We at UpperRoom Games have collaborated with European Speedrunners Assembly to take part in their upcoming event ‘ESA Corona Relief’ to help raise money for the Save the Children Coronavirus Emergency Appeal.
We will be running a challenge event alongside the main event and for every successful participant, we will be donating to the Save the Children Coronavirus Emergency Appeal.
The #WaveyDash event is a speedrun challenge and works as follows:
- Start a new game and start your timer! - Without using Gems to skip levels, run the campaign levels as quickly as you can and unlock the Tombs - door at the end of the Stellar theme zone (past level 27) - Record a video of your run or stream it on twitch - Submit your run to https://www.speedrun.com/wavey_the_rocket#WaveyDash - If your run is under 60 minutes we donate $10 - For every 20 successful runs submitted we donate an extra $50
And that's it!
We hope you enjoy taking part in our challenge and help us in raising money for charity!
The ESA charity event runs from 28 May - 31 May and we encourage all of you who love fast and skillful gameplay to check it out now on Twitch!
If you want to keep up with runs, or have your run highlighted on our social channels, make sure to check out our Twitter for more!
That's all from us, best of luck riding those waves!
The UpperRoom Games team.
Wavey The Rockets Soundtrack is Out Now!
Hello Wavey Fans!
Today we bring some exciting news!
If you’ve been playing Wavey The Rocket on Steam, you would have heard the incredible soundtrack playing underneath your 109th restart of Tombs and thought “I wonder if I’ll ever be able to buy that soundtrack, it’s great!”
Well, today you can!
Wavey The Rocket's Soundtrack is now available on Steam, with 25 tracks of huge bass, smooth riffs, and head-bopping songs all created by Thomas O’Boyle.
We have here for you all, another small patch, this time addressing some bugs as well as some gameplay tweaks and feedback tweaks. We are always striving to make the game better so please let us know if you have any issues or feedback for future patches!
Patch 1.0.2 notes: - Adjustment to whirl pickup radius & pickup pull reach when fins are clipped - Adjustment to the fin colliders' size on wavey - Replaced Waveys collider with a more accurate and symmetrical collider - Adjustment to colliders on switches in Arcade and Evil2 HQ
- Reskin grandmaster keys as giant whirls on map nodes - Add giant whirls to the top of the grandmaster doors to show which you have for that door - Move NPC from Sewers to Streets Grandmaster door and changed the dialogue - Removed Warchild signs as that event has ended. - Put up new ESA signs for the new #WaveyDash speedrun event
- Change to default controller sensitivity settings (from 1 to 1.75 for more fine control) - Shuffling of songs used in Level 1, 2 and 6 - Small rebalancing to sound effects volumes - Minor icon updates
- Fixed bug where if you exited a level from pause while burning, the burning effect carried through to other levels - Fixed bug on Mr. Pinchy where his eyes would sometimes not come out to vulnerable state - Fixed bug where spamming to quit cutscene would result in loading multiple map instances, causing various bugs - Fixed bug where gem HUD in levels can display which gems have been collected incorrectly
Wavey The Rocket - Patch Notes 1.0.1
Hello Wavey Fans!
Thanks to everyone who has played Wavey the Rocket during its launch weekend! Its been incredible for us to see the community finally get their hands on the game, we put our all into the release but it doesn't stop there.
We aim to provide a great experience for everyone and so without further adieu, here's our first game patch, complete with bug fixes, tweaks and improvements.
We hope this improves your experience!
Patch 1.0.1
UI & Menus: - Updated bonus score screen UI to display grade and removed some of the unnecessary 0's from the score value - Update to layout of score screens for levels and bonus levels - Fixed bug in save slot select where selecting a slot then quickly pressing the option button would result in always loading save slot 1 - Fixed bug in score screen UI where clicking leaderboards then retry resulted in a hidden recomplete of the level with extremely fast completion time - existing times submitted as a result of this bug will be removed, we are very sorry for damaging your run's leaderboard submissions! - Fixed bug in score screen UI where clicking leaderboards then continue would cause leaderboards ui to carry over load and into map, resulting in broken UI flow - Fixed bug in map and level pause menus where you could click options then resume/restart and the game would unpause in the background which could lead to other bugs Hub World: - Fixed bonus level nodes grade boards - corrected grade letter placement and fixed bug in 'bar fill' display - Fixed soft lock when pausing game and entering npc chat at the same time - Fixed bug where entering a map node and quickly exiting back out would cause a soft lock with wrong UI showing - Corrected some minor spelling mistakes in character dialogue
General: - Collision/Physics efficiency improvements to - end level valves, end level portal pull detection, end level tank - Removed ability for 'glitched speedrun times' to be entered into the leaderboard should they arise - Updates to S-Rank grade boundaries for bonus levels - Reduced default graphics settings to make the game more playable for more people out of the box - all options still available in video options menu
Level 6 - Chasin' Daze: - Difficulty tweak - change to playspace and added dashes
Level 11 - Industrial2: - Difficulty tweak - change to playspace and whirl placement
Level 14 - One Sided: - Difficulty tweak - change to playspace
Level 17 - Boom Swing - Fixed issue where broken ship particle effects show up on retry from end of level
Level 33 - Block Party - Difficulty tweak - change to playspace and added a checkpoint
Darkside: - Fixed bug where camera pans back down the level when smashing the end level tank
Known Issues: - Potential issues with using DS4Windows application for use of DualShock 4 controller
Wavey The Rocket is out now!
Well HERE WE ARE!
We can’t believe these words are finally being said, but Wavey The Rocket is now available on Steam!
It’s been a super long road to get here, from Game Jam ideas to working remotely on each individual part of the game, the teams have been hard at work for a long time and now it’s available for everyone! It’s quite crazy to see a buy button on Steam for it!
There’s 15% off for one week (7th May to 14th May) as a little incentive for you to pick it up and check it out! If you do, please let us know on Twitter or Facebook and please leave a review in Steam, it really helps us reach more people who may not know about our little sentient Rocket!
We’ll be coming back here a lot in the coming months so should you find a pesky bug, please let us know and we’ll do our best to squash it, we’re only a small team and sometimes they’re so small they slip our extremely tight net!
Let us know your thoughts below, and have fun! UpperRoom Games (Rob, Danny, Torq and Martyn)
Dev Diary 3 - Old idea, New IP!
Hello Wavey Fans!
I’m Danny, the artist at UpperRoom Games, and to start this post off I’d like to sing (digitally) some words at you, to get you in the mood for what’s to come.
It goes like this; “If I could turn back time” and a bit of it goes “If I could reach for the stars”. It’s a Cher song, and this post is all going to be about taking a look in the past at old Wavey assets, and how they look now!
So we’ll start with the star of the show, Wavey himself! Wavey has always been a rocket, so when we started making the game, we knew pretty much how we wanted him to look. Here’s a throwback to some of the first designs behind the soda loving rocket:
And here he is now, all grown up:
Naturally over the course of time we’ve been working on the game, we’ve adjusted, changed, removed and added all sorts to our levels too, here’s a level we worked on when we were protyping:
And here’s that very same level, shiny, sparkly, neon lit in all its glory:
That’s all we’ve got time for today, but to end where we began, here’s Wavey featuring a very Cher like hair-cut.
If you want to check us out on Twitter, head to - Twitter Or maybe you’re a Facebook user, so fly over to - Facebook
As always, thank you for taking the time to read, and please hit Wishlist! Danny at UpperRoom Games
You Play, We Pay! A special announcement from UpperRoom Games and War Child UK
Hello everyone 🚀
We come here today with a very special announcement!
We’re super proud and humbled to reveal that today, we’ve partnered with War Child UK for a very special charity event, that begins the MINUTE someone pushes the “release my game” button on Steam! Sadly you can’t see that button, it’s a special hidden button for us, but we promise it’s huge and it’s green!
War Child UK support the world’s most vulnerable children who have been caught up in conflict, it’s a wonderful charity, and here’s how you can help!
It’s simple, you play, we pay! That’s it!
Okay here’s a bit more of an in-depth list as there are a couple of rules; - Click the lovely Wavey The Rocket wishlist button on Steam - When the game comes out, Steam will say “Hey this cool game is out!” - Whip over to the store when that happens, grab the game, but don’t boot it up yet! - Head over to Twitch, YouTube or Mixer, log-in, set your played game to Wavey The Rocket, and stream for ONE HOUR! - We donate £2 for every hour played to War Child UK!
That’s it, that’s the list!
You’ve got 72 hours to stream just one hour of the game, after that, we’ll tally all the hours played, and donate to War Child UK.
Never streamed before? That’s not a challenge here, all the sites are free to sign up to, and you might just have a great time playing and streaming to your friends, AND knowing that you’re generating cash for charity is a really cool feeling too!
Please share this news with your friends, your gaming buddies, your families, your pets, your personal wave-riding rad rockets, everyone!
“But Wavey, where do I FIND you” we hear you ask, well here’s a neat list; Twitter - @UpperRoomGames Facebook - Search UpperRoom Games
If you’ve got any questions, pop them in the comments below and we’ll do our best to respond where we can!
Thank you, and we look forward to sharing more ⭐soon⭐ UpperRoom Games & War Child UK
Dev Diary 2 - Makin' Moves!
Hello, I’m Rob, the programmer at UpperRoom Games, and today we're going to dive into exactly how Wavey moves in our debut release as an indie studio, Wavey The Rocket!
With Wavey we set out to make a platformer unlike any other. When looking at some of our favourite characters from the past, such as Crash Bandicoot, Sonic and Rayman, they all presented a similar core puzzle; how do I use run and jump to get through the level? While trying to come away from this quintessential platformer concept, we had an idea to move a character along a waveform that the player could shape. After some experimentation we arrived at a sine wave based movement that allows Wavey to weave through obstacles in a skillful and unique way!
This works through a combination of two motions; a vertical wave motion and a horizontal linear motion. The horizontal motion takes a set speed and maintains it. The player can adjust this maintained speed, including being able to go backwards!
The vertical wave motion never stops and has a consistent rate but the player can choose to grow or shrink the vertical distance of this movement (the wave amplitude). What's really interesting here, is how Wavey’s current position on the wave when it changes has a big effect on how much Wavey moves and the direction he moves in!
Being a stylish, yet simple rocket, does have its limitations. While Wavey has amazing fine movement control, he can only accelerate so fast and can only go so fast. A lot of our time in perfecting his movement was focused on setting these limitations to maintain challenge while feeling responsive.
His other key limitation is the fixed cycle duration of the wave. Understanding and utilizing this timing cycle adds a very high skill cap to his control. It becomes a focal element in reflexive play as well as puzzle solving as the game progresses. Players with the best grasp on this are the ones topping speedrun leaderboards!
Still hungry for more? Here’s a peek into the maths for those of you who love some number crunching. Wavey’s wave cycles once every 3.11 seconds. We output this wave as a normalised value (-1 to 1) and multiply it by the players current amplitude to grow or shrink the wave vertically from input. This movement is applied directly to the Wavey’s Y axis, along with a linear horizontal translation (speed over time) on his X axis. The wave is plotted as a prediction of his current trajectory by running these same equations but further forward in time.
As always, we can’t give out all the special details on exactly how it all works, but we’re extremely grateful you’ve taken the time to read this and check it out! You can Wishlist Wavey The Rocket now on Steam, or check us out on Twitter (@upperroomgames) or on Facebook (search UpperRoom Games!) for more info!
That’s it for now, thank you! Rob
Behind The Scenes Dev Diary 1!
Hello, I’m Rob, the programmer from UpperRoom Games, and I’m here to pull the curtain back a little on how we make levels in Wavey The Rocket, a game we’ve been making for a few years now.
To start, we decide which of the themes we want to make our new level in, so for this, I’m going to show you the Tombs theme and make a super short segment of a level. A theme in Wavey will dictate the obstacles used as well as the difficulty. We start the level by copying from a level template that contains the generic start and end for all levels. Usually Wavey spawns from a portal in a safe space at the far left of the level and travels right toward to finish.
We can quickly at this point make the level feel a bit more like our target theme by modifying the lighting and putting in a temporary background. Custom backgrounds are added at the end.
Now we’re “in” the level, we need some obstacles for Wavey to overcome, and in Wavey The Rocket these come in all shapes and sizes. Spikes, walls, traps, snakes, and rocket munching contraptions are just some of the objects we can play with!
Now we need to place a few collectables, some easy and some tricky, this gives the player a reason to take the route they’ll take. A player who likes more of a challenge might try for the Gem where as someone who wants to learn the level and come back later might take the easier route and opt for the Whirls. When designing a sequence of obstacles we think about how we want the player to move. We may want to force the player to go back on themselves, to speed up or to wait for an opportune time.
There’s a lot more that goes into making our levels, but we don’t want to give all the super juicy secrets away! We’ll be doing some more behind the scenes post, so make sure to come check them out, and if you want, you can even Wishlist our game on Steam!
Until next time! Rob from UpperRoom Games.
A Date For Take-off!
Hello Wavey Fans!
We’ve prepped the engines, fuelled Wavey up with his favourite soda, checked for clear skies and started the countdown!
Wavey The Rocket is coming to Steam on May 7th, 2020!
Over the coming months, we’ll be coming back here to show you behind the scenes footage, new trailers, and we’ll add any updates we might have, but until then remember to tell all your friends (including the intergalactic ones) about Wavey The Rocket, follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/UpperRoomGames or search UpperRoom Games on Facebook to come chat with us!
