Release Date and Custom Levels Overhaul!
First, we want to start this with announcing the release date of the update!
It got a little bit delayed, but we are now confident it will be released on the 3rd of February.
We’ve been working hard on this one, and there are a ton of changes that will be described in the patch notes. We would be very happy if old players came back and gave it a spin. We are eager to hear all your feedback and will look to bring it with us for future projects and endeavors too. Take the chance to make your voice heard. We will most assuredly listen and take note.
Custom Levels: A complete overhaul!
This is a big one, and actually the cause of this whole update happening.
How it turned out this way is actually hard to tell if it's good, funny, or just bad development discipline! ;D
This whole update actually started out with me just feeling that the old Custom Levels menus were so hard and slow to use, so I just wanted to do 2 pretty small things to fix it up I thought.
I thought, just “adding thumbnails to all the menu entries”, and “making the list scroll freely instead of clicking a button to advance the list” would not be that hard to do, but it would be huge in terms of usability!
“It would probably be done in two weeks, even when considering I only have late evenings and weekends to work on it. “
- Naive Gafgar in late 2021.
This, we now know, is faaar from how long this actually took. Because once I started, one thing led to the other, and "just one more fix" after "just one more fix", led to this whole complete rework of the menu in the end (AND various other fixes and changes in the game).
I would call the menu unrecognizable!
The Old Menu / The New Menu
We now have a grid view, with more levels on screen at a time, and every level has various other useful information available right there. Like when it was updated, who made it, if you have played it, what rating you have given it, and more!
So before we get into any other sub menu here or other features. Let's just start with breaking down some extra info that can be seen on each button:
Here we can see the title changing color depending on some conditions:
Green = Played and cleared
Red = Played, not cleared, and rated it down
Blue = Not even opened the level details menu
White = Opened the details menu, but not played
Gray = Played the level, but not cleared and no rating
Below the title we can also see the date for when the level was updated, and furthermore, if the level has been updated since the last time you viewed it, the date will be displayed in yellow instead of this gray.
Tags, Filtering, Sorting
Another important feature, briefly mentioned before, that has been added are tags.
They can be viewed directly from hovering over a level in the menu:
But even more useful, is that they can be used for filtering.
In this menu, you can filter on various tags, and get descriptions for what each of them means.
You can also change how you want to have the levels sorted.
If you see any tags you feel are missing, just let us know! 😀
Getting and finding new levels
One other very important part is how you get new content and find suitable levels for you to play, which we have also greatly improved.
Here we can see various options available straight from within the game. There is no need to open the Steam Workshop page to manually subscribe to levels if you don’t want to.
One other nice feature added here is that we now have 3 lists of levels that we feel are great starting points for players who are just getting into playing custom levels, split into different difficulty categories.
( Notice, we have not 100% finished curating levels for the lists yet, but we can continue to do so even without updating the game. So expect these lists to be updated and changed around the launch of the game. We will also continue to evaluate new and updated levels for all the list as we go on. If you got a level you think would fit, don’t hesitate to let us know!)
Other Features
There are a bunch of other neat features that we’ve added for custom levels, but there is no time to cover them all here. I’ll just touch on a final one that I find really neat. Now, whenever you pause the game in a custom level, you get this pause menu:
What I want to bring attention to is this “Copy Position” button.
It will actually copy information about your current position and store it in your copy buffer on the PC as regular text. If you paste it, it will look something like this:
<:CBP:-3.598197,3.924311,-4.025054:0.024118,-0.038343,0.998974:79.999199:>This is actually quite big, when used with the other button right under it, where you can open the levels workshop page and leave comments to the creator. If you find something strange or have feedback about something special, you can just copy the position and give it to the creator along with the comment.
The creator can then take that text, copy it, and use a new feature in the level editor to instantly get transported to the place you copied! As a level creator, I feel like this little feature will be very very handy, and I hope you will all use it to leave constructive feedback about each others’ levels 🙂 Just remember to be respectful to each other!
Custom Level Skins
On one final note. I will be remiss if I didn’t mention our first ever custom levels related skins!
I won’t spoil how any of them look here, but we got 3 new skins related to playing custom levels, and another 2 related to creation.
That’s all for this time!
Next up, is the full release on the 3rd of February! We hope you are all looking forward to it!
Follow us on discord and twitter to get notified when it's posted and to stay in touch! 🙂
https://discord.gg/bumbn3Ep
https://twitter.com/coilworks
Thanks for reading!
