• Fixed a corruption in a game variable meant that most, if not all mini-games that previously allowed the last player to continue playing, now ended the game as soon as there was 1 player left. This was particularly noticeable in survival mode's of mini-games too.
  
• Removed scoreboard from "Knock-Off". I actually don't even remember putting the scoreboard into the mini-game.
  
• Added another measure to hopefully prevent the issue of the host player sometimes not spawning. This is something I cannot personally replicate, however HasteDay runs into this issue the majority of the time, so I will probably be doing a test or 2 in the near future with Hasteday to try and eliminate the issue if I haven't already fixed it.
  

VERSION: METAL TREE #1

WHAT IS IN THIS UPDATE

NEW STUFF

• New Mini-game "DEAD STILL". This is much slower paced than the rest of the mini-games, and still some more things I could add to it for balancing etc. For a real challenge, try the survival mode.
  
  
• New Metal Head model. This was whipped up at the last minute because I couldn't do an update without a new Metal Head, could I?
  
• Input switching is now functional. What does this mean? It means if you start the game and hit ENTER on the keyboard, and then you plug in a controller, then you will be able to control the first character on your machine (the one the keyboard was controlling) with both the keyboard or controller, until you hit START on the controller to join a new character.
  There are still some bugs with this, and there is the issue of hitting START on the controller to pause, but accidentally creating a new character, which is something I'll be working on fixing up in future
  
  

GENERAL

• Fixed an issue where in online mode, when returning back to the character/ready/lobby screen from the game mode screen, some of the characters were still headbanging, which was confusing, as those players had to then hit the ready button to stop headbanging, then hit the ready button again to be
  
• Fixed an issue where the server player information was not being passed to client’s correctly, which had an on flow effect of a whole bunch of other bugs, mostly UI related.
  
• Fixed an issue where the 2nd local (same machine) player was showing a suffix of (0) rather than (1) (for example “OTREUMGAMES(0)” was appearing rather than “OTREUMGAMES(1)” due to an incorrectly player assignment).
  
• Client’s can now join a multiple gamepad’s again online, so the host could have 4 controllers and a client could also have 4 controllers.
  
• Fixed an issue where the servers and client's did not have correct information on players, in particular after they had disconnected and reconnected during a mini-game, and when returning to the lobby, those players would not be lit up/active/joined, and could not do anything.
  

GAMEPLAY

• Tap Out player velocity per button press increases as the camera increases, so that the player can keep up with the camera.
  
• Melting Memory no longer has exploitable safe area’s. Player must be standing in the correct location now.
  
• Knock-Off mini-game had a problem with collision detection on the central pillar that would rise from the floor. It would not kill players until it was fully unfolded and spinning.
  
• Knock-Off hazards and the arena will reset at the end of the round to prevent things like the spinning blade, or sweepers from clipping through the camera, or players standing on thin air.
  
• Knock-Off rotor blade no longer uses AI for navigation, making it much more performant and more reliable. It also has behavior to add to the game difficulty, such as having a chance that it might target a particular player to move towards.
  
• Fixed an issue where if someone disconnected, then reconnected, they would automatically assume control of the 1st player after connecting/rejoining.
  
• Put in preventative measure to stop more than 8 controllers joining. However there currently isn’t a limit on how many clients can join the server.
  
• Fixed a bug where players couldn’t unjoin their controller by holding down the special/back button on their controller.
  
• In the player lobby and tutorial screen, players can hold the right face button (B/O/Right arrow) to unjoin without turning the controller off or disconnecting. Alternatively, players can hold the back/special button on their gamepad/controller.
  
• When resuming a game from the pause menu, the game no longer goes from slo-mo to normal speed while playing online. This was causing a server to client desync.
  
• Fixed an issue where players were being given no name when returning back to the character/ready/lobby screen from a mini-game. This was happening when a client machine had more than 3 controllers connected.
  
• Fixed an issue where local (same machine) players on the client were not appearing when rejoining.
  
• Coallateral now shows button prompts on the coal lumps, and a guide arrow on the furnace when players walk near it, as well as a button prompt to show that players can drop their coal off into the furnace.
  
• Fixed up an issue with player interaction where sometimes it wouldn’t allow the player to do anything if another player was next to them or within the interaction area. This was most noticeable on the Boss Fight mini-game.
  
• Found a major fault within player’s where the device was not being set correctly, thus causing an on flow of other problems. Some other variables had a similar issue.
  
• When players are respawning, check to see if their spawn location is safe, if not, check the other spawn locations and spawn at a random spawn location. This will help prevent players respawning as ghosts in holes in mini-games such as Pipemare or Laser lunacy.
  
• Creeping Creepers wasn’t getting the correct player count and sometimes would end prematurely (with 2 or more players alive). Typically this would happen if a player disconnected or joined mid round.
  
• Fixed an issue where sometimes the tutorial screen wouldn’t even appear for clients.
  
• Fixed up scoring system, it was factoring in dead players, and players who may have left the game too. There was also some bad logic causing 2 or more players to be in 1st place sometimes.
  
• This also fixed up an issue where someone would die first, but still somehow win.
  
• There’s more work to do on the scoring, especially for round based mini-games, but this is good progress.
  
• Improved floor detection for player indicator ring so it doesn’t flicker up and down sporatically.
  
• Fixed up AI in Dark Dangers, where one of the monsters (The Sniffer) would corner a player and then not attack the player.
  
• Fixed a bug where sometimes when a player was stunned, it wouldn’t actually stun them if they had lots of packet loss or high latency.
  
• Fixed up issues where sometimes client’s weren’t being detected correctly when leaving the server or crashing.
  
• Found and fixed an issue where the host would lose input when restarting a mini-game sometimes.
  
• Players should no longer random be moving when starting a new round in mini-games such as Oh Balls, however I can never actually cause this bug in my own tests, I just know that when doing tests with people where this bug nearly always occurred...it stopped occuring, possibly as a result of a preventative measure I added.
  
• Characters in Get Pucked now have their hover vehicle colour set correctly.
  

UI

• UI elements are now device dependent, which means if you’re using an Xbox controller, Xbox buttons will appear, if you’re using a keyboard, keyboard buttons will appear etc. This is a critical feature of this update as it’s a standard feature of pretty much every game ever, and should reduce confusion with new players, especially those using keyboards or Playstation controllers. It took me about 2.5 weeks to implement, and I’m still finding more room for improvement, so bear with me.
  NOTE: In order for Playstation and Nintendo Switch controllers to show the correct button, your Steam controller settings may need to be changed. If you notice that while using a playstation controller or Nintendo switch controller, that the buttons still show as xbox buttons, you will need to apply these changes, settings should look like the image below.
  
  
• Updates the Character lobby UI to be a bit neater. And made it so that each player has their own “Press START/ENTER to join” and made the UI a bit more tidy.
  
  
• Mouse cursor should no longer get set to the top left corner of the screen when a new player joins or a controller hits the start button.
  
• Mouse cursor now scales it’s movement based on the window size, not the resolution.
  
• Fixed up player count showing incorrectly in the character/ready/lobby screen, especially for client’s.
  
• Fixed an issue where intermittently, 3D text, such as “SUDDEN DEATH” and “TIE BREAKER” were appearing in the mini-game when the camera would move. Tap Out was most noticeable, as the camera would start moving up and “TIE BREAKER” was on the screen in the 2nd section of the mini-game.
  
• Fixed an issue when the client had multiple controllers connected, they would not show the correct names.
  
• When a player disconnects or unjoins their controller, the tutorial screen will update correctly for everyone.
  
• Certain UI elements such as host controlled prompts, mostly within the board game mode, do not show button prompts anymore for clients.
  
• Fixed an issue where sometimes 2 players were being set to ready when one player would hit the A button in the tutorial screen.
  
• Fixed up a bunch of scoreboard UI problems when dealing with disconnect controllers, rejoining players, or unjoining controllers. This was also applied to the board game scoreboard.
  
• Fixed up tutorial screen YES/NO text so it is coloured correctly and updates correctly for clients.
  
• Fixed scoreboard bug where if a player joined, the plectrum shaped outline around the player portrait was completely black, and not coloured with the actual player colour.
  
• Changed start up/continue screen so it doesn’t look horrible. I don’t think anybody read that screen previously, or cared that the game was made by one person.
  
• When restarting a mini-game, the host would lose control sometimes.
  

CAMERA

• Fixed up camera hitching in Knock-Off and other mini-games by optimizing the camera’s tracking of players.
  
• Main camera checks if player has fallen off the stage now too.
  
• Changed Oh Balls camera speed to be less snappy.
  
• Termination Trail camera now looks down at a steeper angle.
  
• Adjusted camera in some mini-games to prevent the camera from panning in certain directions, making it difficult to see what was going on and added restrictions to how much the camera can pan.
  

BOARD GAME MODE

• Started implementing a much better drop-in/drop-out experience for the board game mode.
  There’s still a lot of work to do, It’s hard to summarize the changes for this
  
• Board Game camera’s got overworked to work much better online. There's more work to be done however.
  
• Board Game spectator camera now synchronizes online
  
• Fixed issue where the host player would not join sometimes in the board game.
  
• Shop UI now shows correctly for everyone on the server. Including shop items presented.
  
• Fixed a bug with the Shop bot where it wouldn’t rise back up after players were done with it.
  
• Player movement wheel now showing correctly for everyone on the server, and has its own lighting, so will stay lit up, even in shadows.
  
• Players will no longer overlap one another and cause the movement wheel or player wheel (the one used for selecting other players for the curse item and other items) to be dark/in shade.
  
• Player wheel now shows correct player colours. Previously it was all jumbled, which wasn’t entirely a bad thing, but now it doesn’t feel broken.
  
• Player swap now works correctly. Previously, it was all kinds of broken, and players wouldn’t have their new locations saved.
  
• Player shuffle now works correctly. Previously it worked a little bit but wouldn’t save player locations correctly.
  
• Fixed up a small gap in the geometry of the player wheel.
  
• Fixed up Double or Nothing dice roll camera sometimes breaking.
  
• Players who die, will properly respawn.
  
• Deployable turrets will no longer fire until the movement stage. Which also means that if there are turrets shooting on the level, such as the Plasma Ball Launcher, and it’s Trivia time, the screen won’t shake over and over as these turrets won’t be firing.
  
• Action menu now disappears for everyone on the server when entering spectator mode.
  
• If a player joins or rejoins the server during the trivia, they should now respawn at the trivia podiums. (Note: Changes I have made recently may have broken this, so if you test this, please let me know the results).
  
• Fixed up an issue with tile selection particle rings. There are 2 particles, one for unselected, one for selected. What was occurring previously is after hovering over a tile, the selected particle would remain.
  
• Added input relevant buttons to the Trivia UI.
  
• Fixed an issue in the Trivia where players were not seeing the correct scores. A question would be asked, everyone would answer, but the points shown to clients where the same as the points were at the end of the previous round.
  
• Fixed an issue where if a player died just before the Trivia, they would not spawn at the Trivia screen.
  
• Fixed up some animations that weren’t appearing for clients. However there are still a few times where the animations don’t play correctly, so it’s not 100% fixed up yet.
  
• Changed text when returning from a mini-game that said “RESULTS”, rather than “MINI-GAME RESULTS” to clear up some confusion about the scoring.
  
• Fixed an issue in the turn order mini-game at the start of the board game mode, where players couldn’t hit the Y button.
  
• If players do not react in the turn order mini-game, all players who didn’t react will be assigned a random turn order placement.
  
• Turn order mini-game is now client side, so player reaction times are determined client side, then passed to the server, before the server decides who was fastest to react. This makes this much more fair online.
  
• Fixed an issue where if a player were to drop in to the game with a new controller, whether it be online or offline, they would not have any control, and sometimes spawn at the wrong place...basically I fixed most issues related to dropping in a new player.
  
• Fixed an issue where if there was a new player who joined, or unjoined, it would actually just put player 1 in the turn order multiple times and also show the player 1 colour on the scoreboard.
  

BOSS FIGHT

• Fixed up the boss recharge shield, so if players are standing right next to the boss when the boss recharged, those players will get pushed out of the center away from the boss. The current method is a bit rough and janky online, but it works for now until I make it look better.
  
• Charging pillars now show correct button to press based on the controller, and this will show only for local controllers, so that you don’t see another client’s button prompts.
  
• If there is already a player using a charging pillar, another player cannot come along and use it, and so there won’t be a button prompt for that other player. If there is, then the first player hasn’t interacted with the pillar yet.
  
• Pillars now correctly detect players.
  
• Fixed some issues with a knocked down player in front of the pillar messing things up.
  
• Boss charging UI and QTE shows correct key’s based on the controller used. (however may not work if mid-way through and switching to a different input device.
  
• When doing a QTE, whether it be the boss charging QTE, or pillar QTE, if a player hits the wrong button, a red X will appear to show that the wrong button was pressed, there will be a small delay before the player can try again. For the boss QTE, a new sequence is generated, and for the pillar QTE, if a player has corrected pressed 3 of 5 buttons, but then incorrectly presses the 4th button, they will then be back to 2 of 5 buttons correctly pressed.
  
  
• These changes mean that players can no longer spam all the buttons to win.
  

AUDIO

• In summary, I went through all of the audio files for the game and made sure they were set to the appropriate audio class (SFX, Music, Announcer etc).
  
• In addition to the above, I also made sure that all audio files will play even with volume at 0, in case players use the volume adjust keys ( “[“ and “]” ) to change music volume.
  
• Made sure that music was not playing twice or overlapping.
  
• At the end of a round, multiple stinger tracks were playing at once, now only 1 will play.
  
• Fixed the music stopping randomly in Knock-Off.
  
• Added temporary audio to Get Pucked for the environment, but also puck movement.
  
• Added ball movement audio to Oh Balls.
  

KNOWN BUGS AND ISSUES

• The new device switching works as intended, however if a player were to start the game with the keyboard by hitting ENTER on the start up screen, then they go into a mini-game and decide to use a controller, and try to pause the game, it is expected behaviour for a pause menu to appear, however since the START button also joins a new local character, the game doesn't pause, and another character will spawn in, and thus confuse people.
  
• I intend to fix this up by perhaps making it so if you want to join with a controller, you must hold the START button, rather than tapping it, and change relevant UI through out the game to emphasize the need to hold start, rather than just tap it, so that accidental characters aren't created.
  
• Adding to the above problem, I want to add an option in settings to treat controllers as separate to the keyboard.
  
• LAG is still a huge issue, especially in mini-games with lots of moving parts, such as Cognitive Collection. I will be looking into this some more to try and make sure the moving parts are synchronized correctly, because as of right now, there is an offset in synchronization that makes some mini-games unplayable.
  
• Board game crushers are not in sync at all.
  
• There is a persistent bug that occurs for some people (specifically keyboard users) where in the tutorial screen, they have no input at all and can't ready themselves. Sometimes this also carries over into the mini-game.
  
• I am unable to replicate this problem except with specific people, so I will be doing tests with those specific people to try and catch this bug and crush it.
  
• There is a strange issue with audio volume inconsistencies, in particular with round based mini-games, where the music volume seems to ramp up to full volume on a new round. This has me baffled, but at least I can isolate it to only being in round based mini-games, when a new round occurs...there's obviously something simple that I am missing.
  
• Sometimes when connecting/plugging in a new controller during the tutorial screen, the camera changes to the main level camera, and the tutorial screen is no longer visible.
  
• This isn't a huge priority, but when a player joins a mini-game mid way through, in mini-games such as Cognitive Collection, Blue Ballin etc, things will be completely out of sync. I'll be researching better techniques to improve upon this, but this is why studios have dedicated teams of network engineers, OR they simply don't allow drop in multiplayer.
  

WHAT ELSE AM I WORKING ON OR HAVE I BEEN WORKING ON?

• Unreal Engine 4 version upgrade. This took about 3.5 weeks to fully transition to the new engine version, fix up new bugs and problems that came as a result. There was a plethora of corruptions of functions within the engine, corruptions of animation data too, which I spent way too long trying to figure out each issue…the whole thing was a nightmare, pretty much every single UI element had to be re-tested, all animations had to be re-done too… but it will now save me from dealing with issues I have been dealing with in the older version for years that were slowing down progress.
  
• Twin Stick Trouble - Basic functionality has been added for this, but there's nothing to show just yet.
  
• Symbol matching mini-game - I experimented a little bit with a few idea's, but nothing to show yet.
  
• Make a Move - This is inspired by a board game called Robo Rally, if it was made into a fast paced battle royale style survival mini-game, nothing to show off yet, but general functionality is still being worked on.
  
• Buzz Kill - This mini-game used to work offline, but it needs a complete reconstruction in order to work online.
  
  
• Roller Raceway - It is ALMOST ready for online play. Mostly it needs a complete visual overhaul and some gameplay balancing in order to be fun, but during private tests, it holds up pretty well :)
  (OLD SCREENSHOT)
  
  
• Metal Ball Z - This is heavily inspired by a game called Lemming Ball Z, and I'd love to do my own take on it. I've already got basic movement, and movement animations, and camera stuff working, but just need to add the rest of the gameplay and then make it pretty...this is basically an entire game in itself, so this will take a while, especially to make it all work online, but I cannot wait to get it done, it's going to be a blast! (cringe pun is absolutely intended :D)
  
  
• Aside from the above stuff, my intention is to do more regular bug fix updates now with much needed changes and fixes, but the big focus will be on making the next big update into a content update with more mini-games, more board game maps, and more characters so please bear with me, I am only one person, so it takes time.
  

THANK YOU!

THANK YOU, YOU ARE ALL AWESOME!

ROCK ON!

MERRY CHRISTMAS, METAL HEADS!

MERRY CHRISTMAS, and ROCK ON!!!

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VERSION: MONKEY WAFFLES OF JUSTICE #3.3

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