At long last, I'm happy to finally say that we have alternate character palettes! Version 0.19 aka "Olympic Slam" brings palette swaps, player profiles, and a whole pile of UI and UX improvements in the menus and controls customizations.

Version v0.19: Patch Notes

• Alternate character palettes
• Player profiles
• Keyboard images in menu UI
• Simplified controller customization menu
• Various menu UI bugfixes

Alternate character palettes

Alternative character palettes was something that was requested by many, and I'm glad to finally have it in the game. With a small cast of four characters, I hope having a bit of flair and variety to the alternative palettes will add some fun personality to each match played. Each character has 8 palettes: the standard palette, 3 basic color swaps, 3 entirely new palettes, and a "Ruin Crew" palette. For those curious, Ruin Crew is an old story idea I dug up from the depths of Double Turn's early design history. In the world of GCPW, it's a rebellious heel faction that has many members and wears black shirts with white logo. A truly revolutionary idea to bring to a wrestling promotion! The Ruin Crew palette is a simple all black or black/white color change for all characters' clothing but I think it adds a great look to them all. To swap palettes, you can press X on gamepads or P on keyboard. This is also the first time I've included character names in the game! While each of the characters normally go by their archetype name "Brawler", "Striker", etc, the default palette for each character are those characters actual names in GCPW! Another story nugget I dug out of my design bag :)

Player profiles

The new Player Profiles allows you to save a profile with a name up to 8 characters. Each profile can save a custom binding for gamepad and a custom binding for keyboard. This allows for each player that plays on your game locally and on Remote Play Together to have their own settings saved, making it easy to jump back into games with the same people. Note that old custom controls bindings will no longer be usable, so if you already have custom bindings, you'll have to redo them with a profile! And you'll need to make a profile to save custom controls, if not they will be lost when the game is closed.

UI Improvements

As part of the work to get profiles and palettes into the game I also took it as an opportunity to improve the menu UI and controller customization, as I needed to rework many parts of the character select screen to accommodate the new features. Not only was I able to tackle a lot of bugs (full list on trello) but I also got brand new keyboard button images in the UI, started showing the correct button mappings depending on the device in a lot more places, and completely rethought and simplified how you edit custom controls.

Coming Soon

I'm coming down to the last few things I want to complete to hit that v1.0 milestone. First, I'm working on a small patch to fix some AI issues, as the current state of single player is far too difficult, while also being far too repetitive once you learn the AI patterns. The AI difficulty has been a complaint since the first early access build was launched. This won't be a huge lift and I plan to do a bit more work on the AI before launch, but I just want to prevent players from jumping into single player and immediately jobbing to the AI. Hopefully a small patch with some tweaks will fix alleviate that poor experience. You can already find a first version of that build on the "next" beta branch in Steam (macOS and Windows only) and I hope to clean that up and release it very soon. After that I have a series of combat improvements regarding signatures, gimmick matches, and character-specific traits I want to try out. I'm not sure if those will be quick small updates in succession or one larger rebalance like I did in June's core combat update. I'll have that figured out and communicate my plan in the next patch with the AI improvements. Beyond that, all I have left are planned 1.0 launch features! For a full list you can check out the Trello roadmap.

[ 2020-07-21 12:41:07 CET ] [ Original post ]