Vanta Black - Major Update

THE FIRST MAJOR UPDATE FOR SMYS IS HERE

From quality of life improvements to accessibility, this first major update is taking the game to a whole new level.

The game being the most fun when playing as a 4 players party, it is unfortunately not always that easy to have 3 friends available at the same time to play the game, and this is what this update is primarily meant to address.

Vanta Black

Introducing a new game mode : Vanta Black.

Despite being a competitive multiplayer focused game, SMYS has a pretty dense lore on which we rely on when adding new content to the game. When thinking about ways to make the game more accessible, Vanta immediately came to our mind as a character that would make a great opponent to play against, and this new game mode was born.

Vanta is one of the only zglub that is not drawn towards eating yumyums, as he was originally cursed after eating the moonyum, out of despair, erasing all sense of taste he ever had. He is now driven by his sole jealousy and wants to prevent his siblings from being able to enjoy these delicacies yumyums are.

You will face him, either solo or with a friend, in a relentless battle to the top. As the world's tallest and strongest zglub, Vanta will not be easy to beat, especially if you're going one on one with him. This is a real challenge aimed at players looking for a strong opponent, and while it may start easy, the difficulty quickly ramps up with Vanta using new powerful abilities each round.

Playing this mode with a friend is obviously easier, and I hope that players with a less competitive mindset can enjoy it this way.

Bots for Multiplayer

This has been requested by the players, weither it is to be able to play alone, or to fill an uneven party of 3 with an additional player.

I did not realize how important this was until it was part of the game, and I'm glad I listened to the players feedback as it is undeniably adding a lot of value to the game, making it accessible and fun to small parties. Even playing as a party of 2 with each one a bot is suprisingly loads of fun, I'd even go with saying it was more fun than playing 1v1 without bots.

The only limitation I did put on this is that you can only spawn up to 2 AIs for now, which should address most requests I had about adding bots, but if players request it I'll make it 3 so a player could play alone as a party of 4, 1 AI teaming up with the player against 2 AIs.

The bots difficulty can be modified in the settings menu to suit players needs by adjusting either their playing speed or if they should use bonuses or not. I'll add more settings in future updates as I improve AI's behaviors.

Bots have been playtested for hundreds of hours by now, and while I fixed close to 100% of the errors I've found, there might be specific cases we did not encounter yet, which I hope the players will report to me so they can be fixed.

Sidenote

I am publishing a progress roadmap every sunday on Twitter and Mastodon on which you can see how far each upcoming update is from making it into the game, feel free to follow me there to stay updated about your most anticipated updates.

Twitter - Mastodon

Changelog

Features - New game mode : Vanta Black - Bots for local multiplayer - New dead zglub icon - UI timer progress bar for malus effects

Improvements - Players UI panels graphics are now matching the direction of their stairs - Items spawning in the Canons picking phase increased from 8 to 9 - New bonus icons - Players can now only throw blocs when the yumyum has spawned - Bomb explosion radius increased - Bomb explosion now damages blocks around the explosion - All malus durations reduced from 18' to 16' - Bonus spawn chance in Trampolines picking phase increased from 70% to 82%

Fixes - Fixed players building phase panels and players picking phase results panels being abnormaly huge - Fixed players building phase panel bonuses not being cleaned when leaving to lobby - Fixed players building phase panels position not updating when leaving to lobby and switching teams - Fixed 2 items spawning at the same position in Canons picking phase - Fixed canons being disabled when dying just before the end of the building phase