END OF YEAR UPDATE 2024 — Progress, Song Previews, and our return to MAGFest!
Hey gang!
It’s the end of the year already; we hope you’ve all been warm this holiday season! You’ll be glad to hear the team’s still alive and well. We’re wrapping up our remaining work before we take off for the holidays and get some much-needed rest, so let’s take the time to catch up now!
First off, in case you missed it, we had a few small [white label] related updates…
- We recently added Motherbound, a (no longer) secret song from our last [white label] / KS anniversary update to the DEMO TAPES soundtrack. Listen to it here!
- UNBEATABLE [white label] received a new patch that brings back the NOISZ collab songs, with brand-new maps and map gimmicks! These songs will be permanently available in [white label] AND the full game going forward.
- We had the community ask us questions with the [white label] Q&A in May and an additional Q&A in November, and responses for both are live now on our website!
- A new guitar tab from peak divide member Clara is now available on our site — learn how to play Mirror!
- We appeared at Hashtag Con (a small, local event) in November… more showings soon? 🤔
So how’s development? And hey, weren’t we supposed to deliver this game in December 2023?
Unfortunately — this game isn’t going to be finished within the next 10 or so days. Anybody who was anticipating a sick December 31st UNBEATABLE shadow-drop, you can stop holding your breath now.
We’ve communicated this before, but we’ll go ahead and do it again: that December 2023 date was never anything more than an estimate, and game-dev is tricky, complicated, business. In the wise words of one very acclaimed video game designer:
Of course, we’ve been incredibly busy this entire time. Thanks to the immense support you all have shown us, we’ve found ourselves in the incredible position of being able to make more game — and better.
With that said, we can’t give a new release window quite yet (there’s still so much left we want to do!) but we hope our release date announcement will be so big that you, your grandma, and your grandma’s dog will know about it.
Let’s peel back the curtain a little, and give you a peek at what’s been going on internally. We’ve asked a few people on the team (which has recently grown thanks to our beefed up engineering squad) to share some of the work they’ve been most proud of, though keep in mind everything here is a work in progress and is subject to change — or removal:
We’ve been hard at work on our implementation of Rhythm Tracking into the game. Up until this point, our game has had beat tracking exclusively for our Rhythm Game — background or incidental music that happened outside of that context did not have a system in place to get BPM or progress information out. No longer: we now have a system that can seamlessly track BPMs across all the music in our game, which means everything from minigames to environmental props to Beat’s animations and jumps can be timed To The Beat.
Speaking of minigames, we’ve been developing quite a few of those! You’ve seen Beatball in the past, but something smaller we’ve been working on has been a minigame where you, er, put up posters? Gotta get your band’s name out there somehow, right?
Another very work in progress mechanic has you pulling out your phone for some quick shenanigans:
Additionally, we’ve been building out even more environments for the game — here’s a sneak peek at an in-progress backstage area:
We’ve made a huge number of (very old) fake band posters, copaganda, and music-related warnings for you to admire in game — check them out once you get the chance!
Finally, we’ve completely updated our core shader model. We really wanted to match the effect of paint bleed and simplified shadow shapes — the difference is (literally) night and day. These improvements have already been added to [white label] — check ’em out!
From the sound team, we’ve got two additional tracks you’ll be hearing exclusively in the final game.
Here’s a look at HOMEWORK COFFEE:
Dynamic music is a doozy and a half to compose and to program, but this one is turning out to be something special.
Additionally, you might’ve heard Coasting by Day in a previous update, but Vasily also produced a night version! Take a listen here:
The team is still cooking up something fierce, and we’ll have a lot more to share throughout 2024 — we can’t thank you enough for your patience and support; it absolutely means the world to us.
With that said, before we go, we have one last thing we want to talk about…
MAGFest 2024
We’re back! Again! Again. Again… Again…… Again?
Catch up with the team at our favorite event, MAGFest 2024, in National Harbor, Maryland, from January 18th–21st! We’ll be bringing back our demo with event-exclusive songs, a special in-person scoring contest, and event merch!
If you’re coming, please say hi! And if we’re not at our booth, you can expect to see us clogging up the line at the F-ZERO AX cab.
That should be all for now! As a reminder, our ability to monitor email inquiries and social media/forums will be relatively slow during our Holiday break (December 22nd-January 8th). We’ll get back to everything once we return. If we’ve missed a response from you regarding things like Kickstarter info, Slacker Backer orders, or anything else, feel free to poke us and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can!
Thanks, and have a happy & safe holidays!
❤ FROM D-CELL GAMES
