The Week After
Hello!
So Waves was released a week ago and since then there have been 2 patches on Steam and a third that will hopefully go live tonight (EDIT: It has gone live already). That’s more patches than Skyrim has had and I’ve definitely fixed more things than I’ve broken.
Generally the only bugs have been with Achievements and that’s largely because achievements are hard to debug until you can actually see the stats for them which I couldn’t during the beta. Everything else has been adding little feature requests like being able to pick a Random announcer each game or turning off the Aim Line.
Since release several people have said some very nice things about Waves in what are known as “Reviews” I shall share the ones I know about below along with some of my favourite quotes:
DealSpwn “Prepare for hectic unforgiving splendour and retinal titilation of the highest order.”
The72Pins “If you’re looking for a game to take the place of the never to be seen Geometry Wars 3, then this is it.”
Kotaku “Waves is the most addictive little twin-stick shooter I’ve played since Geometry Wars.”
IndieGamesMag “Waves is a hard hitting, spunk-filled fireworks display.”
ElectronDance “1 min of its edge-of-seat bullet ballet = the handstrain of 6 self-love sessions.”
DIYGamer “it’s a lot bloody good.”
Some other things that have happened since release is the Survival leaderboards have seen 4 players break the 1 billion barrier with one player managing to hit the score cap I had to implement because Steam Leaderboards and UDK don’t support 64bit integers.
The current top score for the Challenge mode was actually caught on camera and is on Youtube as well which was quite lucky.
I shall now address the things that people ask me (aside from “Can I have a review copy?”):
Q: Can we have more music?
A: Music is expensive. Really expensive. Waves has not yet made enough that I can afford to pay SMILETRON to make some new tracks. So at the moment no.
Q: Will the soundtrack be released?
A: We’re working on it. SMILETRON is mastering the ingame tracks into an album friendly format at the moment. When it’s closer to happening I’ll post about it.
Q: The Friends leaderboard is a bit slow isn’t it?
A: Yep it is. This is unfortunately a UDK issue and one I was hoping would be fixed with the October update. It wasn’t. This is one of those bugs that I can’t do anything about. The November UDK update may fix it but I’m not promising anything.
Q: Is there going to be a Mac, XBLA, PSN, iThing version?
A: XBLA and PSN isn’t going to happen unless the game makes a huge amount of money. The UDK licence doesn’t cover those platforms so I’d need a full Unreal licence. That’s assuming I got a slot which I think is incredibly unlikely. A Mac or iThing version may happen further down the line but it requires that I have a Mac and iThing to test on which I can’t afford right now.
joao
November 27, 2011 @ 2:51 am
Really great game dude. Keep going.
Riley
November 27, 2011 @ 3:30 am
Being able to hide the UI really improved the look of the game and keeps me from checking the score too often. It also works very well with nVidia’s 3D vision system without the HUD. Thanks for the quick update.
Nick
November 28, 2011 @ 8:00 pm
A couple things I would like to point out though one being the fact that with the new update I believe it seems that in rush it will show my 2nd highest score instead of my highest at the part in game to the right which of course is annoying when I’m trying to beat it, although I can still see it everywhere else including the leader boards and the score screen after I die.
In bombing run as well I find the places where you have to deliver the bomb can sometimes be too close to the green things that build up over time and end up being impossible to get too because they end up with the green stuff growing over the spot.
As well I would like to mention is the fact that it seems when that I slow down time sometimes I end up dieing before I actually hit something? I realize hit detection must be a very tricky thing and I’m not entirely sure if I’m correct or maybe it just figures I would of died anyway? I was always really close when it happened and also I find that sometimes those little yellow things that go in threes sometimes seem to go right over me without hitting me often after I have broken it up into one or two parts left.
The turning speed seems a bit too slow I don’t like how it kinda slows to a crawl for a second when I try to go in the other direction as I do die sometimes although I realize this is more personal preference then anything.
Great game overall though most fun I have had in awhile as I have gotten tired of many of the generic big box sequels. Keep it up!
November 28, 2011 @ 10:34 pm
The game always shows you the score that is immediately above your current score rather than the score at the top of the board. That’s always been the case since release.
The shield in Bombing Run is there for those moments when the only way to drop the bomb is to dive headfirst into some enemies. You’re invincible for a moment after the shield breaks so just go for it.
The collision detection is accurate but what happens is that Unreal always renders one frame behind (I can’t disable this despite trying) the gameplay. The few occasions when you notice this are when the collision was completely unavoidable anyway.
There are a few frames immediately after the yellow ones break apart where the little ones cannot be hurt and cannot hurt you. Without this they would be instantly destroyed by the same volley of bullets that killed their mommy making them basically pointless.
The secret to Waves is maintaining momentum and working out where you want to be in advance. If you really need to change direction quickly then use slowmo to do it as you are more agile in slowmo than at other times.
r3mark
November 29, 2011 @ 2:52 pm
Great game! I am already addicted .. 😉
Few things:
* like Nick, I find spawns of green platforms (bombing run) under green hives unfair. I have to check on whether shield would solve it. I dont like it though.
* BUG: If I play Rush and have a long run with a single life, I get several music tracks at the same time. This occurs after about 5 mins with one life. It happened to me 2 times already in the last few days, and still happens after the update. It almost feels like 3 tracks are playing at the same time then.
* Minor-thing: immediately allow Escape-Key when died, cause when you had a bad game you’d like to restart instantly.
Keep it up. I am absolutely amazed!!
fpdrumond
November 30, 2011 @ 2:36 am
For the score cap:
You should do what we brazilians did on 80’s and 90’s inflation. Cut zeros from currency.
You don’t need to cut so much as we did. Just three zeros from score sufices.
So, the max score would be 2 trillion.
Play it loud: 2011 in Game Soundtracks | D22 Zone
February 10, 2012 @ 3:36 pm
[…] only SMILETRON - isn’t actually available for download as a single unit yet, although the developer’s blog has hinted that it’s in the works. So that means that to enjoy the soundtrack in full, […]