Genre: Shooter, Real Time Strategy (RTS), Strategy, Indie
Tango Fiesta
UPDATE #29 - Hit It Again.
Update #29 - BOSS RUSH
“Hit it again.” Those words were uttered by a genius crook in the best action film ever made. What is it? Not telling, you should know by now. Why did he say them? Because the police had sent in the SWAT team, and they got caught out so they needed backup, and that got taken out with extreme prejudice. Planning for multiple outcomes is very wise, and our European friend planned for every single one. Well, except for the cop playing cowboy outside of his jurisdiction.
Well, you might need backup now, because every single Boss in the game now has goons helping them out! It’s made fights slightly tougher, but also way more interesting, so dive in and see what you think! We’ve also been hard at work fixing issues under the bonnet so we’ve got a much more solid framerate now, while we’ve been prepping some work on AI, but more on that later.
Until then, here’s a pic of my personal favourite element of the update this week, Ghoul Squad Level 3 can get pretty… hectic!
I’ve been able to balance some of the enemy spawning rules and will continue to do so in an effort to make more exciting, varied and memorable levels like this. All our hard work is paying off!
Time for a fair warning - we’re experiencing a few crashes from new players, and we’ve managed to put a chunk of sneaky code in to try and root out the problem - though we’re unable to replicate it with much reliability ourselves. We’re about as far from New Players as you can be.
If you do experience a crash, please do get in touch on the forums right here on Steam, via twitter or on email (andrew.smith@spiltmilkstudios.com) - we’ll ask for your crash log, which should be in in your root Tango Fiesta directory, labelled with the day’s date and the sessions play time.
This is the only way we can fix these kinds of things so any help you guys and gals can give is hugely appreciated.
CHANGELIST!
Added
Generic bad guys now spawn in all Boss Fights on Standard and NG+
HUD flash for when you fire weapon added
Champions are now worth double points
Fixed
Live dropout fixed for multiplayer
Weapon graphics are now removed from play when a player drops out
Fixes for achievement unlocking in Boss fights, which were occasionally stopping progression at the end of fights
Higher chance of Hunters appearing in Jungle-3
‘A Revive’ graphical prompt no longer remains after Revive is successful in co-op
Choppers made slightly less deadly (fewer shots, slightly less damage per shot)
Aliens now shoot lasers with correct sfx (easier to spot them!)
Flamer enemies in Killionaire much less annoying (shorter range, shorter view distance)
Yatcha boss fight made more balanced/fair, with fewer Hunters and more goons
Fixed ghost and zombie champion health issues, they’re now set up correctly (too easy before!)
Zombies now flip to face the direction they’re moving in
Zombie shaders fixed, no more white outlines.
Memory improvements with pathfinders, speeding up the game’s performance
Improved performance for all game pawns
Improved pathfinder performance
Pathfinder node sizes fixed, speeding up the game’s performance
Updated
Updated Ghoul Squad Level music
Updated Ghoul Squad Boss music
Updated Running Man Boss music
Updated all enemies so they have score values
Changed values so the Ghoul Squad-3 is a zombie horde level. Quite a different feel, tons of bad guys over time, very fun!
Bionic Cop made slower, uses his stamina faster. Tanking him up for more distinction between the player characters
Amended Zombie melee and touch damage so they deals lightly more now
Well, not bad for a couple week’s work!
What are we up to next? I’m glad you asked, and I did tease about the AI. Well, our next focus is on getting the enemies to be smarter, more fun to play against, and more exciting in their range of behaviours. We’re aware of some bugs preventing that from happening, but while we’re rummaging around in there we’ll take the opportunity to add a few neat ideas we’ve had over the game’s development too. Watch this space!
Toodles for noodles!
The Spilt Milk team
DEV DIARY - Oops, no update...
...D'you think we're f****** stupid, Hans?
This week we've been hard at work adding baddies to boss fights, attending the Loading Bar's 5th birthday party (we share the same birth-month!) and also a sneak peek at a LOT of zombies in Tango...
Here's this week's video diary to see for yourself what we've been up to:
https://youtu.be/_92lLBhpgjA
...we’ve not put a public update up on Steam though, as we spotted some pretty nasty framerate drops during the game’s demo-ing at Loading Bar, so we want to fix that before we get the latest build out to the paying public!
We also added some playable characters based on Loading bar’s staff, combined with famous action heroes. We think they went down well!
We’ll most likely leave them in once we launch the Steam Workshop feature... I think they’re rather ace! From top to bottom we’ve got Alice Ripley, Lucy 2000, Jack Burtom and Jimmy McDance
But yeah, all of this is a good illustration of why we like go to so many events - they’re a great test outside of the relatively closed and calm environment we’re used to as devs. Not only did we spot unexpected bugs we want to fix before they land on you guys and gals, but we got to test out functionality (the Steam Workshop character stuff) more thoroughly, while having a bit of fun doing it.
Till next week! Toodles!
Update 28 - Score one for the good guys!
“We don’t make things complicated. That’s the way they get, all by themselves.”
We’ve been working hard on so much stuff it’s hard to keep track of. This one’s gonna be a doozy! We’re keen to try and stay regular, but I doubt we’ll be doing weekly updates. Fortnightly seems much more sensible. We get to really wrap features up, and you get better quality each time we update. Of course we’ll respond swiftly to really nasty bugs we find, but other than that, you get what we mean.
So the biggest single change is our new HUD! Check it out...
Check out all of the new stuff!
We’ve got:
Hit Flash: The player portrait flashes red every time you’re hit now, which we find, out of the corner of your eye, really helps communicate better when you’re taking damage.
Ammo Counter: Obviously every hero needs to know how much ammo he’s got left in his equipped gun!
Equipped Weapon Indicator: And what hero would be able to perform his heroic duties if he couldn’t tell what gun he’d got equipped in the first place?
Grenade Counter: If you’re going to throw high explosives around, it’s always good to know how many throws you’ve got left to take out that coconut stand.
Cash Counter: It’s all about the money, innit.
Combo Counter: Combos you say? Hell yeah, more details below...
Score Counter: We’ve now broken down the score you’re registering with each kill, and display it under your hud
Damage-taken-indication: Your health bar now only looks nicer, we’ve taken the liberty of showing you, on each hit, how much damage you just took. Makes it easier to learn which enemies to try harder to kill! It displays in yellow, and fades after a second or two. You know the drill.
Low Health Indication: Your character’s portrait will pulse red continuously when your health is less than 33%. Bit of a reference to Zelda, but without the annoying chime noise.
Stamina Indicator: Essentially unchanged, but nicer looking.
New Portrait Art: Way nicer looking than before! It’s in there for every character.
So, as promised above, here’s the lowdown on our new scoring & combo system!
Hot pink score popups were a no-brainer.
You’ve always been given scores for kills, but now we’re improving the system.
If you kill a bad guy, the game registers that, and if you kill two more before a three second timer has elapsed, and you’ll add one to the multiplier, and all subsequent kills will be worth double (or triple, or even more). The game counts down that timer, and at zero seconds the multiplier is reset.
You can stop that happening by registering another kill (which resets it to three seconds of course), but you can also pause the countdown briefly by registering damage on both enemies and terrain.
Basically we want to capture more of that 80’s action hero essence. We all know how freely they give out their bullets, and how much they revel in wanton destruction - so to encourage people to keep their fingers on the trigger no matter what, this fun solution was designed and implemented.
Here’s the thing - the highest we’ve been able to get is Combo x6. See if you can do better! Protip: try juggling damage on Champions with kills on lesser enemies while you whittle their health down.
Note: some bad guys aren’t given a value yet as we’re still balancing, but we wanted to get his out to you sooner rather than later, and see the leaderboards hot up with some action! I don’t think any of the Ghost or Zombies have scores associated, nor do Radio Guys and Heavy Guys. You’ve been warned ;)
So those are the big additions since the last update, but here’s the full list for your delectation!
CHANGELIST!
Added
Combo system.
Scoring system with Hot Pink score popups.
New HUD for all characters and player slots.
Damage flash now applied to HUD portrait when player takes damage.
HUD portrait pulses red if player is at less than 33% health.
Players can now bind all extra controllers (up to 4).
New Input Controller system means Local Co-op players can now hotswap controllers, disconnect, reconnect and connect while the game is running, and the game will be fine with that.
Crosshair added to mouse pointer for keyboard and mouse players. Turns red & shakes when firing, stops shaking when you’re out of ammo/need to reload.
Brand new pause menu, much nicer, simpler to navigate, and gives access to controls screen too.
Fixed
Fixed multiple player controls.
Fixed Yatcha movement sound playing after her death.
Fixed input binding systems in settings - you can no longer bind a gamepad if it is not connected.
Players should be able to interact with every single screen and every single function with pad, keyboard or mouse, alone or in any combination.
Password entry refreshing the lobby when R key is pressed.
Fixed bug where you could bypass a password game entry by double clicking on a game.
Updated
Updated the join-in-progress character stat panels to be localisation-proof. Icons instead of text for Health, Speed, Accuracy & Stamina.
When joining into single player or local co-op, game now auto-joins whichever input was detected to send game into that menu.
We’ve added a big, chunky and way cooler new boss health bar to all boss fights.
Tree death sfx changed to be less explosion-y.
Finally, following on from the last update, here’s an expanded look at the almost-full-cast of Tango Fiesta. We’ve vastly improved the story in Tango this week - mainly by allowing players to skip straight to the action (ie: ignoring the story if they want) and also with a new command that allows us to edit the delivery of the story with a bit more intent making it snappier, funnier and generally a bit more smooth. Alas, it is still ‘off’ for Early Access and likely will be till full release, but I like to show what we’ve been doing from all angles.
Nearly all of our colourful cast, both friend and foe!
What are we up to next? Well, we’re continuing to improve performance - we know some people will see some framerate hits with this update, and we’re working on finding out the solution - but we’re also going to be improving the AI, the Shop, and the Boss Fights over the coming days and weeks.
Don’t expect an update next week, though, as GDC is on and frankly our coder is in San Francisco networking and doing business stuff. plus this way we get to save up for another bigger update next time!
Ta-ra for now, chucks!
The Spilt Milk team
Update #27 - Big List in Little China
We’re back! It’s been a long, slow 4 or 5 weeks since the last update. We had a great time in the rollercoaster of sales that is the Humble Bundle last month - thank you so much to everyone who spent any money in there, it went to some great causes - but we have to keep on making Tango Fiesta better and better because, well, nobody else is going to are they?
We've taken so long because we’ve had to focus a LOT on localisation and Steam Workshop Support. Neither of which are in this update. Well they are, but they’re switched off cos they’re not 10% ready yet. That’s the bad news.
The good news is we’ve also been spending the time fixing lots of annoying bugs, performance issues and all kinds of issues with the game, so with any luck it should be obvious how much better it plays.
This should mark our return to slightly more regular public updates too, all the way up until we go ‘gold’!
MOST - but not all - of the characters you’ll meet while playing Tango’s story mode!
CHANGELIST!
Added
- Touch damage: now all enemies (other than bosses) do damage to the player on touch.
- Weapons graphics finalised and updated for all guns, characters & situations.
- 1-off rooms added. If placed by the system, this room will be removed from the pool of place-able rooms for the next 3 levels.
Fixed
- Let Off Some Steam now uses the correct number of enemies to assign to ActiveEnemyCount
- Improved Recycling checks on dead/recycled enemies
- Fixed major inter-world lag issue once going through weapon select
- Fixed Helicopters not attacking you
- Mission results labels now respond to mouse click
- Fixed bug in CameraScroller which was crashing the game if there was a chopper in x-3, you completed a boss fight, then loaded y-1 with no choppers
- Fixed bug where bushes would be destroyed but not disappear
- Environment sounds stop on mission results
- You can now purchase weapons with keyboard controls
- Fixed Cancel button bug in character select
- Fixed a bunch of audio errors
- Fixed weapon and impact knockback (now all impacts go in correct -direction)
- Fixed teleport bug in pause menu
- Pickups no longer time-dilate when game is paused
- Rigid-body physics removed from enemies on death to prevent post mortem movement
- Fixed guttering in Host Game and Lobby
- Optimised achievement saving calls
- Bullets now have their renderer turned on by default when being re-used -
- Fixed parachute displaying in front of player characters on spawn
- Fixed parachute being displayed on the ground at the player spawn location during subsequent missions
- Fixed Chopper objective Hovering Audio persisting between game sessions.
- Fixed General Payne noy dying/moving
- Fixed Randomisation of Stalkers in Killionaire boss fight
- Fixed Old Ramishar's health phase issues
- Fix for not being killed by boss during Ramishar boss fight
- Fixed the games front end logo sheen animation
Updated
- Moved Shutdown savefile routine to before the SteamSDK gets shut down
- Performance updates with Interval Manager
- Performance updates with the pathfinding
- Performance updates with Old Ramishar boss fight
- Reduced spawn radius for choppers
- Optimised location find for valid spawn points
- Updated Running Man boss music
- Updated Commando boss music
- Updated Commando level music layers
- Added pooling for Death Hits, reducing performance overhead
- When breaking out of intro splash, it remains on splash instead of going to main menu
- Yatcha Queen has slightly less health
- Killionaire’s mini flamers have their lifespan reduced (shorter range)
- Killionaire’s chainsaw guys are now slightly slower
- Player shadow now darker
- Neutron Napsack doing 3x the previous damage
- Sped up Yatcha Queen between phases
- Updated parachute graphic
- Changed the area which you can initiate a ‘hack’ to all around the Radio Mast
- Changed ‘reloading’ prompt to display only when the player is reloading.
- Reduced Jungle-1 objectives on first playthrough to 1 radio tower and 1 spawn hut
- Bullet Pooling now keeps performance way better
- Trees in Island health reduced to 150 to match those in Jungles.
Like I said at the top, this list isn’t comprehensive - it’s not a school report of everything we’ve been doing - but rather this is what you’ll be able to see reflected in the latest update. Rest assured that all of our work on localisation, story mode, character portraits and of course the Steam Workshop support that’ll allow you to create, share and play with your own heroes (for the love of all that is Arnie I can't wait to see what you guys and gals come up with) will all be coming down the line very soon!
Reassuringly back and productively yours,
The Spilt Milk team
UPDATE 26 - Humble Bundle Heroes!
We’re in the Humble Weekly Bundle!
We’ve taken this opportunity to upload some fixes, mainly to the online play. We don’t want all the new players to get annoyed at bugs and stuff, so even though obviously we’re still in Early Access, we’ve been trying to make a good impression.
We’re hopefully going to get another update with more bug fixes and polish next week, but who knows. not a promise, just a statement of intent :D
Without further ado, here are some lovely bits of art to make everyone want to play our game more!
Alternative poster!
John Strong, Miller & bionic Cop going commando in Operation Sea Shell!
John Strong - the only predator worth worrying about in Jungle!
Conchita kicking ass and proving her innocence in Who Wants To Be A Killionaire!
John Strong busting some ghosts in Ghoul Squad!
CHANGELIST!
Fixed
- ‘Press R to refresh’ prompt now back in the Server Browser for clients
- massive optimisation on performance/framerate, involving some culling of tiles and fewer enemy spawn attempts per second
- online play not a lot more reliable
- host players now able to properly (and more reliably) name and set up games
If you’ve read this far, here’s a fun little glimpse behind the curtain...
You know we’re serious about Early Access when we proudly share brand new bugs like this! Some kind of holiday location seems to generate when Jungle and Island worlds cross their streams...
Humbly, bundly yours,
The Spilt Milk team
UPDATE 25 - A CHRISTMAS PRESENT! AN ACTUAL UPDATE!
YES!
We've uploaded a new version of Tango Fiesta to Steam, and rather than all the usual rubbish I blather here, I'll cut to the chase:
- TONS of improvements across the board
- a few new bugs
- MAC VERSION SHOULD WORK GREAT NOW
- the end
See you after all the festivities!
Oh alright, for those of you who really care, here's the (nearly) full changelog! :D
Added
- Core achievements added, unlocks to be implemented
- localisation added for Russian, English, French and German (functionality to be unlocked)
- Credits added to the Settings menu
- Workshop functionality implemented, no front end yet, functionality currently hidden.
- New Bionic Cop world, currently locked.
- Added greater functionality to props, including new properties
- New animation system for props added
- Huge number of new prop and sprite animations added to every level
- 20 new rooms added to level gen for Coastal
- 6 new rooms added to level gen for Ghoul Squad
Fixed
- Mac build should now progress past Character Select Menu
- objective placement with level generation reoptomised and ensured that there is always an objective
- Fixed problem with room placement event weightings
- Fixed issues with text resizing
- Fixed issues with the game completing a mission before starting, if controls are pressed during the loading screen.
Updated
- Updates to all music tracks
- Big update to a large number of sound effects
- New sound effects for a lot of interactions (bullets hitting wood, concrete etc). All very work in progress.
- Optimised room placement collision algorithm.
- Big art update on a number of sprites and menu ui
- General optimisation on game play flow.
Merry Christmas!
NOT UPDATE 2: SEASONS GREETINGS
"Ho ho ho, now I have a machinegun." Such words are only utterd on specials occasions, and this week we have every right to invoke them.
It's the Winter Sale and Tango Fiesta is 50% off! Tell your friends, buy them a copy, whatever it takes to get them joining in the fun!
On a serious note, today we're not doing an update (again, I know, we're really sorry!), but we're planning on doing one as soon as we can between now and the holidays. Obviously we're going to work very hard on Tango right up to xmas, but we want to give the gift of a good stable fun update before the big day.
Aside from that, I'm here to show you what we've been up to recently - hard at work on localisation, achievement implementation and... Steam Workshop support!
We've been building the tech needed for you to create your own Heroes to play through Tango Fiesta as... and I can't wait to see what you guys and gals come up with!
During testing, our coder came up with this... thing below. But it proves it works! A brand new character skin based on John Strong that looks awfully like a sunglasses-wearing robot sent from the future to repvent the past...
The basic aim is to let you pick one of the existing characters, save their skin out, write over it, and then reimport them and share them via Steam Workshop. The character you choose will define their stats and how they play, as well as their size - Conchita and Dr Henk are on smaller rigs than Bionic Cop, for example.
I have to say again it's going to be really exciting getting to see what wonderful creations - both 80's inspired and original - that you come up with, and we'll hopefully be sure to spread the word about the best ones! It's planned for launch, but we'll be testing it soon so if you want to help us out, let us know.
But that's not all. Amongst all this cool techy stuff, we've also been hard at work making sure the game looks as good as possible - and to that end we've added animated props to every world in the game. The motion adds a ton to the experience - the levels feel alive now - and I can't wait to see what you lot think of it... so here's a few peeks in the meantime:
Nice huh? Glad you agree ;)
And finally, we've added a new team member to the squad!
His name's Danny Gallagher, he's a very talented programmer, and he's going to help us in the final stretch (read: January) to get Tango Fiesta as bug free and polished as possible, as well as looking after the Mac version. Say hello everyone!
I'll say it again before I sign off - I'm very hopeful that before you know it we'll have a chunky update for you all to play!
Keep 'em crossed, and keep 'em peeled... and if anyone ever tells you to watch Hell Comes to Frogtown like we did at our Xmas party, don't. It's not a classic 8's movies, it's just a bit crap.
Speaking of our xmas party, here's what went down in video form!
http://youtu.be/fybzEwXhgC4
Until next time, have a great Steam Winter Sale!
NOT UPDATE AGAIN
Who is your daddy and what does he do? Well, if he's in games production, he'd do us a favour by making localisation and the like way quicker... but as predicted last week, this week is not an update-friendly week.
We are ABSOLUTELY working hard on the game but it's still stuff like SFX hookup, Localisation implementation and that sort of thing. Sadly, time constraints mean we've not been able to spread this work out over the course of more interesting content updates, so that kinda means if we updated, you guys would have a broken, un-fun game to play. You'll have to take our word on this.
That said, regardless, you probably feel like this:
...and rightly so.
Therefore we decided that it'd be fun to see if anyone can guess any of the references or criteria in any of our upcoming 20 Achievements, seen below. Basically if you can't get any new content in your Early Access game this week, then we can at least show you part of what we've been working hard on, and make a game of it, and have it all tied in to Tango Fiesta and the wonderful world of 80's action movies:
I'll give you a hint: 01 is the most popular Arnie quote... but what you have to do to get it and what movie it is from is the question...
...so until next week - when I'm hopeful we'll get some updates out to you for playing and funtimes - keep an eye on our twitter page for daily (and sometimes hourly!) updates!
Peace and love (and manly explosions)!
UPDATE 24.75 - THE BLACKEST FRIDAY
An bit of a grovelling apology here. We’re not doing an update AGAIN and I can only scrabble at your feet and lick your boots in abject shame. The thing is ...lots of small issues and big jobs have basically teamed up and combo’d us into a weird state. I go into a lot more detail in the usual dev diary below, but the short version is - we’ve been making such sweeping changes to so many systems that we’d actually be making the game a little LESS fun to play for you if we released the planned update.
http://youtu.be/0UrT_b2x3tc
Things like placeholder sfx being introduced in wide swathes, localisation jumping up the priority list and tons of balance tweaks that are in progress (and therefore not satisfactorily... tweaked) mean we just can’t face the idea of letting you lovely lot down with a sub-par update at this stage. It’s just not fair when you’ve paid for the game.
As per usual, hopefully the following glimpses of what we’re working on for the Bionic Cop update go some way to reassure you that we’re working as hard as we can, and also satisfying some of your curiosity as to what the final World in Tango Fiesta will look like.
Gamesmaster, I’m having trouble on level 5-1 of Tango Fiesta...
Futuristic Private Security Choppers don’t care about your really expensive server farms!
Go ahead punk, make my day...
Sorry to say we’re not 100% sure if our next update will be next weekend - with our coder away in Canada for the duration of the week, we’ll still be getting lots done but I can’t promise how much. TO that end I’d rather be cautious and say expect another screenshot-and-dev-diary-heavy update next week… but if we manage it we’ll try to surprise ya’ll with some real gameplay and content too!
See you all next week!
UPDATE 24.5 - INSOMNIAC
Hello all!
An incredibly brief note to say sorry, but we're not going to drop our patch today. We're hoping to do so very shortly on the other side of the weekend, but we're away at the Insomnia 53 festival showing Tango Fiesta to the public. Probably should've mentioned it sooner! It kinda crept up on us (ok, on me - Andrew S) so I can only say we just weren't really prepared for how it'd affect our update process.
As a sorry, here are a bunch of pics of stuff for you to see what we've been working on, presented with little-to-no waffle, as slight amends for the disappointment. Know this; we've made tons of great progress and the next patch will be bumper in both size and effect on how much fun the game is right now. Promise.
What kind of evil corpooration would do this to a human brain? And for what dastardly reason?
The rogue's gallery (at least part of it) for Bionic Cop!
A so-early-Ewan-will-probably-kill-me peek at our Bionic Cop Boss!
Some of the WIP level design going into Bionic Cop. Derelict! But science-y
Well that's yer lot - so sorry but I simply must sign off and get back to showing the game to all the wonderful folk at Insomnia in Coventry. See:
Aren't they great! they're loving it, but you'll have to take my word for it :D
