We interrupt our regularly scheduled lack of blog posts to announce that this Saturday (May 10th), we will be showing N++ at Bit Bazaar, so if you’re in Toronto you should come and check it out!
Bit Bazaar is a cool game/craft fair that is part of TCAF, and there will be a ton of cool stuff to check out (and, apparently, eat!) there. We will be selling some of the gorgeous N++ stationary that we’ve been posting about on tumblr, a gorgeous limited edition poster, and we have a bunch of free stickers, moo cards, and buttons to give away too. Stop by and say hi!
We’re really excited to see what people think of the current build of N++; it’s not done yet, but it’s getting there. Since our last blog post, we’ve been working on:
- Colours: one of the most fun new aspects of N++ is that you can change colour schemes. Our previous demo (which we showed at Bit Summit and GDC) only had about 4 different sets of colours; the current demo has about 10.
- Levels: our current level count has passed 1000! (It’s currently 1016) This will probably change as we edit things, and we’ll continue to make levels until the game is out (and beyond, for stuff like the weekly challenges and DLC) — we’re still learning how to best use all of the new entities, and it’s been really rewarding to see our level designs get better and better and better and better. Our current demo only shows about 500 of the levels — we didn’t want people to feel too overwhelmed, and also we’d like to save some surprises for the full version 😉
- Menus: the UI in N++ has been one of the most complex and time-consuming tasks… menus are hard! However, as Sportsfriends has recently shown, when you take care to make your menus special, it can really elevate the whole game. The current demo has a streamlined, minimal UI — we thought that a single screen would be more fun in a demo context than having to traverse a bunch of different menu screens — but the full version will have some pretty intricate and beautifully-animating UI.
- Multiplayer: Race and Deathmatch modes are being implemented and refined/iterated; we’re pretty excited about how they’ve turned out, we hope that Race especially will be worthy of serious competitive play. Of course there will be lots of options, so you can turn it into a silly party-game frenzy if you prefer 🙂
- Animation: the animations in the demo version are semi-placeholder — they look fine, however they’re not quite smooth enough, and all of the silly victory dances are missing. The dances in N++ are going to be even more awesome than ever before, because our friend Colin Mancer — who worked on Sound Shapes — is helping us make them. If you’ve ever wanted to see a ninja doing The Worm, N++ will be right up your alley!
We’ve also attended to the dozens of other things that small teams have to take care of: press releases, promo images, localization, etc. Basically, we’ve been busy… and we’re not quite done yet.
In the next few months we’ll have plenty more to show, including some new videos, and plenty more details to talk about, so stay tuned!
ps. New N bugfix build is coming very soon, stay tuned for that as well!
é uma pena eu não poder ir. estou muito ansioso por esse jogo a tempos, não vejo a hora de jogar. (primeiro tenho que comprar o PS4)
Excited to try it tomorrow! 😀
Why is this PS4 exclusive? I mean you have a big fanbase that centers around the PC version and the n2.0 was a flop. I think there would be a bunch of people buying the game for PC and it would certainly bring back the old glory days of the N community
@Meanapple: server stats show that N v2.0 was hardly a flop 🙂 About why N++ is coming to PS4, this has been asked and answered — you might want to start reading here: http://www.metanetsoftware.com/2013/the-road-to-n and continue here: http://www.metanetsoftware.com/2013/ps4-progress, including the comments.
With over 72k user maps in under a year, I don’t think v2.0 has been a flop Meanapple haha 😛
I do think the bugfix is needed to make it as solid as v1.4 though.
Regarding highscoring (speaking of the core levels), I agree its kinda quiet, but thats basically because the highscoring community overall is really small nowadays, v1.4 inclusive. I myself will probably come back to the highscoring scene when the bugfix is released, specially looking forward to being able to see your score when you die and/or don’t improve your current best, thats the main tool you have to gauge whether you are currently doing good or not. Cheatproof would rock as well, although as far as I can recall its not possible to implement, or something like that.
@Eddy: Good news! There’s a new build up today. Here are the changes (still working on that editor bug and other things, so there will be more builds soon, but in the meantime):
– A new dialog after speed runs and replays that shows the time calculation. You can rewatch a replay from this dialog.
– fixed a bug where achieving a personal best in any scenario where personal bests are not saved (coop, playing in episode mode, game running too slowly) would prevent you from submitting any personal best that didn’t beat the unsaved one without restarting the game.
Unfortunaly I live kind of on the other side of the planet..
Great to see you guys are making progress 🙂
Any idea of what the game will cost? Or maybe be free for Playstation+ users?
I’ll buy it anyway though haha
@M&R: That is some great news! In a month when I finish my exams I’ll try that build out 😉
Oh, by the way, there has appeared a new hacker, “roid”, I’m not sure how many hacked runs he has submitted but as far as I’ve seen, he has submitted impossible scores to all levels from 0-0 through 3-2 barring 2-3 and 2-4.
I have a little suggestion for the following build, which wouldn’t prevent hacking compltely but it would decrease it, I think. I don’t remember if I already suggested it, but here I go:
You could prevent the game from submitting a score if the score exceeds 5400+120*(amount of gold), which would be the technical maximum if all gold was collected and the level was finished in 0 frames.
I guess that since hackers wouldn’t know this, most of them would assume that the game is unhackable and would leave.
If that is not possible to code for some reason, maybe you could add some measure to the Metanet core levels at least, like assuming a maximum of 50000 (which exceeds the maximum that any level can reach in the core levels). This couldn’t be applied to userlevels because you never know how many pieces of gold the author is going to put.
The other reason this is a convenient measure is that, in the community we have developed programs that download the scores in order to arrange reports, rankings, overall leaderboards, and that cool stuff, and it happens that having a score over 65536 (2^16) makes the program crash, and I don’t really think there is any workaround on this. So preventing any hacked score to reaching that impossible score would prevfent the program from crashing and we could keep doing rankings and elaborating statistics.
Sorry for the really long rant! Looking forward to your opinion on this 😉
Eddy.