Light Repair Team #4
A new price!
We just want to make it known that we have officially and permanently reduced the price of our games, Light Repair Team #4 and Fruit for the Village. These prices are permanent, and will not go away! Sales will still happen, as they appear, so please keep an eye on that.
Light Repair Team #4 is now $4.99USD
Fruit for the Village is now $2.99 USD
We would also like to give a shout out to our Australian friends, you may see that your prices are a bit more reasonable compared to what you may usual expect.
We thank everyone for their support of us and our games and we wish you a happy end of the year.
- Eerie Bear Games
Our next game, Fruit for the Village
Over the past year or so we've been hard at work on a new title, called
Fruit for the Village and it's coming out May 22nd. JUST 3 WEEKS AWAY!
Fruit for the Village is an incremental game, in VR. Think something like Cookie Clicker, but in VR with a little bit of a twist. You, the player, take on the role of growing fruit for a nearby village ravaged and lost in a post-war, world. Much like a standard 'clicker' game, you'll be using mallets to hit pots to grow fruit, which will give you credits to buy more pots, auto-clickers, bigger pots and most importantly, fruit that you'll send back to the village to replenish their ever diminishing supply.
Fruit for the Village has two modes available at launch: Story Mode and Survival Mode.
In Story Mode, you'll you'll hear the story of the nearby village that you've offered to supply fruit to and have to make decisions based on this story. There are two (technically 3) endings in Story Mode.
In Survival Mode, there is no story, there is no endings. It's a game of survival as you see how long you keep can the village from running out of food.
Again, Fruit for the Village launches May 22nd. We don't have a price point yet to announce, so follow our Twitter or Facebook pages. Or, wishlist the game on its Steam Page to get notified when it's launched! We're excited to launch this title and hope that you enjoy it!
Thanks
- The Eerie Bear Team
The Menu Update is now live!
Finally here, our first content update (yay new stuff) is here! The two of us have been working hard to get this patch ready for everyone and one dead hard drive later (whoops), it's here! Enjoy!
Here's the complete patch notes:
Features:
New Menu UI system - No longer will you shine a laser to pick a level! We've revamped the whole level selct system. Use the controllers to navigate through all thirty (30!) puzzles, complete with new names and chapters titles. The new menu system includes:
+ game chapters (a collection of puzzles) & levels associated with each chapters
+ an image of the puzzle (so now you can see which levels you're going to!)
+ Completed puzzles now turn green in the menu, complete puzzles where you beat the part time will turn yellow.
+ Par times for the puzzle, along with your best-puzzle time (so you can compete and do speed puzzling)
Speed-puzzling - Like mentioned above, all puzzles will now keep track of how quickly you complete the puzzle. Try to improve your puzzling time and beat our puzzle par-times set by official master puzzle parers. When we were demoing LRT4 at PAX East back in April, people racing to see how far they could get in the alloted demo time became kind of popular, so we've now officially added the feature. Think you have the fastest time in the world? Tweet us @eeriebeargames and let us know!
Five new levels - Yup, new puzzles. These puzzles use all the mechanics in the way you've learned to use them, but slightly differently. They're a bit more challenging that what you're expecting, and will make you think a bit harder than in the first 25 levels. The new Five puzzles can be found in the "Repair Jobs II" chapter.
Other notes:
Adjusted the amount of mirrors, lens and prisms given in some levels to make them a bit more challenging and less cluttered.
Watch the updates trailer here:
https://youtu.be/EVPr9N46nR0
Enjoy and happy speed-puzzling everyone!
Dev Blog #8 - The Menu Update (coming soon!)
Our first content update is just around the corner! We're doing some final checks to make sure nothing completely burns down or crashes. While you're waiting, we thought we'd fill you in on whats actually in the update.
- Five new puzzles - Some shown in previous Dev Blogs, others shown in the teaser above, ALL shown in the trailer below.
- New Level select interface - we've revamped the menu level! Use the motion controllers to pick which levels you want to play, see what levels look like before you play them and see which ones you've completed.
- Timed Puzzles - All puzzles now keep track of completion time. Try to improve your puzzling times, or attempt to beat the par times!
Thats all we have for you now, be sure to check out the update trailer below!
https://youtu.be/EVPr9N46nR0
Toodles! :ledgewindowon:
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If you want to make sure you're one of the first people to know about upcoming features, changes and content to the game, be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter (@EeriebearGames).
Light Repair Team #4 - 33% off during the Steam Summer Picnic Sale!
Light Repair Team #4 is now on sale, 33% off during the Steam Summer Picnic Sale!
We've brought the price of Light Repair Team #4 back to the launch week sale price, for everyone who missed it! If you're looking to scratch a roomscale puzzle itch, grab Light Repair Team #4 now, before July 4th!
Dev Blog #8 - Oculus Rift and Touch Support(ish)
This past week introduced an update to SteamVR that added the initial Oculus Rift and Oculus Touch compatibility through SteamVR. What does this mean? Any Vive game bought through steam, should work with the Rift and Touch controllers. Because of this update, Light Repair Team #4 is now sort-of Rift/Touch compatible through SteamVR. If you have a Rift and a Touch controller, you can play Light Repair Team #4 right now, if you wanted. We're not comfortable yet calling it full support, so you won't see us changing the store page to show the Rift being supported - let me explain why.
You can see me (Joe) play Light Repair Team #4 with the Oculus Rift and Touch below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMBdYcpjw_M
Each headset has their recommended "supported" set-ups. For example, the Vive instructs you to put the LightHouses up high, facing each other in the corners of your playspace. This is because they're supported set-up is for roomscale VR (and thus, Standing and seated too). For the Rift and Touch, as we understand it (we could be wrong! We don't know yet!), the "supported" set-up will be two cameras on your desk about four to five feet apart, facing out and slighting inwards. We call this 180degree set up. At least, this is the set up we've been shown and you see a lot in demos. While this gives you a lot of coverage, full roomscale is not the greatest as there are a lot of roomscale tracking issues with this set up (based on our tests). If you turn around and face away from the cameras, our testing showed that you will have very bad tracking issues because you're occluding the cameras. Issues to the point where it's not even playable, unless you turn around and face the cameras. This is the recommended set up, the one that we have to assume a majority of Rift/Touch users will be using and is the reason why we're not calling Light Repair Team #4 fully Rift compatible.
To play Light Repair Team #4 with the Oculus Rift and touch controller, you need to set your cameras up much like the Vive lighthouses. That is, you need to place cameras at the corners of your playspace, and face them at each other. Joe's tried both the roomscale camera set up, and the forward-facing supported set up and has found that the roomscale set up provides the best quality experience. However, the kicker is that to do roomscale Rift set ups, you need to buy some USB extenders, as the provided camera cables are not long enough for roomscale set ups. USB extenders are not necessarily the cheapest thing in the world, either. A 6 foot cable cost us $13USD at Target. Talking to other VR devs, they've had to buy upwards of 25ft cables to make roomscale Rifting work. Oculus doesn't provide long cables/extenders nor (again, as far as we understand) will they be suggesting the idea of Roomscale camera set ups. With all these things combined, it provides a barrier for consumers to set up roomscale Rift, and as such, since roomscale Rift set ups are not the officially supported camera set up, we're not going to officially call Light Repair Team #4 Rift compatible... yet.
Now, you might be asking "Well, why don't you just design the game to work for the supported set up?" And the answer is: it's not that easy! There's a lot of things we'd have to do, and we'd probably need to port up from Unreal Engine 4.10.4 to 4.12.2. There'd be a lot we'd have to do with the art, user experience and the design. It's about three blog posts worth of talking. We looked into it, and it's a lot of work for something we've put down the queue of 'things that need to get done'. We're just two people, we only have so much time, energy and resources to get things done.
We're going to wait and see how the Touch Controllers change and progress over the coming months. Like I mentioned earlier, both of us have touch controllers and Rifts. We'll keep an eye on how the hardware progresses and we'll be seeing how the launch of the controllers go (whenever that is). If at Touch launch, we see that many people are using the roomscale set up, rather than the recommended desk set up, we'll look at calling Light Repair Team #4 officially compatible with the Rift. Until then, it's kind of a loose post-it note on the box: "This works with the Rift and Touch, but with some conditions!" ... The game was designed on the Vive, for the Vive, and the best Light Repair Team #4 experience will be on the Vive.
tl;dr: Light Repair Team #4 works fine with Rift and Touch, if you set your cameras up like Vive light houses. Since this requires you to buy and do extra things, and is not the officially supported set up, we're not officially calling Light Repair Team #4 Rift supported yet. We'll keep an eye on the touch development and launch, and see if this changes.
Oh, and finally, a look at one of the new puzzles coming in the next update.
Toodles! :ledgewindowon:
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If you want to make sure you're one of the first people to know about upcoming features, changes and content to the game, be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter (@EeriebearGames).
Dev Blog #7 - Technical Talk and a peek at new content
It's been a while since the last Dev Blog. We've been busy working away at the first content patch for Light Repair Team #4. Yup, not another patch of just bug fixes and polish! This update will be bug fixes, polish and five new puzzles. In the last blog post, I showed off four of those puzzles. Unfortunately, for this blog post, you're only going to get one teaser, but you'll see more in the future. ;)
This is a work in progress shot of the environment of level 26. It's a river side nook in the industrial sector of New Corona. There's still some work to be done, so if you have feedback, let us know below!
(Warning, things start to get a bit technical after this)
One of the things that some people commented on with the first 25 levels is that they were all essentially looked the same. You were in a narrow canal in the middle of a city, you had to look up and around to see the differences. Part of this reason was that we didn't have the resources or time to make a lot of different environments, so we stuck with just the canal and varying different environments outside the canal for variability. Through the early initial parts of development, there was just one of us working on the game, doing everything. All things considered, I think it turned out the best that it could be.
Another reason for the canals was that we wanted to mask level transitions, so that when you completed a level, you weren't temporarily booted out into the SteamVR lobby for a second or two. This broke immersion and would've been happening far too often. So, we used something called level streaming to dynamically load all the maps into a single file, then effectively make them visible and active whenever we wanted. When the level was done, we just made them invisible and not active. Boom, no loading screens.
When you play the first 25 levels, your playspace physically does not move anywhere in game space. There's not teleportation tricks or moving you while the you've been faded to black. The world literally loads, then vanishes around you. Unfortunately, doing it this way means that we were limited in the art, as lights placed in one level, would shine into another level, even if both are hidden. The first 25 levels only have 3 source of lights, and that is the bar lights that you see in the canal. At the time, this was the easiest thing for us to do, given our basically non-existent resources.
The new five levels however, don't use this system, technically. We still use level streaming and we still do the fade-to-black transition, but we now, from here on out, will be reducing the amount of levels per-map-file, so that we can then spread them out. We'll be employing the teleportation trick to move you between the levels. This, in combination with having more time and resources at our disposal, thanks to your support, we'll be able to start cranking up the cool stuff for the game.
And thats it for this blog. It's a bit of a weird one, and I apologize for the delay between blog posts. We were just busy and there really wasn't anything too super exciting to talk about. Thus is game development sometimes. When we get closer to the launch of the content update, we'll talk more about what else is going to be in, and toss some more images out of the new levels.
Toodles! :ledgewindowon:
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If you want to make sure you're one of the first people to know about upcoming features, changes and content to the game, be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter (@EeriebearGames).
Dev Blog #5 - Lets talk about progression!
Lets talk about game progression!
In the month or so that Light Repair Team #4 has been out, many people have commented that our puzzle progression is a bit different than other puzzle games on the market. In MANY games like Puzzle Dimension, Portal 1/2, FORCED, World of Goo, Crayon Physics, Legend of Zelda, QUBE and more, there is a linear progression of puzzles that you have to follow. There may be some variance, but it's all set progression. This is pretty standard, as that many of these games don't have exclusive tutorials and instead us gameplay based teaching to show how puzzle elements work. You have to play through the game to learn everything. We like this! We think that it's better for immersion to teach the player how to play the game while in the games environment and not through some guided tutorial zone. Arguably, doing in-environmental tutorials, rather than an exclusive tutorial 'zone' is very hard to design for, since there's so many weird cases and variables that you have to design around to keep it 'fun' and 'challenging.' Either way though, this is what we decided to do when coming up with the levels for Light Repair Team #4.
Like mentioned before, Light Repair Team #4 doesn't force you to go through a tutorial, nor does it force you to start at level 1. We did this intentionally. We knew and trusted that people who wanted to play Light Repair Team #4 were going to be clever. If you wanted to start at level 16 instead of 1, go for it. You could figure it out and we weren't going to force you to go through 10 levels just to explain and reinforce how mirrors, lens and prisms work. We do teach how the mechanics work in the game during the first 10 levels for those who want to go through a more guided learning experience, but it wasn't required. Those types of levels could get boring and dull to some people and we wanted to give people the freedom to do what they wanted. This is a type of design choice that is executed flawlessly in The Witness. You're plopped into a world with no linear path; you're allowed to roam and explore where you want. We liked that. If you got stuck on a puzzle, you could leave that puzzle and come back to it later! We made it so that you could come and go to any level you wanted whenever you wanted. You could take the preset path, starting at level 1, or you could plunge in and try your hand at level 23. We don't care! We know linear puzzlers have a problem where if you get stuck on a puzzle, you can't get passed it. You have to pound your head against the wall over and over, trying to solve the puzzle just to progress. We don't like that, and we feel that we made a good decision to let you leave, try another puzzle, and come back.
Now, we give you the ability to pick any level you want and play them in any order, buuuuuut, you don't really know what you're getting into when you do. With the current hub tunnel, you can see a bunch of numbers and receivers on the walls, but thats it. There is no information on what type of mechanics are in the level, what the environment is or, most importantly, if you've solved the puzzle before. Whoops.
... and thats why we're making a new hub world.
The current one looks pretty, but it doesn't give you any information about what the puzzles are like, or where you've been. We don't want to get into too much detail about what the new menu will be like, as we're still pinning down features, but we can let you know of some of the more likely features. (Disclaimer: As always, things are likely to change and this does not represent anything that is 'final') With the new menu, you'll be able to see which puzzles (or repair jobs) you've completed. No more having to load into a level, look around and load back to the menu, guessing which level you left off at. You'll be able to see it right in front of you. To help with this, we're hoping to add an image of the level, so that you can look at the levels at a glance and look for something fun to solve. We're looking at adding a timer so that you can time yourself doing puzzles and compare them with friends. We did an informal timed race at PAX East, where we'd see how far people could get in the 5 minute demo. This was rather enjoyable to a lot of people and we'll be looking to add it to Light Repair Team #4 as a permanent feature.
Finally, this update will add a handful of new puzzles for everyone to solve, along with additional polish thingies.
What do you think? Anything you'd like to see that we might not have considered yet? Let us known in the comments!
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If you want to make sure you're one of the first people to know about upcoming features, changes and content to the game, be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter (@EeriebearGames).
May 9th, 2016 - Patch #1b - Crash Hotfixes
Patch Notes:
- Fixed multiple game crashes
- Sea wave sounds are now properly directional, 3D sounds. They will no longer sound like they're coming from everywhere.
Patch note extras!
The crashes that a lot of people have been reporting recently were related to the new player controller code we implemented in Patch #1 on May 1st. Essentially, if you were still holding an object (thus, holding the trigger button down) through a level transition, the game would crash. We were accidentally leaving bits of code in after the transition that shouldn't have been there, and thus, broke everything.
We're still not sure if this is going to fix the super esoteric and less-common crash issues with the i7-6700k CPU's. We're still not 100% sure that the i7-6700k CPU's are the reason for SOME crashes, as we have not fully replicated the crash reliably! This is our working theory as this piece of hardware is the only common thread between the crashes! We're going to continue to investigate the issue as we are able to.
Thats all for now folks. Happy Repairing!
- Game Repair Team #1
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If you want to make sure you're one of the first people to know about upcoming features, changes and content to the game, be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter (@EeriebearGames).
May 2, 2016 - Patch #1
Finally! This patch is live. Sorry for the delays. We'll be better at predicting the unpredictable in the future! You can read about the reasoning is behind the patch notes (and patch delay) in Dev Blog 2 and Dev Blog 3. This weeks Dev log is the patch notes, and they're a day early! We're really spoiling you now.
Backend Code rewrite:
As mentioned in the previous blogs, we needed to rewrite the back end code of Light Repair Team #4 so that we don't completely pull our hair out adding new features and mechanics in the future. As such, the patch notes will look lite (pun intended), but the implications of the patch are large. You won't see many of the changes, but there are visual improvements to the game that we have added as part of a second (third? fourth?) polish pass. Noah did a kick-ass job on it.
Mechanics:
- The entire back end code has been rewritten to allow for future expansion of content, features and mechanics.
- Prisms now glow the color they are splitting
- Lens now show the beams of light that are shining on them inside the lens.
- All hit-to-freeze sliders are now standardized to be frozen for 10s when a beam leaves their receiver. They will remain frozen while a beam is hitting their receiver. The 10s countdown begins when the beam leaves the receiver.
- Receivers now glow brighter when a successful connection has been made, in addition to sparking
- Beams are now brighter, vibrant and less opaque. Their colors are more accurately represented
- Orange is now oranger and is less yellow than before.
Player Controller:
- We've rewritten the controllers to be smoother, literally.
- To pick up objects with the new controllers, overlap the sphere (isodecahedran, technically) ontop of the controllers with what you'd like to pick up, and pull the trigger.
- Controllers will now shake less if the players hand is not steady.
- Pressing application button will take you back to the menu hub, pressing escape will have you quit from the game. This has not changed, from the previous version, but I'm going to say it anyways to make it clearer.
Puzzle polish:
- All puzzles now end quicker than before. Buildings still light up when puzzle is completed.
- Various mirrors have been adjusted to reflect (literally) the new backend code changes. This has affected some puzzles difficulty. We will be monitoring this over the coming weeks for bugs or polishing.
Puzzle #3
- Adjusted the puzzle to better show how lenses work
- Changed combined color from Purple to Orange
- Added a yellow and red receiver to connect to show proper differentiation between Red, Yellow and Orange.
Puzzle #7
- Added a visual indicator to draw the players attention to a receiver.
Puzzle #11
- Changed the slider to be a freeze-on-hit style of slider, rather than an hit-to-move style.
Puzzle #14
- Lowered the height of a crate to make it easier to move the slider (this should help people who are vertically challenged).
Puzzle #22
- Adjusted detailing to better hint at some new positions needed.
Puzzle #25
- Changed an auto-mover slider to a standard hit-to-move slider.
Fixes:
- Sliders will now behave better when trying to move them.
Thats all for now. If you find any bugs (which there will probably be some!), you can post them here, or in the bug thread. If you can provide exact steps for replication, that'd help us out a ton. You can never be too specific with bug reports!
- Game Repair Team #1
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If you want to make sure you're one of the first people to know about upcoming features, changes and content to the game, be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter (@EeriebearGames).