Washed Up!
Earth Day 44% Discount!
Obviously cleaning up virtual beaches isn't as good as the real thing, but the thought still counts, right? 🙂🦀🌊
v1.2 : Local leaderboards, tweaked challenge scores, bugfixes
We've just pushed the 1.2 update to everyone, which among other things adds this requested feature: Local Leaderboards.
You now have the choice to not post scores to the public leaderboards, and instead just track your scores locally. This option is at the bottom of the "New Game" screen, and defaults to the current behaviour (public).
Even if you do post your scores publicly, this feature means you can see your best 10 local scores as well, with the date/time you achieved them, so you can see the spread. Was that high score a one-off, or did you get really close to it last week? Maybe next time you'll beat it? :)
Just cycle through the Filter on the high score page, which now has 3 options "Global", "Friends", and "Local".
The full changes list is below, we hope you enjoy the update, and thanks for playing!
Full Change List:
- Option to not post scores to public leaderboards
- Best 10 local scores with timestamps (via high score filter option)
- Fixed high score previews not being visible on New Game screen in 4K
- Try to always provide a "Challenge" score when playing publicly; if you have no friends with better scores, display the next score above from Global leaderboards
- Fixed a potential bug with interleaved scores from different filters if you flipped through the high score options too quickly
- First-time tutorial experience tweaks
v1.1 update : save games and more!
Save & Resume
Now when you bring up the in-game menu, there's a new option "Save and Exit", which does what you would expect!
Now you can come back to your game later; when you next choose Start Game from the main menu you can just resume where you left off. The only limitation is you can't save in the middle of a storm, or when you have a block currently picked up; resuming in the middle of those is jarring. Finish the storm or place the block, then you can save.
More music variety
We've mixed up the music selection a little to give more variety in each game mode; there are now double the number of tracks available in each mode.
Previously each game mode had its own dedicated track list, but since many people mostly play a single game mode, some nice tracks weren't getting into rotation.
There is now some overlap between modes so you get more variety, although some tracks are still reserved for certain modes; e.g. the chill-out tracks of Free Play don't really work for the frantic pace of Time Attack.
Other minor issues
- Improved error reporting & recovery of Steam connection problems
- Fixed a rare case of the first block visual being slightly out of alignment after game restart
- Fixed queued sound effects at the end of a game playing at the start of the next one
We hope you enjoy the update!
Hotfix 1.0.4.2 for in-game Steam overlay
Sincere apologies to anyone affected by this! It's fixed now.
Washed Up! is OUT NOW: 20% launch discount!
Get your fix of block-arranging fun with the added benefit of a 20% discount for launch week. Join the fight against pollution and help out your little crab friends now!
Release date set!
The Steam homepage has a new launch trailer and screenshots, which feature a bunch of the polishing we've been doing in recent weeks.
One of the things you might notice in the new trailer is a day/night cycle. Once you become good enough to play for longer, there's an extra sense of progression as you tend the beaches through the night. You might also notice new shadow effects, which make everything feel more grounded and also reflect the passage of time.
On top of that we've refined some of the art, and optimised things a bit more for older machines. There are a few more polishes we'll be adding in the next month , but we're basically there.
We're looking forward to launch, we hope you are too! Be sure to add us to your wishlist to be notified when we release.
Polishing, achievements, music, polishing!
We've spent a lot of the last month polishing - better in-game effects, redesigning some UI bits, making our title screen handle more aspect ratios, and so on. Art which was a work-in-progress is approaching final state - it means of course we'll have to re-do all the screenshots and the trailer again, but that's not a bad problem to have.
The game now has achievements (34 of them) and music (a title track, and 2-3 tracks per game mode), and we're really happy with it.
We feel like the final polishing will be done within a month, but due to a schedule clash around that time we're pushing the release date to October so that we can be sure we'll be fully available when we flick the switch. It means we narrowly miss the "Summer" target we hoped for, but at least this is a window we can be certain of, pending Steam officially giving us the green light.
Sooooon :)
Free Play Mode, wider beta
The beta process has gone really well so far and we've made a ton of refinements to the game over the last few weeks. Big thanks to all our beta testers! We're opening the beta to more people next week as we head into the final straight before release.
There are too many individual changes to mention since the beta started, but the headlines include:
- New no-pressure Free Play game mode (to go with Classic Mode and Time Attack)
- Completely reworked and extended tutorials
- Control system refinements to make everything feel better
- Enhanced pollution effects and mechanics
All in all we're really happy with the way things are going. The new set of beta testers next week will help us test the new user experience again after all these changes.
As for release, our target is still "Summer", which is intentionally vague :) We could release the game right now - we don't have any more major changes left to make, but we do have a bit more polishing we want to do first. It's our first game, and even though it's small and fairly simple, we want it to be as good as we can make it. We'll most likely fix a hard date in the next month, and then focus on talking to anyone who will listen about it ahead of that date!
Thanks again to our testers and everyone who has shown an interest in Washed Up!
And we're live!
Closed beta testing is going well, we've had lots of great feedback which we're busily working on. This, plus some additional polishing work which is left to do, means we're aiming for a "Summer" release.
That's a little vague, but the game is basically done and people seem to be having fun with it. The main things which are left are tweaking the difficulty for new players (all feedback has confirmed that the default difficulty is nails for new players - we'll keep the range for challenge but make the starting point lower down the scale), expanding the tutorial to be more direct guidance than hints, and polishing. We *may* sneak in another new game mode on top of Classic and Time Attack as well, but we'll see - that may be a post-release update.
Thanks for reading!