Adjusted the last result station to indicate that you need to not only finish under par, but you have to save all the Nummels too


Cleaned up a couple pain points with the "Watch that first step!" level. There were too many ways for Nummels to die in annoying ways. I made it so that Nummels can't accidentally fall off the left side of the start point, and you no longer have to worry about Nummels falling into the water near the secret exit. That water is there so the player has a way to respawn themselves if they get stuck down there.

Fixing up some small issues to make the game work better with Steam Deck

• Pause the game when the Steam overlay is activated
  
• Use Vulkan graphics API by default on Linux build
  

Various minor level adjustments

• This one's easy! - Make the hitbox on the first exit smaller so it's easier to get over with a single ladder
  
• Step by step! - Move the start button so players don't get stuck trying to jump up when Nummels are walking over the gap and getting in the way
  
• Dig it! - Add some rocks to prevent players from digging under the exit area
  
• Watch that first step! - Make it safer for Nummels to walk into the underground area, and split the ladder so it's easier to get out of the hole on the left
  
• They call me Mr. Squishy Face! - Make it easier to get up to the top area by wall sticking on the left side
  
• Nummels stay right! - Move the ladders on the far left so they are easier to spot (some players didn't see them way over there)
  
• Numminko! - Make it so the Nummels don't walk back to the springboard after they fall and are launched over
  
• Hidey hole! - Make it more clear that you can get out of the left side of the level after all Nummels are saved
  
• They have electric skin! - Fix the coin that was in the wall, adjust the block on the left side to make it easier to jump on
  
• Step down! - Add rocks so you can't get to the challenge coins without doing the challenge
  

Fixed an issue where replays couldn't be loaded from the leaderboards.

I was lucky enough to have one of my first review keys used by a person that goes by Dwaggienite on Twitch. He was very thorough about completing each level 100% on his first playthrough. It was super helpful to watch his stream as he found many pain points and frustrations. He may have even rang the bell of rage a few times. My game was a bit under cooked, but I've just done some baking and hopefully now it's just right, or at least a lot better.

[h2]Wall stick/pop mechanic[/h2]
One of the core parts of the way player movement works in Nummels is that you can sprint and then squish into a wall, where you stick for a second before being able to pop off at high speed and get some crazy height. This can also get in the way more than it helps when you continuously stick to walls as you're trying to get around a level quickly. It could also maintain your speed when you weren't pressing anything on the controls, making you get stuck bouncing back and forth in narrow gaps.

Now when you stick to a wall and then don't press anything, you just fall straight down. No more bouncing backward. If you hold the opposite direction from the wall, you will pop horizontally without any vertical jumping. If you press jump without holding anything, or hold in the direction away from the wall and press jump, you'll do a big jump off the wall. If you press jump while holding into the direction of the wall, you'll jump straight up and can jump right over the wall you were sticking to. These changes make it so you don't feel like you're fighting against the wall jump as you're running around the level as fast as you can. I think it's a huge improvement.



[h2]Par time strictness[/h2]
The par times were designed to be very challenging to do, and require planning and speed-running to hit. Since I had an achievement where you had to collect all the coins in the game, it made perfecting every level a requirement to do that. It was just too harsh, and more frustrating than it was challenging in most levels. So all par times have been increased by about 20%, and some more than that. There are leaderboards for the people who really want to go crazy with the speed-running.

[h2]Level revisions[/h2]
There were a lot of levels that had some rough edges, and things like having spikes in places that were just mean and didn't add to the puzzle. I tried to address all the places I could find where it felt like something unfair could happen, where a Nummel could die in a weird way that wasn't always consistent. A few of the levels were unredeemable. Those were thrown in the trash and replaced with a new one. They knew who they were.

Here's a selection of before/after shots with the old on top and the new on bottom. About half of all the levels in the game got a touch up.







[h2]Death beam brutality[/h2]
The death beam was just a bit too mean, and would shred Nummels when it looked like the beam was high enough to be over their heads while the player carried the box. I moved the collision up, so that Nummels at the same ground level as the player will be safe while the player is carrying the death beam. There were also issues with setting down the death beam and being instantly vaporized by it. I decided to make it so if the death beam is on the ground, the player can walk through it without getting killed by it.

[h2]Nummel bomb grabbiness[/h2]
If a bomb is armed, the Nummels will no longer pick it up. They'll still pick up and start the timer on an unarmed bomb, though.

[h2]Coin collector achievement[/h2]
I changed the achievement from requiring the player to get every coin in the game, to only needing to get 1000 coins. There are 1647 coins total, and getting 1000 still requires you to do reasonably well throughout the game, but you don't have to be near perfect.

[h2]And the rest[/h2]
There were a bunch of small changes in the update as well, like changing the visuals for the green button that starts the level (so it doesn't look like you need to jump on it), and being able to interact with the green button without dropping what you're carrying. I also made it so if you drop something on the same position as another thing, you don't instantly pick up the other thing. There was a lot of unintended grabbing going on with that.

I think the game feels miles better than it did before this update, and I feel very lucky to have given a key to Dwaggienite who was stubborn enough to keep playing even though there were many issues that made the game not fun.

The full release is coming to Steam on June 21st, I'm looking forward to having more people play it!

I was watching a guy play the Nummels demo on Twitch a couple weeks ago when I saw him run into a bug that I had already fixed in the non-demo version of the game.



This would happen if you held the jump button while you respawned after dying. It was something weird where the jump animation would get stuck on the first frame. I fixed it by adding this script to the animator so that it will always reset the playback speed when entering the jump state in the Unity animation state machine thing.

public class AnimatorResetSpeedOnEnter : StateMachineBehaviour
{
public override void OnStateEnter(Animator animator, AnimatorStateInfo stateInfo, int layerIndex)
{
animator.speed = 1;
}
}

There was one other bug that was way worse than being shorter and fatter than the average Nummel. If you restarted the level just wrong, it would load a second instance of the level at the same time, leading to all sorts of badness.



Here you can see one copy of the player is stuck doing his best impression of a blood fountain. The whole game would be broken at this point and the only way to fix it was to quit the entire game and restart. I fixed this one by just making sure that you're not allowed to restart the level while it's in the middle of restarting the level.

One other feature that sneaked its way into this update was an update to the screen resolution menu. It used to have pages and pages that you would have to click through in order to find the resolution that you wanted. The best resolutions are all the way at the end, so it wasn't a great user experience. I got some columns going in there.



That's better! And now you know why there's an update to the Nummels demo a month after the big Next Fest event.

I was planning to stream later tonight, but I realized this morning that the schedule for the Steam Next Fest ends in a few hours, so I'm sneaking this livestream into the schedule before it's over. I plan to show some clips from a few streamers where they ran into problems and then show updates that I made in response to those problems. Thanks to TheElectricMindset, TheMischievousMoose, Spectropolix, and Aron_dc for giving permission to use their footage on my stream!

Come on over to the Nummels store page on June 22nd at 6PM Pacific! I'll be playing through the full version of the game (probably not every level), and then I'll probably do a dev stream for a bit where you can see what the process looks like while I'm working on the game. I'm also planning to do dev streams for an hour or so each night of the event from the 16th to the 22nd at around 6 or 7PM Pacific on weekdays, 2PM on Saturday and Sunday.

I had always been a bit intimidated about dealing with localization for my game. This has been a do-it-yourself kind of project -- I even took some music lessons to learn the basics of composition. One thing I can't do myself, at least not before finishing Nummels, is learn Chinese. It turned out that it wasn't such a big deal to pay someone to do this part.

After getting the game ready to be able to swap out all the text with any other text, I asked for a quote from a bunch of localization companies. I found about a dozen of them that have experience doing game translation. I settled on one that had a good price and nice features -- I liked that I could see the progress of the translation as they were working on it and I could answer questions from the translators directly. I ended up spending about as much on my nice cover art illustration as I did to get the whole game translated into three languages. I'm not sure if it will be worth it, but I feel like it was a good investment to help me reach a wider audience.

I tried making an interesting level as a finale for the demo in the last update, but I think it turned out to have too strong of a difficulty spike. This update just replaces that last level. I'll save the old one for the full version of the game.

The Summer festival is over and here are some changes based on things I saw and learned.

Keep it short

I think the demo was too long and took too long to get to the more interesting stuff. I lost about half of the people that tried the demo before they even got to the gum. It's a tricky balance with those early levels teaching important concepts but not being as interesting. They're really tutorials disguised as the regular game.

The demo included levels that were disabled, where you could jump in a portal to progress past the level. I thought it would be fun to tease those, but they just kind of broke the flow and confused some people. There was also a hub level where you had to deposit keys found at the end of other levels, which wasn't really necessary for the demo.

With that, I trimmed out a bunch of unnecessary stuff:

• A few less important or less fun levels
  
• The disabled levels
  
• The Key Sockets hub level
  
• All the key gems, since there's nowhere to use them now
  

I made this game with these dumb little creatures, and you get to play as one of them to help them get home safely. The demo usually takes 15-30 minutes to complete. This has been my nights and weekend project for the last five years and I'm planning to release in Spring next year. I hope you like it!

Nate Platt

Come and hang out with me, the guy who made this dang thing! I'll play through the demo and you can tell me about your day. I hope you've had a nice day.

Ask me about whatever. If you want to know how I built a sound (answer: possibly with my mouth), or why this game needs a self destruct button in almost every level (answer: because it's fun, and other reasons).

[h2]Change notes[/h2]

• Player no longer sticks to Nummels when sprinting into them
  
• Pop speed significantly reduced when holding the direction opposite to the pop when popping out of a wall stick
  
• Added options for sprint modes. Can hold the button to sprint, hold the button to walk, or press the button to toggle
  
• Moved the self destruct station on Walk or chew, not both! to make speed-running more interesting
  
• Fixed some issues causing replays to not play back correctly. Replays that are under the par time record more detailed playback information to detect when playback is out of sync. Longer replays don't include extra data to keep size small
  
• Fixed menus locking up when closing and rapidly reopening a level from the world map
  
• Lowered default music and sound volume
  
• Fixed cosmetic items not showing correctly when watching replays
  
• Moved replay controls overlay to bottom center
  
• Nummel corpses no longer disappear when starting the memorial
  

Come and hang out with me, the guy who made this dang thing! I'll play through the demo and you can tell me about your day. I hope you've had a nice day.

Ask me about whatever. If you want to know how I built a sound (answer: possibly with my mouth), or why this game needs a self destruct button in almost every level (answer: because it's fun, and other reasons).