The fun thing about creating a skill level is that we get to create a (mini)game. Fortunately, creating games is exactly what we love to do! :-)
This is the current prototype of one of Caromble!'s future skill levels. It's (obviously?) inspired by the tower defense genre: you will have to defend your base—the paddle—by surviving waves of attackers using the ball to obstruct and destroy them in their path.
Using this prototype we will experiment with variations of the attackers' properties like speed, size and lives. We'll also like to create waves of incoming enemies because that would better fit the genre. And, we'll think of ways to slow the attackers down in their path to all your base.
Please let us know what you think of this skill level so far. Suggestions are welcome!
Happy gaming!
Caromble! Friday #367: Feedback
Caromble!'s Early Access is about getting feedback. That's why we are super excited about releasing another chapter on Steam.
And thanks to our community we found some important issues that we would have missed otherwise. I'll list a few below, as a sort of thanks to the people reporting them.
Mouse/ Analog controls are laggy Reporter: Hyperduel Status: FIXED
In the first Early Access release we had some smoothing on the paddle controls. We had originally introduced this to mitigate the problem that our input library didn't give us a new mouse position for every frame. The disadvantage of the smoothing was that the paddle would overshoot a little bit after stopping. So with the next release we removed this smoothing, and the controls were much more direct. However we didn't notice that we still hadn't solved the problem that we didn't have mouse information for every frame.
And if it hadn't been for steam user Hyperdual we might have never noticed. So thanks for pointing it out! Now we noticed it turned out that it wasn't that hard to query the mouse position much more often (currently we poll at 2000Hz). As a result the controls are much, much smoother. In fact, I was able to improve my highscore in the SpinMaster challenge!
I easily improved from 7 to 13 in a few tries, and I think I can do better still. Please share your high-score in the comments if you like.
Ball gets lost in lava Reporter: Alessandro Mattos Status: FIXED
In the last stage of the second level of the game the ball would suddenly always fall in the lava instead of bouncing back against the railing.
We introduced this bug last release when we tried to fix the problem that the lava wouldn't actually kill the ball as you would expect. So we fixed that. We thought it would be a safe fix, I mean, we never intentionally have levels where the ball hits the lava. But it turns out that in this level the ball can just hit the lava...
Luckily we could fix it easy enough by turning of the physics of this particular bit of lava, so it would no longer hit the ball.
We discovered this particular bug when we were watching a let's play video about Caromble! (we try and watch everything). We noticed a bit in the video where a ball would not roll up a ramp as it should (how hard is it ball?!) but instead rolls into the ramp and stays there for a bit. Weird.. Annoying...
And as of yet not reproducible.. So we've have added it to our backlog, and will hopefully tackle it shortly.
UPDATE: We fixed the issue! New build with the fix will come up on October 7th 2016. Thanks for helping us find it!
Ball gets stuck behind obstacle Reporter: dwoolley428 Status: OPEN
Another ball get stuck behind / inside stuff bug: Dwoolly428 reports an incident where the ball gets stuck behind a movable barrier (see below). We tried to reproduce the issue, but sadly haven't been able to so far. We will continue to look into it!
(Brick-)Breaking News: Chapter 3 has been released!
We are proud to announce the release of Chapter 3! You’ll find a lot of added content and a new Arkatron (Caromble!’s special power-ups): The Cannon!
We’ve also added a prologue level:
And a time-trial skill level ‘Race’:
The time it took us to come to this major update was longer than we hoped. We really didn't sit still in all this time and have added, improved and fixed a lot. In retrospect we have fixed too much for a single update. In the future we will consider doing more updates and not only when we have finished a full chapter of content. Let us know what you think of this.
A selection of everything new in this update can be found in the release notes below.
We’re eager to hear your feedback so we can make Caromble! the brick-breaker you’ve always dreamed of!
Release notes
What’s inside this update?
Major features
4 Story levels - New level content! A total of 12 subareas + boss fight.
Prologue level - Introducing the epic fight between paddle and boss. (Note: This level is placed before Chapter 1).
Skill level - Race! A tough and fun time-challenge.
New* Arkatron - Our new special power-up is a cannon mounted on the paddle! Shooting with it results in fancy, weird explosions!
Mercy ball - When you are game over, you'll get a chance to forfeit your current score and time (bye bye medals) in return for an extra ball.
Improvements and minor features
Paddle physics. It now has a better collision shape.
Paddle destroys objects on touch.
Spin effect tweaks.
HowTo for the Arkatrons.
Score particles more present.
Game/rendering engine optimizations.
UI improvements.
Steam cloud saves to share the same progress on different machines.
Gamepad/controller menu navigation fixes.
Lighting enhancements in levels.
More animated textures, e.g. hit particles, fire.
Better balanced difficulty of previous chapters.
Bug fixes
A lot! Power-up weirdness, UI glitches, gameplay deadlocks, crashes, etc.
Thank you!
Thank you for all your feedback, patience and support! Let's get ready to Caromble! some more!
Crimson Owl Studios
Caromble! Friday #365: Cheat Explosion
During the new prologue level (coming soon!) we heard an explosion of which we couldn't figure out where it came from. After some debugging it was clear the paddle created it somehow! But why?
One of the paddle-related features is to penalize the player for moving it too fast, because we consider this cheating ;)
This is what that looks like:
An explosion is spawned and the paddle can't move for a moment to prevent the 'non-standard gameplay'.
So this is what triggered the sound bug in the prologue level:
The paddle is flying at high speed and, although no one is moving the paddle (because it's animated), the penalty for moving too fast was still applied and we heard an explosion! (We didn't see an explosion because that happened out of sight.)
This time we got penalized for adding an anti-cheat feature :)
