Early Access Build 2017.4.11.1 of Pixel: ru² has been rolled out on Steam and with it comes something we've been talking about for quite a while...
Online Leaderboards!
Now when you play Pixel through Steam (or login with your Steam account in-game) your score will be automatically added to the online leaderboard system. The system will score every run you do, but only your best score on each level will be used on the leaderboard. This was done in case we change the scoring algorithm in the future. This way, all the runs can be updated, and if a different one is your best score, that one will be used.
Remember that Pixel is still in Early Access and the leaderboards are subject to change. As we adjust existing levels we may create new boards to help keep things fair, but we'll make sure there are ways to still play the old version too.
Also, if we see any scores that are too good to be true, we'll be removing them unless the player can validate their run.
The Holdup
This is something we've wanted since the start. We spent a long time researching the options that are out there instead of reinventing the wheel, but we just couldn't find one that worked for us. Our scoring system and the security we wanted didn't exist. This means we had to take time to develop it ourselves. It's still not 100% finished yet, but it's finished enough that we can start rolling it out for everyone to enjoy.
If you were at PAX East 2017 you may have seen our system in action. We setup a small network for testing it there. Everything went smoothly and we've spent the last month polishing it up for this release.
The Future
Now that we have an API and back-end to work with, we can continue to grow the online features of Pixel. Leaderboards are just the start. We plan on having tournaments, challenges, and eventually, online multiplayer.
We're bringing back our development stream, so you'll be able to see what we're up to and give your opinion on updates as they're developed.
Do you have what it takes to be a zero? Play Pixel and find out!
Happy Ada Lovelace Day
For those of you that don't know, October 13th this year is Ada Lovelace day, a day about women in science, technology, engineering and maths. It was named after Ada, Countess of Lovelace, the first computer programmer.
New Level
To celebrate today, we created a new level called Algorithm. It's available in both the demo and the full version of the game. It's a tricky level that involves an intricate color puzzle. There's no combat in the level, but you will need to use your beam weapon. Remember that by default, you can change your weapon's color with the scroll wheel.
Trading Cards
Ada Lovelace wasn't the only woman that did a lot for computer science; there are plenty of others. In fact, five of the fifteen trading cards are of women that did a lot for computer science:
We also fixed a minor bug (thank you Grace Hopper for that term, and for the compiler) in the RGB keyboard algorithm (thank you Ada Lovelace for seeing computers as more than just calculators) using computer science (thank you Adele Goldstine for creating the foundations of that and writing the first book on the subject).
And thank you to my partner Charlotte "Charlaxy" Ellett, who doesn't post much on her own, because she's too busy programming.
There are 10 Types of Players on Steam
Those that have played Pixel: ru², and those that have not. Ha, ha, ha...
Anyway, 10 is a special number in our latest update, and here's why.
10 New Levels
We completely overhauled the tutorial and expanded it from the four old levels to ten new ones. Some elements of the old levels made it into the new levels, but the majority is new and improved and designed to help you get the hang of the mechanics better as well as just being a lot more fun and engaging. With new levels comes new music and new backstory. Give them a try and tell us what you think!
All ten of these levels will also be available in the demo.
10 New Achievements
Pixel now has Steam Achievements. We plan on adding more over time, but added ten now to get you started.
Here are a few of them:
10 100 1: Kill two enemies with a single Rocket.
Firewall: Set an enemy on fire through a barrier using the Burn weapon.
Hax: Jump or flip off of an enemy projectile.
Hotfix: Change the color of a projectile while in flight so that it will now damage an enemy.
PTMP: Hit three enemies at the same time with the Spray weapon.
10 Other Improvements
Optimized performance throughout the game, still some issues (especially with the fire mechanics), but we're working on fixing those too.
Added a hints system to help out stuck players.
Added tips that will display between levels.
Fixed memory issue that caused game to crash for some people when loading a new level; mainly Windows 10 users, oh look, another 10.
Score is now displayed at the end of each level and the image information has been moved to another part of the screen.
Improved some old levels, making certain parts less frustrating – the box in Syntax Error is now bigger!
Beefed up a few weapons, but also made certain enemies stronger and others weaker.
Fixed issues related to resetting levels.
Added the ability to shoot with the arrow keys, and the ability to mix color bindings – press the red and blue buttons on an Xbox controller to select magenta.
Secrets... shh...
Don't be a zero, be a one and play Pixel.
Transparency - New Color for Pixel
Hello everyone,
I know we haven't posted much lately, and we want to change that. We want to be more open with everyone about our development process so everyone can easily stay up to date on what we're working on. That's what we want to make C63 Industries a more transparent company.
Live Streams
As of last week, we've been doing live development streams on Twitch. We plan on continuing this trend and hope to be able to continue doing one every night for as long as we can. We'll probably not be able to do one during events like PAX, but we hope to bring you other content during those events such as a live stream from our booth.
You can watch us develop Pixel almost every night at Midnight (central time) on Twitch: C63.in/stream
Online Multiplayer
We're still working on finishing this up. What went well as a prototype has been a bit of a challenge to implement well. We are making progress though, but I can't give you a set deadline yet. It is happening though, and if you watch the Twitch stream in October, you'll see us working hard on it.
New Levels Are Coming
Aside from working on fixing a lot of performance related issues, we've been working on adding a few new features to the level editor. With these new features comes a batch of new tutorial levels (10 total) that we hope will be a lot more enjoyable than the old ones. We plan to have this finished by the end of the month, so expect a big update then.
Let's Play
Here's a Let's Play Preview of Pixel done by Sabriel Mastin – one of the contributors over at Indie Haven.
Thank you to everyone for your support, and please let us know what you think!
Don't Rage Quit Alone
Multiplayer for Pixel: ru² is coming!
We're happy to announce that an addition to Pixel: ru² that's been planned since the start is finally going to be rolled out starting in 1 - 2 weeks. Multiplayer modes! We have several modes that we're working on, and are going to be releasing them one at a time so we can use feedback and data from each mode to help make the rest better.
We know how important playtesting is and we want to make sure everything is working well in each mode before adding a new one. We also don't want to spread ourselves too thin by releasing several modes at once.
Leaderboard Mode
This will be the first multiplayer mode to be rolled out and may remain the only multiplayer mode for a few months as we use it to test back-end code for the other modes. This mode isn't as advanced as the rest, which is why we're rolling it out first.
Leaderboard mode will be similar to how multiplayer in a game like TrackMania is. You'll be able to see each other, but won't be able to interfere with each other. You instead just keep trying to get a high score on that level until there is a level change and then everyone will be displayed the results before switching to the next level.
Not only will we be using this mode to help get issues out of our multiplayer code, but also as a step towards having global online leaderboards.
Cooperative Mode
This will most likely be the next multiplayer mode released. You will need to team up with other players and solve puzzle-platforming together similar to a game like Portal 2 or LittleBigPlanet.
This mode will be useful for testing interaction with other players. Because it's cooperative and not competitive, we're hoping any issues that happen won't be as frustrating to players. Once we get these issues fixed, we'll be able to move onto the next mode.
Competitive Mode
This mode will be similar to Leaderboard Mode, but you will be able to interact with each other. This means on top of having to worry about the enemies on the level, you'll also have to worry about other players.
We expect this mode to require a lot of balancing tweaks as well as ways to prevent players from griefing each other -- sitting at spawn spamming the rocket launcher for example.
Team Mode
This is the final multiplayer mode we have planned, and although it will have a different feel from the rest, it will incorporate a lot of existing elements. It will be a competitive game mode where teams are competing with teams in various ways. From traditional deathmatch, to objective focused levels, to cooperative leaderboard challenges where teams are competing against teams.
This mode opens up a lot of options, and because of that there are already a lot of ideas for things we can do. We may do a separate rollout for different modes within this mode.
Feedback
We'd love to know what everyone thinks of these modes and if you have any more ideas on what we can do with Pixel: ru².
Thank you.
Latest News & Updates
It's been a couple of weeks since our last update, and we have a lot to say!
Trading Cards
Some of you probably noticed that we've recently added trading cards. There are 15 trading cards in total and each one contains text about the early history of computers. Let us know what your favorite moment is.
Emoticons
With trading cards comes emoticons and we added special ones to Steam that allow you to create pictures like this:
Each emoticon represents a pixel that's a specific color. There are 8 colors in total.
Settings
We've overhauled our settings file and changed it from an INI file to a more scalable XML file. Unfortunately we don't have backwards compatibility with the INI file, so this means you're going to need to redo your settings (sorry). The good news is that this should never happen again, the XML file will let us grow and do more as we add more features. We wanted to make this change now, before we did more settings so the lose wouldn't be as bad.
An additional feature you get out of this change is the ability to bind individual weapons and ammo. The default binding are 1 - 6 for colors and F1 - F7 for weapons. We're also planning on adding the ability to have a multi-key binding.
RGB Integration
Those of you with RGB peripherals will be happy to know that we've been doing more with this. We now have mouse support and just released a rough video showing everything off:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=3shkn9shRH4
Let's Play
Highsight of Indie Insights recently played Pixel: ru² live on Twitch. Here's a 30 minute video of it:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=hwcqFwlEc6E
MomoCon
If you're in Atlanta this weekend, visit us at MomoCon! We'll have a booth in the Indie Games area.
Thank You
Thank you everyone for your support so far. We've received a lot of great feedback from the community including ideas that have been implemented into the game. We hope this continues and together we have a great game we all enjoy.
Improved Performance and Lossless Audio Support
We just released a new build of Pixel: ru² onto Steam. Here are two of the major changes to the latest build.
Improved Performance
We completely overhauled how a lot of the threading was handled in Pixel: ru². This has resulted in better performance and smoother gameplay. If you had any issues running the game before, please give it another try.
Lossless Audio Support
We added support for FLAC files to Pixel: ru². If you install the soundtrack on Steam, the game will play those lossless audio files instead of the lossy compressed Ogg Vorbis files.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/351280/
Let's Play
A new Let's Play was released this week on YouTube. It was done by mbourg99 and shows the first few levels of the game.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Z2Yt8kNvQZg
If you write an article or record a video of Pixel: ru², let us know so we can share it with the community!
Latest News from the Weekend
We have several things to share from the weekend, so instead of making separate posts for each one, here's one post with everything.
New Guides
We wrote two guides on Steam that we hope you find useful.
How to Play Here is an instruction manual for anyone that needs one. It covers the basics, but also advanced topics such as using secondary colors in combat:
Level Editor This is a guide with lots of information about the Level Studio. Don't let the length of it intimidate you, a lot of it is more like a reference than a guide.
We just released a new trailer. It shows off some of the fun gameplay mechanics and also hints at a little of the backstory.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=V7umdGZVK4M
Preview Article
Agent86 over at Without The Scarcasm posted an article about Pixel: ru². If you'd like to see what they thought of the game, take a look:
http://withoutthesarcasm.com/pixel-ru-preview/
Here's a snippet form the conclusion:
Pixel ru² [is] a truly geeky game ... If games were dice, Pixel ru² would be a d20.
Steam Workshop Support
We're happy to announce that Pixel: ru² is now integrated with Steam Workshop. This means you can create your own levels with the in-game Level Studio and then publish them to Steam.
We'll be writing a guide on Steam to help everyone with the Level Studio. One tip to help get you started is that all the entities can be resized with the resize tool. This means that instead of placing a row of blocks next to each other, you only need to place one block and resize it.
We look forward to seeing what levels everyone comes up with!
You can access the workshop at:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/351170/workshop/
We uploaded an old level to get things started.
If you need any help, please post in the Workshop Discussion forum here:
http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/discussions/?appid=351170
We're still working on making the levels that players subscribe to display correctly in the game. For now you can access them by selecting Load Level on the Level menu and navigating to the following directory:
...\Steam\SteamApps\Workshop\Content\351170\
Watch for more integration with Steam over the next couple of months. We're planning on having leaderboards done soon, and we also have ideas for achievements, trading cards, and stats.
Let us know what you think and what additions you'd like to see added to Pixel: ru².
Thank you for your support!
Pixel: ru² Update
We just overhauled several things in the latest build of Pixel: ru².
The biggest change is updating the grid from 16x16 to 64x64. This not only means that the game will look good on high resolution monitors, but it also allowed us to make the controls much smoother and less finicky. If you don't have a high resolution monitor, the game will scale itself for you without hurting the smoother controls.
We also changed how we're listening to events such as key presses. Our new system shouldn't miss any key presses even if the game lags. Our new game cycle code should also be effected less by frame locking. This means that recording a video of Pixel: ru² shouldn't slow down the gameplay.
Another thing that is included in this update are 2 new levels in the full version and 1 new level in the demo version. One of the new levels still has some bugs, but we'd still love to know what everyone thinks so far.
And finally, we changed the internal format of the PXL files making them a lot more powerful for future additions we have planned. Old PXL files will still work, but when you save your level in the studio it will save as the new format. This means that new levels won't be backwards compatiable with older builds of the game.
Unless any major issues are caused by this update, our next goal is to add Steamworks integration.
