Added a new Lumi plush-related line for K-Lev at the end of the game
Fixed an issue where Lumi disappears when she touches a door that opens (maybe she went into the void?)
Fixed some more typos in Polish
Fixed an issue that let players skip the cutscene that gives them the star power-up
Added Braille language support.
After listening to player feedback: Made it less likely for black holes to appear in real life next to players, sucking them in along with their entire neighborhood.
Removed Braille language support
Fixed lag spikes in the secret multiplayer mode
Very, VERY minor patch
Fixed a bunch of typos in the Polish localization. That's it
Minor fixes and adjustments
Attempted to fix an issue causing the save file to get corrupted.
The game will create a new save file whenever it attempts to load a corrupted one instead of simply getting stuck on a black screen.
Reduced the amount of projectiles in the firewall phase of the last boss.
The firewall phase has a background effect which can be quite costly to run on old computers. Long ago I implemented a mechanism that measures your FPS and forces the background to look worse until your FPS stabilizes at 45 or above. Some people were still getting low FPS on the lowest background quality, so it's been adjusted to nerf itself even further before stopping.
There were actually more minor changes. I forgot what they were since I released them in small patches that had no release notes written for them.
New game! The World Is Drowning
I'm happy to announce my newest game! Persona 3The World Is Drowning
"The world is drowning, and everyone you know is gone. If you wish to survive, you'll have to climb to the moon. On your way up you’ll encounter many traps and monsters, but remember, you must never stop. The sea of blood is coming, and it will rob you of your final breath"
The World Is Drowning is a horror roguelike game that focuses on hydrophobia instead of traditional scares
Questions you might ask, and answers I may answer
How many people will work on "The World Is Drowning"? For now, it's just me. Once the game's prototype is further developed, I hope to raise funds and hire more people to help me make this game.
Will the game feature multiplayer? Only if the game gets enough funding. It is currently being developed as a singleplayer game.
When can I play the game? I plan to hold beta testing rounds in the future. If you wish to know about it once I announce the dates then make sure to wishlist and follow "The World Is Drowning" on Steam, as I'll be announcing it there. I will also announce the dates in The World Is Drowning/Outcore's discord server
How can I help the game's development As mentioned above, wishlist and follow the game on Steam, and tell about it to your friends. That's the most direct way there is to help the game until it's available for testing.
What engine are you using to develop "The World Is Drowning" Unity, although I'm seriously considering starting from scratch with Unreal Engine. I feel like UE5 tools could fit this game more than Unity, and hopefully result in a better-looking game.
Will you still be working on Outcore? Yes, but I will mostly be fixing bugs, supporting players, and adding new languages. While there's some cut content I wanted to add, and I DO have plans for the game in the future, I can't afford to work on it right now as I have to focus on releasing something that earns me money. Turns out you can't sustain your existence if you release a game for free.
Does it mean The World Is Drowning will cost money? YES! It will cost ALL of the money!
The "Cute animals with clown noses" update!
I'm happy to announce Outcore's biggest, most important update ever since "The big 2023 update" earlier this year.
Please welcome...
The "Cute animals with clown noses" update!
Finally, after ten thousand years, I've managed to focus ALL player feedback into one singular feature which everyone can enjoy. It took hundreds of the best engineers around the world to develop this, but we managed to overcome the technical difficulties involved in developing such a complex system.
You can finally, look at cute animals with big red clown noses instead of playing Outcore
Look, buddy, I'll be frank with you. The game has like 17k post-release wishlis++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +
+654
Sorry, my cat just landed his abnormally gigantic ass on the keyboard. Here's proof
Anyway, as I was saying, The game has like 17k post-release wishlists. That's like 17,000 people who showed interest in the game but haven't played it even though it's free. This is my dream game, and I'm gonna make them play it, you hear me??? The only way to convert them was to pull out the big guns, the forbidden weapon, the illegal Danish: Cute animals.
I could have just let you look at regular cute animals, but then I would have missed the opportunity to subconsciously remind you to buy the clown nose DLCs, which you don't have to but you should definitely remember that they exist and that I hunger for french fries and schnitzel in pita which I can buy using YOUR money.
"Finally, Doctor Shinobi, YOU'VE DONE IT! I no longer have to play your stupid game. I will now proceed to tell ALL MY FRIENDS about Outcore's new awesome update. Next, please add a feature that lets me order hard-boiled eggs directly to my home".
Yeah!!!! Go tell your friends about the update! And have fun, I worked very hard on this update just for you!
Ohhhhhhh.... by the way
I made a new attempt to fix the annoying black screen bug. Hopefully, the bug-fixing editions (and maybe the base one) should fix it for everyone. If you're still getting black screens, let me know on the game's Steam forums or Discord server.
OHHHH, by the way 2.0
I'm working on a new game which I hope to announce sometime between this micro-second and the end of August. Unfortunately, it won't contain cute animals with big red clown noses
June 26th update
- Remember the blog post about the "racism" bug? Well, it's fixed again. No more manually adding support for weird characters for the rest of eternity.
This time it's almost certainly fixed for good. That said, there's also a very decent chance I may have made that bug worse. Only time and your angry comments will tell.
- Fixed the game's rendering on 5:4 aspect ratio screens, which should allow cavemen to play Outcore.
- Fixed the memory window not recognizing Lumi being dropped into it for some players
The "racism" bug
Patch notes:
Attempted to fix a bug that makes the game break for people who have French names (I'm dead serious. More details below)
Upgraded the engine version. This will hopefully help fix rare crash bugs
Made it easier for hackers to write an autosplitter for Outcore.
French names bug
For some players, when Lumi asks the player to open a folder such as "Documents" or "Downloads", she fails to recognize the folders being opened. She simply stands there doing nothing, leaving players confused.
After receiving several "Player.log" files from players who encountered this bug I noticed something common: They all appear to have French Windows usernames.
"Doctor Shinobi, you little clown, did you just make a racist bug?"
Woah woah woah hold on, I can explain everything. I suddenly remembered it's not just French! This also used to happen with... Turkish people!
"Great, now you're racist against the Turkish people too"
Or am I...??? I'm going to prove my innocence by presenting the technical details behind this bug.
Why this bug happens
Aright nerds, let's dive in.
I previously publicly mentioned that when you play Outcore you actually run 2 apps at the same time:
Outcore, the game.
A special invisible program I wrote called "WindowsUtility", which in short we'll call WU.
I wrote WU to assist Outcore with interacting with your Windows OS. For example, you know how at the beginning of the game Lumi's glitch blob points you to her first file? It knows its position on the screen thanks to WU.
Outcore and WU communicate with each other like a server and a client, except they are both on your computer. The bug occurs inside WU, way before the information is communicated to Outcore.
When Lumi asks you to open a folder, she instructs WU to check the address of any folder that you open. Let's say Lumi asks the player to open the Downloads folder. Outcore will send a love letter to WU saying "Hey WU, my brother which I dearly love. please let me know when a folder with the address 'C:\Users\DoctorShinobi\Downloads' is opened and focused"
WU will then check the address of every folder that is opened. If it's equal to C:\Users\DoctorShinobi\Downloads then WU will respond to Outcore with this letter: "Greetings, Outcore, my twin sibling which I definitely do not hate for being more popular than me, the folder you requested has been opened by the master of this computer".
Outcore will then notify Lumi about this exciting news. She will change animation and probably say something like "wow look at this, it's my file, yeaaahh let's gooo".
BUT
French names, amright? In French you have these accented letters such as "é, è, ê, ô, û, à, É, È, Ê, Ô, Û, À, ï, Ï, ë, Ë", and more!
Let's imagine this hypothetical universe in which I am French. Lumi would ask WU to monitor this folder: C:\Users\DôctôrShinôbï\Downloads When the folder is opened and WU checks its address, it's actually going to read something that looks like this: C%3A%5CUsers%5CD%F4ct%F4rShin%F4b%EF%5CDownloads
Weird, right? I'll tell you why it looks like this. If you ever looked at a website's address, you'd often see symbols like this. I don't know what's up with URLs but they don't really support all types of characters. To work around that, browsers/websites encode the URL addresses, which is called "escaping". When you escape a URL, you're replacing all special characters with regular ones that represent them.
For example, "/" is replaced with "%5C". "ô" is replaced with "%F4", and so on... Then after the escaped URL is transferred somewhere, the receiving end can unescape it to get the original text. The folder URL that WU reads is escaped. to Unescape it, I use a C# function called "Uri.UnescapeDataString". It works well most of the time, but it fails to unescape accented letters for some reason.
The somewhat bizarre solution is to manually unescape the URLs myself. This is something I've done in the past with accented Turkish letters, but had to extend with more letters for the French ones:
Can't say I'm super happy with this since I keep discovering new letters that need to be added. But at least it should be good enough for most cases.
If you still encounter this issue then let me know in the Steam forums on the game's Discord server
Bug fixes
- Attempted to fix a case where the player's settings fail to load - Attempted to fix an error preventing the memory window from opening - Fixed an error preventing some windows from being closed (such as the memory loader) - Added a bunch of safety checks which should help me identify the source of some errors.
French localization + CT nerf
Outcore can now be played in French! The translations were made by Alexis Barroso, Alexis Deschamps, Léo L'hoost ,Maude Nantel, Kariane Lacharité from PrismaLoc
Nerfed Captain Tutorial to be less difficult than the final boss of a Souls game
Fixed an issue preventing Paint from being opened on some computers
Fixed a bunch of errors that occurred in the background for some people
Minor patch
Attempt to fix the invisible walls bug at the last boss.
