Full notes
Full Hyper Jam update
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Repeated intro
Hello everyone! First of all, thank you to everyone who played the game at PAX Aus this year. We had an awesome time and got a tonne of positive feedback. Seeing your reaction makes us even more excited to get the game into your hands! For those of you who didn’t get a chance to see us at PAX, we wanted to check in and share some of the what we've been up to over the past few months.
What changed
- Balance
- Gameplay
- Maps
- Compatibility
New level: Overpass
This level is a lot of fun to play on, especially using the rotating billboards to get grenade trickshots, and knocking each other into the abyss. After completing Overpass we found ourselves wanting to take another look at our older levels, and ended up making some huge improvements to both their mechanics and their visuals.
Subway
Subway has always been a favourite, so we didn't want to change the design much mechanically. Instead we opted to simply refresh the visuals and improve visibility to make it easier to play on.
Assembly (formerly Hoghouse)
As with Subway, there were mechanical elements of this map that we really enjoyed – such as the pits and dynamic cover – but the slaughterhouse theme was a relic from early development and felt a little out of place. We decided to capitalize on those mechanics we enjoyed by making the moving cover bigger and more solid, and by making more of an event out of the pits, which now open and close during the course of the game, giving the level a really dynamic feel.
Hotel
After playing on the old Hotel level for a while we found some fairly fundamental problems with the old design, and so went back to the drawing board. We ended up redesigning the layout completely to be simpler and more fun to play on, while still preserving the enjoyment of breaking glass and falling into the pool. As part of this we also gave it a visual overhaul, with readability as a major priority.
Characters and Animation
With the new levels coming together we then turned our attention to the characters. We completely revamped the animation system, and made big improvements to the character models, including new physics-based clothing which not only looks great, but really helps with character identification. The game now feels much more fluid and responsive to play, particularly as your movement and attack speed increases.
New ability: Parry
We decided that there were not enough defensive options in the game, so we added a mechanic that allows you to block damage and deflect projectiles back towards your opponents! We are still fine tuning this mechanic, but even in its early stages it has added a whole new layer of gameplay and tactics that we are really happy with.
Online Multiplayer
We are very excited to announce that we will be launching Hyper Jam with online multiplayer! Online is a feature that is very frequently requested, and after doing some tests internally we are confident in our ability to pull it off. We still have quite a lot of work to do to ensure getting into an online game with friends or randoms is a seamless experience, but the core gameplay itself is working quite well already, and we hope to do a beta at some point in the future so the community can help us stress test it. --- There have also been many other smaller changes and under the hood improvements, including changes to throwing weapons, chance-based perks and more. Now that our graphics upgrade is complete, we will get back to posting GIFs and other content on our Twitter and Facebook accounts, so be sure to follow us there if you want more Hyper Jam. Thank you all so much for your continued support, and let us know what you think!
Source
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