Trivia mode now works as intended. Irrelevant questions are filtered out, and only relevant questions are asked, but the answers are no longer always going to be the default player 1, now the answers are correctly picked for each question. :)
There's still more work to do to make this Trivia mode better, such as more variety of questions and even better filtering of questions, along with a MUCH better UI (like the whole game...because let's face it, the UI SUCKS am I right!?), but ultimately, I need to focus on the underlying mechanics of everything working before I go doing a visual overhaul to the game.
There's still 2 weeks until the end of the month, and as far as the progress I want to make in that 2 weeks, I'm ahead of my plans, and that is a great thing!
YOU ALL ROCK!!!
Hotfix (Easter Access 6.1)
Feeling even worse today unfortunately, but managed to try and fix up some stuff and work on some network optimization.
CHANGES:
- Player 1 should no longer turn completely black in certain circumstances. This didn't break gameplay, but did mean that certain gameplay elements that relied on the player colour were invisible. For example in Cognitive Collection and Melting Memory, the rings light up the colour of the player, however if the player colour was black, that meant the light was black and therefore wouldn't actually light up or show light, making it very confusing for player 1.
- Made the board game UI initiate the current round/max rounds correctly and be formatted correctly. Previously for a moment it would just show the current round, nothing else. So now it shows as "Round 1 / 8" versus "1"
- Added a kind of safety measure to ensure that if the stage of the board game wasn't the "Modify Tile" stage, then the modify tile user interface would not appear on screen. This generally only occurs due to significant lag anyway, so if the host PC isn't very good, or their internet upload speed isn't very good, there would be a huge delay on the information sent to clients that is necessary to update them all on what stage the board game is at.
- Updated the text in the start up (CONTINUE) screen to include "MUSIC IS DMCA FREE".
- Did some performance and network optimization to Dark Dangers, as each tile/section in the level/maze previously had a pickup which was loading on the network and slowing things down a lot. I haven't tested the before and after performance, but it should be better.
- Experimented with network optimizations in Cognitive Collection. Previously there were variables being updated constantly by the server, which caused a significant amount of lag online. Now a lot of the logic is client-side. I also attempted to add some kind of synchronization of the rotation of the cogs, but it's still not perfect and there's still a slight offset from server to client, but this offset is almost impossible to remedy due to the nature of how online/networking works. There is one thing I am looking into to try and resolve a LOT of the networking issues in general, but until I learn that method and implement it, this is all I have got for Cognitive Collection for now. If it's still suuuuper laggy, let me know. I also disabled the randomly changing directions for Cognitive Collection for now as it's almost a requirement for the online multiplayer to stay in sync until I learn better techniques on network synchronization.
Thanks everyone!
YOU ROCK!
BOARD GAME ROUND BUG HOTFIX
Hey everyone, I durped!
This update fixes the round counter in the board game mode.
This also means that you can ACTUALLY play the boss fight, where as due to this bug, you couldn't.
I took today off as I woke up feeling really ill, and have been feeling gross all day, probably due to the long hours and staying up until 3am every morning which I'm not used to doing. (usually I am up at 6am and go to bed at midnight).
Tomorrow I'll get back into working on bug fixes, there's a LOT of them, but thankfully, I have so many written down, so it's only a matter of time before they are all ironed out :) One in particular that I'll be tackling tomorrow, perhaps in another hotfix update, is when the host player lands on a shop tile and buys an item, the screen is just black for everyone else, which kills the fun a fair bit and is very confusing. I'll also be tackling an issue where on slow host computer's or networks, sometimes the tile modification wheel remains on screen the whole round.
Anyway, ENJOY THE BOSS FIGHT! :)
BOSS FIGHT NOW WORKS!
UPDATE: EASTER ACCESS #5.9
Hoooo boy, this one was an absolute nightmare to get this out, it felt like the worlds biggest game of whack-a-mole, but I think it is all good to release for you guys! YAY!
I'll spare you the blabber about me working 12-16 hours a day, and how freakin exhausted I am, but I won't spare you from me showering you with a million thank you's and ...a million apologies.
Here's the completely organized change-log/bug fix list ...thing:
INPUT: I have spent a significant amount of time working on this, and it is a constant battle it feels like, but I am slowly progressing, finding better ways of doing things. When I started working on Metal Heads, my knowledge of dealing with 8 players on one computer was almost non-existent, I knew that there were limitations, but I couldn't find any information to help with this. As a result, I have been constantly making what I THINK works, and it seems to work for a little bit, but then I do something else which breaks everything, for example the online multiplayer, then keyboard support, then making keyboard support work in online multiplayer. I am still battling these issues, especially in regards to keyboard users, but I am confident that I will get the game to a point where there aren't any issues with keyboard players.
- I discovered an issue where if for example, a player launches Metal Heads and hits ENTER on their keyboard, then joins an online server, but then hits the START button on a connected controller, the game was creating 2 "souls" for that player. The game got confused about this, and assigned the player either with "NONAME". I have found a better solution of setting player names, but have not yet fully implemented this yet. For the most part, the last few tests I have done with Discord users haven't had any game breaking problems happening if players use keyboards or unsupported controllers.
- I discovered some other issues in relation to player enumeration which should fix up some general input problems, and an on-flow of problems throughout the whole game, it's menu's etc
- Seemingly as a result of the above, I have fixed a bug where players wouldn't appear in the end mini-game winner screen, and also seemingly have fixed a "PLAYER 0 IS THE WINNER" issue that is related to this bug.
- Also as a result of the above, in round based mini-games like Creepin Creepers, all players will respawn every round again. If they don't...let me know (and I'll be very confused).
- I got a hold of my old xbox 360 controllers for some testing, however all of the cables are broken, and I don't have a wireless adapter, so may end up purchasing some cables or a wireless adapter soon to help with input testing.
- I tested out a Spartan controller that was worth about $5, and it worked about 2 weeks ago, but now it fails to even be detected by Steam or Windows....I was using this controller to help with testing really generic/basic aftermarket controller support...I spent a few hours trying to figure out why it worked and now doesn't, but figured there are better priorities.
LOBBY SCREEN/CHARACTER SELECTION SCREEN: - Fixed up an issue where keyboard players couldn't hold the right arrow key to leave the lobby. This took about 6 hours to fix today....and it was of course the most stupidly simple thing ever.
BOARD GAME MODE: - Re-instated drop-in/drop-out mechanics for the board game mode, however there's a few scenario's yet to be tested, so there are still problems. - Fixed up the 3D text showing the wrong amount of rounds left in the board game. (This was a stupidly simple fix that my tired brain couldn't comprehend, so it took longer than I wanted it to take) - At the end of the board game mode after the Trivia, all other players SHOULD show up rather than the winner and maybe 1 or 2 other players. But I haven't been able to test this fully yet. - Trivia mode is still very much unfinished and broken, and the answer still is generally player 1, but if a player dropped into the last round, the game may set them to be the answer....pro tips right there. - Egg fart sounds are louder than in EASTER UPDATE #5.8. 3x volume vs 1x...this is important.
MINI-GAME TUTORIAL: - Tutorial screen kept on showing a video of the previous mini-game, but the name of the current mini-game, which was really confusing, so now have brute forced it to show the correct one.... It's not an elegant solution, and is more of a band-aid fix for now. If you run into this problem, let me know. - Made the description text scale according to the amount of text.
BOSS FIGHT MINI-GAME: - The boss fight mini-game NOW WORKS! YAY! - Re-created the entire boss character scripting, as it was old and outdated and very broken. - ANY player can be the boss now, everyone can see the boss, it is animating correctly, synchronized correctly etc. - Depending on which player wins the board game, the lighting in the boss arena will match that player's colour, as will the boss's "eye"/"cockpit"/"visor" (which one is it? hmmm) to help represent which player it is, as players were not aware that they were the boss due to not reading the tutorial. - The boss's super amazing health bar and energy bar UI show up for both server and client now and is updated in sync with server and client. - An arrow appears when the boss player's energy goes below 20% to help guide them to go and recharge in the middle of the map. - Once the boss player starts recharging, the boss player can do a QTE (quick time event) where they will need to hit the buttons that appear underneath the energy bar. Every time the player gets a full sequence correct, they gain a large chunk of energy. The boss can also do this after being overcharged. Right now, like all UI buttons, it's all designed for the xbox controller, however I will eventually be implementing a switching system that detects that player's form of input and changes the UI icons to match, so that it's more intuitive and understandable. - The boss's cockpit/visor/eye now flickers and goes dark when charging, then turns back on again when finished. - The boss's arms now blocks player movement, making a bit more difficult to get up close to the front of the boss. - The charging pillars now work almost 100% without issue. The ONLY problems I know of are that if there's a player standing in front of another player who is interacting with a pillar, The player who is interacting, gets blocked and the button presses don't work. I aim to fix this in the next update. - Added visual cues to show players that they need to run to the pillars. - Added visual cue over players who get knocked down when another player runs past, it pops up with the Y Button. - Players who are knocked down by the slam attack can only be helped up by other players, and have a little yellow swirl above their head. Sometimes this doesn't really work, so players need to move around a bit before they get the right spot. I'll make this way better in the future. - Boss starts pouring out smoke when low on health and this shows up for clients, not just the server. - Added a place-holder cinematic at the end of the boss fight. It currently kind of shows the boss exploding a little bit, and is reallllly basic, but it's better than nothing I guess. It also occurs no matter who wins. - After the boss fight/board game is over, players are now re-entered into the lobby correctly. Previously, the game wasn't setting a particular value to be TRUE, and so everyone ended up as player 1 (player 0).
OH BALLS: - Made the Oh Balls jump height slightly higher. - Made the Oh Balls falling platform rings not drop down as far, to allow players to still recover if they get caught as the platform is spinning downward before it drops.
TAP OUT: - Tap Out survival mode difficulty lowered slightly by making it so the player doesn't have to tap as much. However there is still a potential problem where client players need to tap more than the host, so I'll do more tests to find out if this is actually a problem, or if people have very different expectations of the survival mode.
====================== FINAL NOTES ======================
There were more changes and fixes that I didn't even allow myself the time to open up my developer log and note down, but there were LOTS...most were due to an on flow effect from fixing other issues, so not much point noting them all here.
I will be working like a mad-man for the rest of April to try and finish up the board game mode and boss battle mechanics before I start working on making more mini-games while simultaneously working on fixing up network performance in many of the mini-games.
Online multiplayer is not a simple thing, and even bigger companies, with very highly skilled and talented network engineering teams struggle....I'm one guy, and my skills with networking are very limited...but are rapidly developing along with the game. Many of the mini-games were atrocious to play online to begin with, and now most of them can be played without any issues, or very minimal issues online, so it's only a matter of time before the other mini-games run well online as well.
Thank you all again for being so super supportive of the game, and so patient with me. It means an incredible amount to me and gives me great joy that I can create this fun for you.
You are the life-blood of this game, you put the "metal" in Metal Heads.
YOU ALL ROCK!
Reverting back to Easter Update 5.7 until I fix major issues.
Hi everyone.
First, I'd like to apologize if you have been having problems in all of the mini-games, menu's etc with players losing names, or just not respawning in games like creepin creepers etc.
I have reverted back to Easter Update #5.7 until I can fix these problems, as I cannot replicate the problems with mini-game scoring, player names being messed up, players not respawning etc in mini-games. HOWEVER, this version does NOT support drop-in/drop-out in the board game mode and it will break the board game mode. In fact the board game mode scoring etc is very broken in this earlier update, but at least the whole game isn't broken.
Thanks to the test I did last night with the Discord community, I have discovered what I think is the root cause of the issue on the later version (Easter Update 5.9), which I can only replicate 100% of the time when hitting ENTER on the keyboard upon starting the game (continue screen), and then when joining a server, hitting START on the controller (or the opposite), or simply by having multiple controllers connected at one time, hitting START on one of them on game load, then hitting START on another one when joining the server.
Once again, I apologize for the rough experience you may be having with the game and I am doing my best to try and remedy these problems.
I thank you for your patience with me, and I thank you for your support. This is not an easy time as the only developer working on the game, but I am confident, that whilst there are these bugs and issues right now, the game will eventually have very minimal or no bugs, and will be a much better experience for all.
YOU ROCK \m/
Board Game connectivity update
This one has a few big changes!
I'm absolute exhausted getting this update ready, yesterday worked 16 hours, today 18 hours....time for sleep after this!
Make sure you restart your Steam client so that the update comes through. It is called "Version: Easter Access #5.8(EA)"
PATCH NOTES: (In no particular order) - Roasted music track wasn't being treated as music, and is possibly why it kept cutting out. This should hopefully now be fixed. - Pipemare segments should now smoothly move on clients, although the rest of the pipe is generally out of sync, such as lasers, fan blades etc. - More fart noises (this is important) - Also assigned the fart noises to the SFX sound class, which means they will have volume adjusted up or down based on SFX volume. - Lowered the volume of fart noises...500x volume was a bit excessive. - Fixed an issue where the board game intro didn't skip for clients when the server skipped it. - Round number now shows correct round for clients in board game mode. - Added slight delay before a newly connected client can hit start/enter to join to prevent some connectivity issues when a player who is joining keeps spamming the start button despite not being loaded in properly yet.
BOARD GAME CONNECTIVITY: I spent about 36 hours on board game connectivity problems, writing a bunch of different scenario's down and testing them all out until they worked....then testing them all again every time I changed something...that's why this took so long.
Players can now drop into the game whenever they want, and drop out whenever they want and there aren't really any major issues at this stage.
There are still some problems regarding drop-in/drop-out in the board game map, such as players losing all of their stats, but I will be addressing that hopefully for the next update.
The main objective for this update was to allow players to be able to join the board game mode whenever they wanted, and be able to participate without breaking the game. I think I have succeeded, and I am very happy about this.
I'm sure there were more things fixed that I didn't touch on, but it's now 4:30am and I need to sleep before I pass out from exhaustion!
Have fun everyone!
YOU ROCK! \m/
- Nathan
Fartastic Update
Alrighty, so today I was feeling particularly off, but I managed to still push through and get work done in the afternoon before almost passing out.
For those who have already played the board game, despite it being unfinished, broken etc, I added more Easter eggs.....enjoy!
For those who haven't played the board game mode yet, DO IT! Even if it's broken, go see what all of the Easter eggs are about.
Funny Easter business aside, here's what I actually managed to get done today:
- Added a Tie Breaker screen rather than Sudden Death kicking in over and over. Who-ever gets the next high score wins. So if 3 people are on 7 points, and one person is on 5 points, but they manage to get 3 points before the other players, they end up on 8 points and win. So basically when the Tie Breaker is triggered, the game looks at the highest score, and who-ever gets another point higher than that score wins.
- Eggs are kind of squishy now (really important, I know)
- Added field of eggs in the right side of the board game map.
- Updated Bunny metal head material so it doesn't break.
- Animations should properly be synced for players when landing on a tile that gets the player wheel out. (There are still more things to synchronize with this, but it works much better)
- Character is now animated properly after the trivia screen, however not all characters show up still, that's still a bug.
- Winning player in the board game should be lit up differently so shouldn't appear as green.
- Removed the mod/tile points from the UI as they are now obsolete and just confused people.
- Fixed an issue where players couldn't view map in the action menu after the first round.
- Fixed a few other minor issues, along with a bunch of bugs that took several hours to find and fix because the engine crashed mid-way through a compile, corrupting a bunch of work....that was not fun.
- Updated Pipemare to have smoother rotation on clients. Still more lag fixing to do for this one, but this is WAY better. (No more suddenly rotating pipe segments!)
HAVE FUN!!!
YOU ALL ROCK!!!
MOVE OVER LOLA! THERE'S A NEW BUNNY IN TOWN!
Hello my fellow metal heads!
I just wanted to do something a bit fun today, so I've added some easter eggs to the game, and a new metal head to use! THE BUNNY HEAD!
This head will stay in the game permanently, but the eggs unfortunately will all be eaten in time (if anybody really WANTS to eat them) and disappear after the Easter Break, so get in now, check it out and have some fun!
I haven't gotten to work on any bugs today, but I will be doing a live test at 6:30pm AEST (+10GMT) if anybody would like to join in on the stupidity.
After the Metal Heads live-stream, I'll be moving the stream over to Twitch to play some other games with the metal heads testers from the Discord community, so come join in, come hang out with us all, ask questions in the chat and let's have a good fun time! You will be able to continue the fun over at: https://www.twitch.tv/otreumgames
If you aren't seeing easter eggs in the game, make sure you have version "EASTER ACCESS #4.5 (EA)" showing in the bottom right corner of the screen.
This update of course only is valid for the full game, not the demo yet, but I will probably try and update the demo straight after posting this event here!
YOU ALL ROCK! \m/
Improved keyboard support.
Most of today has been spent trying to get the Official sound-track sorted out in Steam, but in the afternoon, despite being burned out, I found some issues that I just couldn't ignore.
These problems aren't all fixed (although, they may all stem from one thing that I believe to have fixed), but here are some of the issues I really want to iron out: - Player joining and causing player 1 to go kind of blank in the lobby, their eyes go dark, their platform goes dark, I'm not entirely sure why this is happening, but it may be fixed now as I found something that may have been causing it...it's just hard to test a bug that I can't replicate myself. So go break the hell out of the game and let me know how it goes :P This bug also caused confusion as the character's colour got messed up and as a result, text was unreadable, eyes weren't lighting up etc. It didn't break the game, but it is a bit confusing for someone new to the game. - Some players just flat out not even spawning when playing mini-games. This may not be fixed, but it's caused by keyboard players, and I believe this may be resolved now. - Players can now hit the down arrow key again in the board game mode to skip past the post mini-game score screen. - Down arrow key in general should work better. It was being overridden by another function, and thus resulting in no input detected.
- Fixed up scoring bug in Termination Trail. The win conditions were somehow set to be based on survival time vs points, which doesn't work in round based modes, winners should be determined correctly again.
NOTE: Drop-in/Drop-out support in the board game is still broken and will result in players not being able to play in mini-games, it will generally break the whole board-game mode. If you intend to play the board game mode, perhaps create a passworded or private server and add all of the players in the lobby before-hand. I'll be working on fixing this soon.
Thanks for being patient with me while I work through these frustrating bugs! YOU ROCK! \m/
Quality of Life board game improvements.
So today started strong, I started working on learning more about network synchronization and then trying to set up a test environment to improve the network lag for mini-games like Blue Ballin, Dodgy, and Pipemare. I didn't get much done today about the lag as I was exhausted and needed to rest shortly after starting work.
That aside, I did manage to get some quality of life improvements done. Here is what was done: - Lobby screen has text added underneath the BACK button to show keyboard users what to do. This is a placeholder, like the whole UI. - The "Press START to join" message now says "Press START/ENTER to join" to help keyboard users. - The tutorial screen has some additional text added to the 3d tutorial texture to show that you can HOLD the A button to force start the game (if you are the host), and text showing players that they need to HOLD the B button to leave the tutorial screen, as most players were tapping the button and confused why nothing was happening. - I started implementing a switcher that looks to see if the player with control is using a keyboard or controller. But this isn't yet implemented. - Fixed camera not moving for clients when a player would equip/use an item when in their inventory. - Fixed not being able to hit the Y button (up face button) in the reaction mini-game at the start of the board game. It was only allowing input from the current player. - Fixed up post-Trivia UI that kept showing "WHAT IS HAPPENING?" for clients even though the server was updating it's messages correctly. - Fixed the end-round metal heads not appearing for clients in the board game mode. - Fixed up an issue where the mod wheel would spin freely with a controller since it wasn't updating when the left stick wasn't being pushed in a direction. It would set to 1 (clockwise) or -1(anti-clockwise) direction, but never to 0 (stop). - Added bonus points to the board game map for various other tiles to give players an incentive to do more platforming. - Fixed up the slime spill meshes so they have better collisions. This is significantly less work for me while doing level design. - Changed the layout of 2 of the slime spills so that they area easier to get past. But still require jumping to get through the danger. - HOPEFULLY fixed an issue where sometimes the first collectible wasn't shown or found, and therefore breaking that system of the board game mode. I say "hopefully" because this is such a random/difficult thing to test. If it does occur for you, please let me know. - Increased the types of tiles that collectibles can spawn on so that their locations are more varied.
And that's it!
As for an update on me. It's waaaay later than I wanted to go to bed, as it's 2:26am and I planned to go to bed at 11pm but I really wanted to crush some of these bugs.... I probably should let myself have a day off, but this 1.5 is perhaps the most important.
