v1.1 - Free Christmas update! New rooms! Trading Cards!
6th December
Hey everyone! As a big thank you to all our fans we’ve been spending after hours time, when we can, on getting a small free update for Unseen Diplomacy for you.
Unseen Diplomacy has become a bit of a cult hit with it’s use of Environmental Redirection, one-to-one movement, and a true room scale experience. Hopefully these changes will help those who like to demo the games to others, and has new gameplay ideas we wanted to try.
We have been listening! There’s only so much we can do without extra budget and with the odd hour away from other projects - and features like auto-scaling to playspaces requires a complete re-write. We’ve managed to do a few changes though, and added a little more content.
So what’s changed?
Two new rooms! We won’t spoil what they are, but one of them is a new ending!
‘Restricted Movement Mode’ has been renamed, as this was confusing players. Now just named ‘Allowed Crawling’. If you didn’t know already, this turns off the crawling areas and changes the levels slightly for disabled users or for people who just don’t want to crawl.
Bigger celebration if you complete your mission successfully
Monitors and TVs can now be switched on and smashed
Stools have much better collision and can be picked up
Moved the switch in the third room, due to player requests!
You now get a mission briefing before you start so you know what your goal is.
Improved physics materials added to movable items for slightly better collisions
Fixed incorrect laser warning sound effect
Steam Trading Cards!
We hope you enjoy the changes! Please leave us feedback in the Unseen Diplomacy forums on Steam. Remember the readme!
We've also been play testing a couple of brand new rooms at KernowDAT (in Cornwall, UK), and EGX 2016 (Birmingham, UK). They need some tweaking and fixing before they go up on Steam, but hopefully we will get in when we are happy with how they play test. Keep an eye out for us at events, and updates in the future.
We are actively looking for funding! We are still having to work 'after hours' on the project (which are few and far between). So if you know of anyone that you believe may be interested, send them our way.
Thanks for all your support!
A Thanks, And The Future!
First of all, and most importantly, we want to say a big thank you to our fans and friends. The feedback and warmth we have had from this community has been brilliant, and totally unexpected.
As many of you know, we created Unseen Diplomacy as a small experience game, to demonstrate the power of VR and show off what room scale volume tracking, for an event in Nottingham called GameCity. We were really worried about releasing it as it was only supposed to be a short game (because otherwise there would have been long queues to play!), there wasn’t what we would call a full game loop (things like achievements, story, or reasons to keep coming back), and the huge room space requirement.
But as a community you still have welcomed the game, and we’ve even seen many of you defending us and our decision to release it - pointing out to new players the history of the game. We really appreciate that!
We have been listening, planning, and looking ideas we didn’t get to implement for last October's GameCity. We want to keep updating and growing Unseen Diplomacy - we’re just looking at how we can.
From our side, there’s just the two of us full time! We have been working on another title, Smash Hit Plunder, for over a year and have to focus our efforts on that. However, we are looking at hiring new staff (if you are a VR Unity game developer, please get in touch!), and are looking how we can get some funding coming in so we can hire more permanent team or work with some external contractors to help grow Unseen Diplomacy.
So we’re waiting to hear back from Vive X, and just heard Valve may be offering funds, we’re talking with some teams with how we can work together to make Unseen Diplomacy bigger. For now, we’re working after hours on the project, and have already made some interesting breakthroughs.
From the game’s perspective, we have some prototypes with room scaling (still a lot of work to do!), have a giant list of room and interaction ideas, still have lots of alternate start and endings ideas, and a big list of improvements to user experience - things like the ending being hard to understand, and explaining what restricted movement option actually does.
As for hardware support - even though we have Touch, we are still only working on Vive for Unseen Diplomacy. The Vive is the only device at the moment that can track the full height and volume of the room space we need, and the design of the Touch controllers means that you cannot crawl with them (darn that loop!). We don’t want to compromise the physical nature and design of the game trying to support other hardware. I don’t believe that there is anything that can stop players from trying Touch, but see this as a warning as we don’t want you to be breaking your Oculus hardware trying to play Unseen Diplomacy! For future games we will always design the game for capabilities of the hardware we plan to launch it on, so to offer the best experience for that platform.
v1.0.2 Patch - Streaming mode & unlimited time mode
We've just updated the game to allow the raw video feed from the kit to be seen, and for the game to be played without a timer.
Super Secret Streamer View
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If you hit 'ctrl' while the game is running you can toggle between the main observation view and a raw headset view. Useful if you're a streamer trying to capture raw gameplay footage!
Secret Hidden Menu
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If you hit 'tab' you can toggle between the observation view and the name entry screen. Here you can enter the next person's name and start the game for them - this is great for demoing for VR-newbies!
The game can be played in a timed mode - tick the 'Time Limit' box and players will get 3 minutes of play before the end lift appears! Move quickly to see more rooms and get a higher score!
Patch Notes
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* Added Streamer View on Ctrl key press
* Added 'unlimited time' and moved 'timed mode' to setup menu on 'Tab'
* Fixed a bug when you tried to pick up an object with two hands