We've a new patch for everyone to fix a slight bug. But first, we've got an announcement on our company name!
Rocket Hammer has now changed its name to Brimstone. Over the past few months we've been making some changes to the company. We have new team members, new projects, and a new direction for the company. So we felt a change of name was needed to fit this new change and direction!
Now on to the patch notes!
Patch 1.0.3
Fixed bug where input would be unresponsive inbetween rounds.
Classic Edition Has Returned!
Classic Edition is back!
Lost your chance a few months ago to purchase Lance A Lot: Classic Edition so you could invite your friends over and humiliate them in a few rounds of rocket jousting with classic controls? Well, now it is back!
Not only is Classic Edition back, but it is also a part of a bundle! Purchase both editions of Lance A Lot and save 25%! That is a whole heck cheaper than buying them individually, but we also won't tell you what to do with your money and your extensive gaming habits.
So hey! If you've purchased Enhanced Edition, give Classic a look through! See what it is like to joust on a rocket in an entirely different way than in Enhanced.
Out there! into the world and the Wilderness! Lance A Lot: Enhanced edition can be found here!
That means that Lance A Lot: Classic Edition is no longer for sale. For those of you who have it, you'll find the Enhanced Edition already within your steam library, ready to start a tournament against your friends and win a bunch of money as everyone starts placing bets on the screaming matches.
Ruin your friends. Ruin your controllers and lance a lot!
Last Chance Sale!
Oh Boy A Sale!
That's right folks! It's time for a sale! From September. 18th to the. 25th, Lance A Lot: Classic Edition will be 35% off its original sale price! Nice.
So why the sale? Missed the memo? On September 26th we will be release Lance A Lot: Enhanced Edition. On the 26th, Lance A Lot: Classic Edition will no longer be available for purchase.
Lance A Lot: Enhanced Edition is a standalone game and an improved version of the original Classic with a load more features and a complete graphics overhaul! Play against AI, slaughter each other on 8 new maps, smack your friends with rocket hammers and so much more!
Check out the Steam Page for more information on the new edition!
And for those of you who purchased our ol' Classic Edition, upon release of Enhanced, you will find a cool little present already in your steam library. Yes folks, Lance A Lot: Enhanced Edition is totally free if you have the Classic Edition!
So check it out! You've got one week to spend your mom's cash on this neat little sale that gets you a bonus of the Enhanced Edition.
Grab some controllers, order some pizza, and get ready to yell at your friends in the Lance A Lot: Classic Edition. And do the same again next week with Lance A Lot: Enhanced Edition! But maybe order some nachos, or get some burritos. Unless you're that type of person who really does enjoy eating pizza every week while you play video games. I'm not here to judge.
Announcing Lance A Lot: Enhanced Edition!
Announcing Lance A Lot: Enhanced Edition
September 26th we will be releasing an Enhanced Edition of Lance A Lot!
For those who already own the original Lance A Lot, the new standalone will be available for free! You'll be able to find the game within your Steam Library once Enhanced Edition has been released. Upon release, Classic will no longer be available for purchase.
Why Release Enhanced Edition As A Standalone?
The Enhanced Edition has a complete graphics overhaul and additional features make the Enhanced version much more enjoyable and makes for an overall better gameplay experience by providing players with much more content.
What Are The Major Differences?
Complete graphics overhaul with new maps, UI, menus, redesigned player characters and new player characters.
Increased movements speed for faster gameplay and maneuverability.
Additional fighting mechanics including firing your lance to skewer others and Rocket Hammers to stun opponents and the environment!
AI system for solo play!
More content to interact with from smashable trees to rocket missiles.
For the past few weeks we've been working on adding an AI system for an upcoming version of the game.
Check out our AI's in action on the new map, Winterhold. They're getting pretty smart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aV_OwpEwp0
Dragon Knight & Rocket Valley
Black Knight has received quite a change. He will be replaced with the Dragon Knight, since he was a bit too difficult to see on screen. The map Barrel Roll, has been replaced with Rocket Valley which has two large rockets on either side of the map that can be sent soaring if hit with your rocket hammer.
Here's the Dragon Knight in action on Rocket Valley!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtoEF-KeUAU
Remember to give our facebook page a check for any other updates or information.
Updated Knights & Maps
We're back!
And we have been working these past few months on improving the look of our characters, maps, and adding quite a few new mechanics to an upcoming version of the game.
Mystery Challenger & Enchanted Lake
Updated look for the Mystery Challenger and Enchanted Lake levels. The character is much more vibrant and easily visible on any of the maps. Check below to see her on the updated map
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTGxjw8XDUY&t=5s
Royal Champion & Crossroads
Our Royal Champion has also received an update with increased colors for easy player visibility. Check below to see one of our devs get destroyed by the rest of the team on the updated map.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owbv4bh3KAM
Want to see what's more to come?facebook for weekly updates until the release.
Destructible trees & new player character
Destructible trees
Trees and thorns can be destroyed with explosions (including full charged melee strikes, which are also explosive). We might make other stuff destructible as well, but we want at least static objects to remain, well, static (so walls etc won't be made destructible). Destroyed vegetation regrows after half a minute or so. See the video below!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usLcqfm5abE
Forest Guardian
The Forest Guardian will be the fifth character added to Lance A Lot, and naturally has the color green.
Online cancelled
We made the mistake back in October of promising online multiplayer for Lance A Lot. We made the promise without knowing fully what it would take to implement it, and without letting ourselves have enough time to think it through. We shouldn’t have promised it. But we did, and now here we are.
We have realized that there is just no way that we can live up the expectations and create the experience people would want. Online multiplayer in our development build has network issues that are fundamental to how the game is built. To fix it we would have to rewrite most of the movement and physics code in the game, and we would also have to redesign the core gameplay to be less dependent on physics and exact hit detection.
There is also the issue of sustaining a community over time. Lance A Lot lacks the depth and variation necessary to keep player’s interest for long. It’s fun for what it is as a local multiplayer game, but we think people would want so much more from an online game than what Lance A Lot provides.
Beyond that, there are also other projects that we really want to do. Games that we think you would like more than Lance A Lot. We never planned to invest nearly as much time into this game as we have. It was originally a short 3-month project that we wanted to make as a way to gain experience before we started something bigger, and to show publishers that we can actually ship games (which is essential to make any form of deal). We have now spent nearly 9 full-work months developing the game (over a 13-month period). And we still have a few more months of work that we must do for the console release. Cutting online and the work we have invested in it is not fun, but it is necessary.
In the long-term, we think it would be better both for us and the community if we made a game designed for online from the start. A game with the depth and content necessary to keep people interested over time. We also feel that there are lots of stuff we can do with the concept of rocket jousting that we never got to explore in Lance A Lot. Unfortunately, we skipped pre-production and proper planning when we started development since it was supposed to be such a short project, so most of the good ideas came too late to be implemented. At some point in the future though, we would like to explore those ideas in the form of a sequel or a spiritual successor. But that’s for another day.
Just to be clear, this means that we have decided to cancel online multiplayer altogether for Lance A Lot.
We are sorry to disappoint you.
Why promise online in the first place?
Online multiplayer has been the most requested feature by far throughout development. Both by people we have met during events and by people online. And especially during release. At launch we believed that we could add it fast enough that it would still be worth it, but that has obviously not been the case.
And what have you been up to these past few months?
First of all, keep in mind that none of us worked full-time between the October release and early February. Since February though, I’ve worked full-time as designer and Erik has worked full-time as programmer. The rest of the team works part-time as 3D artists. That’s why progress has been so slow until recently.
From November to mid-January, we focused entirely on implementing online. By the end of January however, we had to start working on the Xbox One version as Microsoft had asked us to exhibit the game at GDC. Getting it to run at above 60 fps on console (and still look good) required a lot more time than expected. And once we had already spent the entirety of February optimizing the game for console we realized that it made more sense to just finish the console version and release it, rather than postponing the launch for online.
Why not reveal sooner that online was cancelled?
We wanted to wait until we had something positive to show as well. For example, earlier today we posted this video update. Hopefully in the coming weeks we will be able to show new stuff on a somewhat regular basis.
So what are you actually planning to do?
Considering our inability at keeping promises, we would prefer to not promise anything right now. Instead of talking about upcoming stuff, we will simply show you what we are working on. Follow us on either YouTube or Facebook for (hopefully) regular video updates.
Our overall goal going forward is to improve the local multiplayer experience as much as we can with the time we can afford to spend on Lance A Lot (before we must move on to our next project), and to get the game released on console. It’s coming to Xbox One this summer, and it may be released on PS4 and Switch as well.
Furthermore, this also means that there will not be a standalone Enhanced Edition anymore. All future updates will simply be patched directly into the current game. We also want to add support for Mac and Linux as well, but we can’t promise anything yet.
Again, we are sorry to disappoint you regarding online. But with the limited time we have, we prefer to focus on improving local multiplayer and getting the game out on consoles, rather than to spread our efforts thin and attempt more than we can finish. And we would rather make a great local multiplayer game, than a mediocre online game.
We hope that this isn’t too disappointing.
Regardless, we are very sorry to that we cannot deliver on our promise.
tldr; online multiplayer in our development build has fundamental network issues that would take too much time to fix (need to rewrite lots of physics/movement code, and redesign core gameplay). Therefore we have decided to cancel online multiplayer permanently for Lance A Lot. We are sorry to disappoint you.
EDIT: Shortened the text, it was unnecessarily long.
EDIT #2 (March 29 2017): Changed title to "Online cancelled" from "We're sorry". We're still sorry, but this makes it clearer what the post is about.
Here's our plans for 2017
What's our plan?
During these past few months we have had a lot of discussions internally about ideas for Lance A Lot. The topics have ranged from what it is that we would really want to add to the game if we could, and whether or not we are on the right path with our plans. We have also been questioning whether it’s worthwhile to work on smaller updates to a commercially unsuccessful game. Updates that are likely to generate little awareness outside of our current player base, yet still cost us valuable time to develop.
And the conclusion we have come to is that It’s not enough. So, we asked ourselves; why not think bigger? Why not make something wholehearted that truly has the best chance of reaching people’s attention? Why not go beyond merely adding an online mode to a local party game, but rather make Lance A Lot into a game built for online from the ground-up?
Announcing Lance A Lot: Enhanced Edition!
In fact, we have decided to expand Lance A Lot into a new, fully-featured, standalone game. A game which has the features people expected the original Lance A Lot to have. A game with both online and local multiplayer, with a proper amount of levels and content, and with enough depth in its game mechanics to keep people interested over time. While we have no final name for it yet, for now we are calling it “Lance A Lot: Enhanced Edition”.
And since we promised you online multiplayer as a free update back in October, we are going to give out the Enhanced Edition for free to all owners of the current version of Lance A lot.
This is all made possible by the fact that we have received some minor funding. Not much, but enough for me as designer and for our programmer Erik to be able to skip part-time jobs. Starting Monday next week, half our team will be working full-time, which should really speed things up!
We expect our new plans to raise some questions, so we have compiled a short list below of the things we think people are most curious about!
FAQ
The name Lance A Lot: Enhanced Edition is a working title and will probably not be the final name for the game. We are going to rename the current version of the game to Lance A Lot: Classic once we release the Enhanced Edition, to avoid confusion
The Enhanced Edition will be free for all owners of the Classic version
For everyone else, the Enhanced Edition will be a standalone release for the price of $14.99
The Enhanced Edition will feature 8-player online and 4-player local multiplayer (the modes will be kept separate due to technical and design reasons)
The Enhanced Edition will be a much deeper game than the Classic version, and will utilize pretty much all the buttons on a controller – therefore it will not be able to support local play on a shared keyboard (but it will support mouse and keyboard for one player). This is one of the main reasons why we have chosen to release the Enhanced Edition as standalone, since some may prefer the simpler Classic version
We will spend more time on the development of the Enhanced Edition than we spent on the original Classic release, but some art and code are reused (which is why we are not calling this “Lance A Lot 2”)
We are planning to release the Enhanced Edition during summer 2017, and sometime later to Xbox One. Hopefully the Steam launch will include Mac & Linux as well
We plan on keeping the Classic version as it is (hence the name), and all further work will go towards improving the Enhanced Edition
We may stop selling the Classic version on Steam when we release the Enhanced Edition. We have not decided yet. Either way, owners of the Classic version will of course still get to keep it in their Steam library
There will no longer be an online beta for the Classic version, but we will probably have some form of open or closed beta for the Enhanced Edition before its release
We will be relatively quiet on the PR-front during these next 4-8 weeks while we implement and test new game mechanics. After that we plan on being quite active, mainly on our YouTube channel and Facebook page – subscribe if you’re interested in hearing more about the development! This is just a heads-up to let you know that we are hard at work even when we are not posting about it! ;)
We will of course gladly answer any questions or suggestions you might have regarding our new plans. Just comment below or reach us at contact@rockethammer.com and we’ll get back to you!
tldr; We are going to release a standalone “Enhanced Edition” of Lance A Lot with online multiplayer. It will be free for everyone who already owns Lance A Lot, but otherwise cost $14.99. Planned release this summer on Steam. Xbox One release sometime after that. The “Classic” version of Lance A Lot will remain as it is without online, and there will no longer be an online beta for it, but there will probably be an open or closed beta for the Enhanced Edition before its release.
EDIT Feb 9 2017: Just to clarify, the promise of getting the Enhanced Edition for free is only for those who own the classic version on Steam (and only before the launch of the Enhanced Edition). It does not apply to console owners (Xbox One).
EDIT #2 Feb 9 2017: That being said, we do not recommend people to buy Lance A Lot now if they are only interested in the upcoming online multiplayer. You might just as well wait for the future release and decide then if it's good enough or not.
EDIT #3 March 28 2017: The online mode has unfortunately been cancelled, read more here.
