July Update

With Steam Next Fest over you all have left a lot of feedback to work on especially with regards to needing more variety with the charting. We are now about 3 songs away from wrapping up the base game and in the process the editor has also gotten some sweet new features including:

• auto arrangement options (spreading notes further apart, or closer to one another so the person editing doesn't have to move the notes one by one)

• a bunch of convenience functions such as dragging notes with mouse, copy paste, ctrl+z revert up to 50 changes and so on

• batch editing effects across different notes

Chart adjustments:

Comin' up and Bread got some teeeeny tiny adjustments to make them a little bit more engaging. There is still a lot more button mashing than I would like but I feel this is a step in the right direction to make them more engaging. Been spending a lot of time on the tracks for the full game to keep them varied and challenging and seeing how much more can be done on those maps compared to the demo ones does make me a bit embarrassed but hey, we all started somewhere!

Visual updates:

The next time you play a round in Beat Vector you will notice two differences:

1, Whenever you reach a Beat Drop charge (that is pass a combo of 50) you will not only see the charge tracker fill but to make things a bit more obvious, your speakers will start glowing with energy. Once you use up your Beat Drop the energy will also go away. Hopefully this will be a bit easier to keep track of than glancing at the charge tracker below the timeline.

2, Misses now glitch out your characters. Every time you miss a note, the characters will glitch to give you a bit of an extra feel on just when were you too late or off angle.

3, When playing in standard mode, the color of the notes was a bit hard to distinguish on the Ballroom levels. Brightened it a bit to make them more visible.

Mechanics: Hold Notes (the long ones) were a bit too unforgiving and disappeared as soon as you missed the entry point of the hold. This has been adjusted a bit so you are still able to "catch" the note as long as its exit point hasn't arrived for partial scores.

Onboarding:

Based on the feedback and streams I realized the onboarding can get a bit confusing. From now on the simple calibration scene's audio calibration section got a tiny bit of a guide so to prevent hits that are way off. This can be helpful if you are using a bluetooth headphone which could result in 150ms+ offsets that the autocalibration wouldn't be able to register otherwise and instead leave you without any feedback.

The tutorial also got some extra visuals as well as some wording changes to make it a bit more clear on what to be done where. Furthermore the "Phase" texts have been removed to ensure a bit quicker experience so you can get to playing sooner.

Wording:

Timeouts (late hits) were displayed as purple "MISS" text on the hit feedback. This has been changed to "LATE" to make it more clear whats the reason behind a 0 score on a hit.

Mac issues:

A big apology to all of the mac users who have used Beat Vector, as noted in the previous post, there were some shaders that didn't render solely on Mac but perhaps more annoyingly there were some quirks that kept resetting the saves locally and made cloud sync impossible. Today's fix should take care of that albeit you might experience some side effects such as the system asking you to sign the leaderboard opt in again or reset preferences/local progress. Rest assured though, your leaderboard scores are safe even if the local data acts up a bit, next time you submit a new high score the two should sync up within about 5 minutes. Again sorry for the inconvenience, Apple has been quite a challenge for me, but I am still committed to make this game work on all 3 major OSs so no-one gets left out. If you have any issues with your machine just shoot a message on Discord and I will be right there with you to provide tech support so we can figure it out let that be via chat or a call, whatever that you are comfortable with.

Legal:

Next a bit of a legal groundwork, the TOS and Privacy Policy are now available, you will be prompted the next time launch the game.

Achievements:

The achievements are ready for the full game, and are already uploaded to the main page (albeit I think they won't be visible publicly until the main launch). If you want to know more about them I am very happy to chat about it on discord!

That's it for today, now I'll continue with charting so I can roll this out to you all as soon as possible!

Take care!