Hey everyone! It's been a while. COVID-19 hit us right in the jobs and threw everything off for most of this year. Fortunately in the last few months we've been able to find new work and things are finally stabilizing a bit. We're grateful, especially because we know not everyone has been so fortunate. Over the holidays we had a bit of time to talk and plan and we've decided our best path forward right now is to focus on getting Thunder Rally fully stabilized and out of Early Access as soon as possible. This does mean there will be no online multiplayer added, however we have had great success using remote screen sharing software. We've had the smoothest experience with Parsec, plus it allows up to eight controllers.
Although we're not currently planning any big new features, we will be continuing to support Thunder Rally and addressing any problems that may arise. The love it has received from players far exceeded what we ever hoped for when we started work on it. We're grateful for your support, and we've loved seeing and engaging with people who love the game as much as we do.
Thank you for supporting us in this game development journey. -Typical Entertainment
Release notes:
Added four new levels.
Fixed xInput bug that disabled 8-player mode.
Various stability and bug fixes.
Early Access Update #1
Hey all! Incredible that it's been thirty-seven years already since we released on Early Access in early April. Life has been a little wild for us all, so this update isn't as big as we were aiming for, but we got some fun changes in related to the way a match can be customized. We've been enjoying the new team play feature even more than we had expected!
Release notes:
Major Changes
Added five new levels.
Added a setting for playing as teams in the pre-match settings menu. When enabled, players can pick the same color and will then be teamed up together. Be careful, there is friendly fire!
Added setting for disabling catapults in the pre-match settings menu.
Added setting for spawning as a car or a driver in the pre-match settings menu.
Super powerup crates can now be broken by drivers. When this happens, the car spawns with the super powerup enabled on it.
Minor Changes
Added tips to the loading screen.
Driver air control value turned up, making it much easier to get back onto the map after jumping out of a doomed car.
Drivers can now be controlled a little while stunned and rolling on the ground.
Mechs can now hit things when starting to punch in mid-air.
Super powerup crates are slightly easier to break with cars.
Cleaned up powerup icons.
Made a couple of the hardest levels a little bit easier.
Various minor graphical tweaks and adjustments.
Online multiplayer in the works!
Hey all! Sorry we've been radio silent for a while, we've been working busily on implementing online multiplayer into Thunder Rally, as it's something we've decided we really want to have in and working well at launch. We don't have much networking experience, so are learning a lot as we go, and we've been finding out that we picked one of the more difficult sorts of games to network. It's making us do some very low-level reworking of the game logic, but it should all be worth it in the end!
We've taken down the current demo as we start up a new phase of work. Thanks to everyone who played! If you tried it and have any feedback or questions we'd love to hear from you here, on Discord, or Twitter! We'll be posting more information soon on what all we've been up to lately.
https://discord.gg/ee8gPqx
https://twitter.com/Typical_Ent
Alpha v0.3.0 is now live! With bots!
We've added bots, a few new levels, the round-ending Black-Hole powerup, Steam controller support and other various bug fixes.
New Power Ups!
Join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/ee8gPqx
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Typical_Ent
Alpha v0.3.0 Release Notes:
-- Notes --
We've removed the two different play modes. XInput will default to enabled to support Steam controllers out of the box. This means, **if you want to play with more than 4 human players**, you'll need to go to the Settings menu and change 'Use XInput' to off. The game should remember how you had it set, so you don't have to change it every time you play. Just because we love you.
-- New Features --
- AI has been added! Press right trigger to add them on the Car Select screen.
- A new selection of levels and power-ups are in the game.
- Added a +1 score indicator over your car after you eliminate another player
-- Levels --
- Levels featuring new hazards
- Pool table
- Scrolling highway
- And a couple old but goodies.
-- Improvements --
- Various visual and functional improvements to the Car Select screen.
- Various VFX and lighting improvements
-- Bug Fixes --
- The game should no longer hang and crash on exit.
- DPad input should behave better regardless of XInput state.
- Made explosions affect missiles less.
- Fixed a bug where the 7th and 8th players to die would come back in a catapult over top of others.
-- Known Bugs --
- Scrolling Highway makes players/objects disappear once the level loops
- With Xinput enabled car color select (Left/Right) is opposite using Left Analog Stick
AI players coming soon!
Hey everyone! We've been busy hammering away on a lot of the less fun but just as important features like settings, UI systems, input options, that sort of stuff.
In more exciting news, we're also implementing AI players, so you'll never have to settle for only a 1v1 match again! The AI players can currently drive decently, bail out of cars if they're going to fly out of the arena, fight on foot very well, and are crack shots with the catapults. They're not great at using powerups or avoiding arena hazards. Yet.
Here they are duking it out in an 8-player AI battle royale:
*Sniff* They grow up so fast!
We're also working on lots of new levels and new hazards! More details to come.
Stay tuned for more news! We're aiming to be much more regular with our updates here.
Alpha v0.2.0 is out!
We've just released an update to our open alpha! Added two new maps, and a new powerup: the sticky bomb! Also lots of minor bug fixes and tweaks.
If you have some friends and controllers handy, please join us on Discord to get a key to test out local multiplayer in the current alpha: https://discord.gg/ee8gPqx
