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Gentlemen. Ladies.
We’re announcing the last update of the Highrisers alpha demo, version 0.4.0.
The update intends to adress issues experiences players have brought up, but it also has the purpose of making the game more accessible to totally new, unexperiences players.
It will contain the following:- Bugfix – Crash when switching characters via keyboard: When selecting a character via the keyboard while the camera was scrolling to the interaction target of the previous one, in order to bring up the interaction bubbles, the game froze, or at least didn’t allow you to leave interaction mode any more.
- Bugfix – Crash when transferring items to a non-empty slot: It is possible to move items from one player to another by dragging that item to the target player’s inventory. However, the transfer is only concluded when the players touch each other. If, in the meantime, while player 1 was on its way, the respective slot was blocked by another item, the game crashed.
- Bugfix – Crash when aborting tasks: With very unlucky timing, it could happen that the abort button was brought up for an action on an item that ceized to exist while the button was brought up (e.g. upon disassembling furniture and aborting right before the disassembly was completed. While the camera would center on the furniture, the disassembly would get completed and the abort interaction would link to an action disassemble which no longer had a target.
- Bugfix/Feature – Mouse over now works pixel perfect: This means that the mouse cursor will ignore the transparent pixels of assets while checking if it is hovering above them. This especially helps with objects where the sprites are far larger that some versions (the plants are infamous for this; they would block adjacent plants from being selected). On the downside, some thin or filigrane items are now harder to select. Let us know if this causes trouble.
- Feature: Player progress bar As suggested by the community, we added a progress bar to the player hud element, so you can always see who of your guys is busy and who’s not. And also get an impression of how long it will take.
- Feature: Adjusted crafting menu We took up several suggestions from the community of how to improve the usability of the crafting menu.
- Feature: Added more disassembly states Several of the more technical items now have more disassembly states and yield more and different parts upon disassembly.
- New player appeal: Added intro scroll Upon startup, the camera will scroll up part the building in order to give new players an impression of what to expect.
- New player appeal: More precise task messages Play tests showed that the mere “Repair the helicopter” was not enough for most players to have a joyful game experience. The lack of direction caused confusion and frustration when players got overwhelmed during the first night. More detailed directions are meant to make sure players knwo what to actually do in the game
- Switched to C++ codebaseThis has several technical advantages under the hood; but for you, it is mainly noticable due to the greatly improved framerate, which gives an overall smoother game experience.
- Feature: Plants Updates Plants without water are still withering, but can be revived if provided with water fast enough. The withered state will therefore serve as an easy to recognize optical trigger, telling you that water is needed here. If the survivors fail to provide water in time to a withered plant however, it will change to “withered dead”, from where it can no longer be revived; it can only be grubbed out and removed. Also, a new bushwhack interaction will allow survivors to hack down and remove any plants from their container. And finally, pots become portable.
Further updates will be added to this list.
Hey there!
Yes, there is news. We are currently changing our code base from flash to C++.
This sounds like a big step, but since we programmed Highrisers in Haxe, which is a cross-platform toolkit, the transition should theoretically go with just a few mouse clicks.Of course it is never soo easy, but we’ve already fixed most of the bugs that were introduced through this transition.
The change itsself became necessary as the death bells of flash, which have been ringing for years now, could no longer be overheard. The technology was abandoned everywhere. For you, this means at least 50% faster builds, which are also more stable. We have the opportunity to utilize more graphical features and C++ is also a perfect base for an itegration with the steamworks SDK (which is needed to put your game on steam).
Not sure if we will be able to provide the 4.0 demo version already via steam (is this even desired by you guys? Let us know in the comments!), but we will keep you updated on any progress here in any case.
Thx!
Can’t speak for everyone, but I don’t need the demo on Steam. I’m perfectly fine downloading builds and testing them that way.
Steam alpha/beta versions are a little irrelevant, though they do offer some minor convenience for updating.
That said, if they help you get everything Steam-related figured out before release, it makes sense to start doing it that way as well.
Hey guys.
Thanks for your feedback. Yes, valid points; for testing purposes alone, steam would just offer a slight bit more comfort regarding updates.
Currently, we are setting priority on getting the C++ build bug free; steam is only a secondary side benefit from that.
(There’s still some problems with scrolling speed, with some layer transparencies and with some of the audio at the moment).Steam will become an important topic when we open the closed demo up to everyone however.
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