- Reworked speech bubble (smaller for shorter texts, other font)
- Improved scripted events with Mom in the beginning
- Red Town shop relocated for better tutorialization purposes
- Fixed pixel bricks being black instead of pixelated
- Added a clear hint as to how to destroy pixel bricks
- Small changes here and there

Blue Ville changes:
- Removed red flowers; they just cause confusion and don't really make it more fun.
- Simplified gate puzzle only requiring 2 crystals instead of 3
- Fixed a couple of ways to get on top of walls you shouldn't be able to reach.
- Fixed that the belt stays on when it gets robbed while using it
- Added hints to puzzles and some other changes to make puzzles a little easier, mostly by protecting you from yourself; not letting you walk away, so you are forced to focus on the puzzle

Hotfix:

- Fixed castle battery socket not powering what it should
- Fixed 3 of the 4 new achievements not working
- Fixed battery respawning not removing power from socket
- Fixed player conducting power even without the belt on
- Fixed flies in Blue Ville endlessly respawning
- Fixed crystal door puzzle broken after loading the game
- Fixed Robber respawning again after you had already been robbed, thus corrupting the game and savegame
- Improved 2 puzzles in Blue Ville
- Preventing fake solution to light barrier puzzle
- 2 important coins were missing
- One pixel block was sometimes missing
- Fixed mom getting stuck and not running to castle
- small other fixes

Major changes:
- Added new region: Blue Ville, adding about 2 hours of new puzzles
- Added fallen-hero-souvenir system (you can take an item of found dead heroes which will then be on a shelf in your home). Also added 5 more fallen heroes (9 in total)



Notable changes:
- The strength upgrade now lets you destroy pixel bricks with your sword
- Added some more steps to getting the color barrel in Carrot Town and fixed the fake solutions
- Added new puzzle including a new mechanic in facility right before you get the float buckle
- Added new puzzle in region after rattle hag using a completely new mechanic
- Added coloring machine in Red Town including a nearby puzzle involving giant carrots (only supposed to be solved by people that are very advanced in the game, but it's technically possible to solve it very early)
- In the same manner I added a new puzzle to the supraball pitch area; you can solve it early on, but you only get the knowledge how to do it much later.
- Added water barriers to Carrot Town that kill flies so you need to find the right way when carrying them around.
- Added some more guidance after blue and purple crystal, because some people were not sure what to do next.
- Added puzzle in Red Town to open up the big hut that was always closed so far
- Added a couple of new chests and secrets
- Added some more quick travel pads to save you some hassle of doing repetitive stuff
- Added blue npc event at liftblock puzzle after farm (this will be broken in older savegames where you are already past that section)
- Fixed, that blue pirate guy in locker room prison had a red skin.
- Made chapel puzzle a little harder by removing yellow flowers
- New jumppad design

Small changes:
- Eaten carrots now stay gone after loading the game
- Simplified 3-Steel-Ball-Fire puzzle
- Fixed NPC text sometimes not going away
- Less max coins upgrades
- Fixed being able to solve heavy-brick puzzle in Red Town with force cube
- Fixed a couple more fake solutions to puzzles
- Fixed being able to shoot supraballs through walls right in front of you
- Fixed awesome meter, grave counter and chest counter not showing when you activate them
- Fixed dead end hole near facility
- Fixed lots of places being too dark
- Keycards now get respawned incase you threw them all away
- Lamp crystals in Purple Crystal pit are now used as arrows showing the next steps; also other small changes to make the Force beam tutorial a little more easy
- Changed Walt Red's cooking house door situation
- Removed several NPCs after they become useless
- Fixed trump character to have orange skin and an orange jumpsuit
- Shield generators now make powerup and powerdown sounds when being turned on or off
- Demon enemies now leave red color splashes on the ground after dying
- Fixed some objects that would not fly as high or far as they should on jumppads
- Added several missing "secret area" notifications
- Added a giant swing next to the sandbox
- Sponges now work with the coloring machine (but they serve no purpose)
- Fixed sometimes broken rising metal beam in region after rattle hag.
- Fixed pixelisation errors in armor skin and changed colors of armor
- Moved player camera 4cm forward so you dont look into your own neck when looking down and to prevent you from looking through your body when jumping
- Inventory buttons now using darker design for keyboard
- Made facility puzzles easier to understand by using trigger-rings instead of yellow buttons
- You can now catch the ball while no matter what weapon you have selected and it will switch to Gun 2 the moment you get it
- Reduced amount of shells in shell task
- Crosshair now turns into a little hand when you aim at a usable object
- Guns now less bright so they don't darken the screen so much
- Lots of other small things

I am using the achievements mainly to track how far people get in the game.
Like pretty much everyone finishes the tutorial.
But only about 75% get to have a Force Cube.
Only 59% get the gun. And it keeps decreasing like that to about 15% in the end. Most people seem to get lost at the blue crystal facility.

There are 2 problems:
1: I added the achievements a bit too late so that a huge chunk of people played without them, so they are not counted and the numbers are now lower than they should be.
2: It's depressing to know how few people actually get to the point you're currently trying to work on. When you know you just work for the remaining 10-20% of the players it's hard to be motivated. That makes me want to streamline the game a little more, so that more people reach the later parts.
But I don't know if they leave because it's too hard or because they are bored.

But the question how much love you put into late-game-content is one every studio has to deal with. You must not drop the quality, but it's sort of not paying back.

These are the numbers of how many people finished those games and how long it took on average:

10% - 24h - Shadow Tactics
11% - 13h - Psychonauts
13% - 10h - Fieldrunners 2
13% - 100h - Factorio
15% - 10h - Thief
20% - 45h - Metal Gear Solid 5
22% - 31h - GTA 5
23% - 13h - Half Life 2
27% - 49h - Witcher 3
28% - 8h - Ori and the blind forest
41% - 8h - Portal 2
43% - 12h - Sherlock Holmes, Crimes & Punishments
46% - 13h - Rise of the Tomb Raider
48% - 7h - SteamWorld Dig 2
60% - 4h - Firewatch


Being in the 20's is normal for most games. Only few outstanding games get over 40% of their players to get to the end.
But it's of course also dependent on the difficulty. Tomb Raider and Firewatch are so easy, they nearly play themselves and Firewatch is also by far the shortest game on the list. So the numbers mean different things for every game. Shadow Tactics is very hard to get through so not surprising it has only 10% finishing.

Supraland currently has a playtime of about 8-15hours and is pretty hard in some places. So maybe I should throw in some more hints for the harder parts? What I definitely should do is make the facility easier. It drops from like 40 to 16% between the locker room and the blue crystal.

Are you a player that stopped playing Supraland at some point? I guess those players will not be reading Dev Blogs. But if you are, I would be super interested to know where you lost interest to play and why.

I'd also like to know which parts in the facility were the hardest to figure out for you?

Thanks!

EDIT: was just told that many people stopped to wait for the finished game. Ok... I didn't take that into account that you don't quite want to play an unfinished SP game.

I finally started with Blue Ville. Actually I only finished the puzzle that lets you enter the village once and for all.
I've also added a lot of other puzzles and things to the rest of the world. I wanted to release that as an update but I ran into a problem...

Before entering Blue Ville someone robs some of your tools. I had to get rid of some gameplay options for a moment because a cool puzzle could otherwise be solved in a way too boring simple way. You'll get your stuff back a bit later, but if I released this now and let you get to the early access ending, you would not have all abilities and couldn't go hunt for chests. Or if I gave you the abilities back, your progress would be screwed up once you picked the game back up, because you would have the abilities while you should not have them.

For that reason I will only put out another update once I'm at the point where you got all abilities back.
But then it will be a huge update.
Right now the changes list already requires some scrolling down. I did so much polishing work in many areas.

The changes most interesting to dev blog readers are these:

- Hero souvenir system
I added 5 more fallen heroes (9 in total now). And now you can pickup a piece from them and it will be stored on your shelf at home. When you found all of them (should be 12 in the end), you will be rewarded with something cool. I haven't thought of anything yet. At least there will be an achievement.

- I like the concept of having puzzles in early parts of the game that you can technically solve, but you don't have the knowledge yet how to do so. You're not missing any items or abilities, just the knowledge of how certain things work. That's why I put in a bunch of puzzles in that style in Red Town and around the Supraball Pitch.

- A couple of new puzzles. For example a new puzzle in the facility right before you get the float buckle will teach you a new mechanic that you didn't know exists. I've also added a completely new way to use the force beam. So far it's not explained how and it's only needed to get an optional chest. But it's so much fun that I will make it mandatory at some point.

- The strength upgrade will let you destroy pixel bricks with your sword - no more pickaxe needed.

Regarding the last bit and similar mechanics I've run into a bit of a problem.
If you for example find a pixel brick somewhere else in the world, but you don't have the optional strength upgrade, you could get the idea that you would need to carry a pickaxe all across the map. Same for carrots and purple flies.
I always provide a solution that is right around the corner. But in those cases it's possible to solve puzzles by carrying things a very long way. I'm not fully sure how to prevent all of this in a satisfying way. I just don't want you to do tedious, boring tasks.

So even if I somehow prevent you from getting the item all across the map, many people would still try and have wasted time. For example there are now waterfalls you need to run through, and purple flies would be killed there to prevent you from taking them past this barrier.
So you will now find flies in other regions of the map too, so if they are needed somewhere they will be close by. I hope I will get it right.

Progress will probably be a bit slower at the moment, because I also have to take on another project that should take me some weeks to finish. One of the books I wrote was translated from German into English and I have to do the layout for 280 pages and translate all the 120 graphics. This will have priority until it's done.

Thanks for your time!
David

I have a few questions for you so I can learn more about what's good and bad so I can improve the game. Could you fill in this form for me?

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScz8Qg6KCBWnOWbdXi4HphM0EjfwJn5TffYvFVxz__Co16lJQ/viewform?usp=sf_link

Thanks!

**IMPORTANT** If you want to continue your savegame,
copy Save1.sav from
C:\Users\name\AppData\Local\TheDrought\Saved\SaveGames
to
C:\Users\name\AppData\Local\Supraland\Saved\SaveGames
(The 2nd folder only exists if you started the game once).

I changed the project name from TheDrought, which was the old internal name, to Supraland. The change of the save location is an unwanted side effect of that.

- Fixed music and sound volumes not working
- Added FOV slider in options
- Music in carrot town repeats less
- Maybe fixed new bug with health sometimes not changing, even after dying - please report if it happens again
- Switched to new Unreal Engine (4.19 to 4.20) - this can have all sorts of unexpected side effects. Please report everything that seems weird or wrong to you.
- Added German text (not fully translated yet, but most of it)

- Added system that allows me to easily add little events involving NPCs; added a few events with "mom" running from target to target and telling you to follow her (instead of her just disappearing and waiting at the next target)
- Made NPCs with important information wave to you, so you are more likely to listen to them
- Improved performance of the HUD drastically (a lot of elements are no longer updated each frame, only when they are actually changed; this will most likely not improve your FPS because this is a CPU job and the CPU is done with the calculation of each frame long before the GPU is)
- Fixed being able to walk along tiny ledge to beat the platform puzzle before the chapel
- Fixed holes near the facility in which you could get stuck
- Fixed getting stuck on objects you carry while being on a jumppad and dropping them in midair
- On top of the highest mountain the view down is no longer blurry
- Now hiding speech bubbles of people talking who are too far away from you
- Fixed floor in a secret cave being slippery that you couldn't walk on it
- Fixed a secret mountain cave being too dark
- Fixed that some health fruits were not picked up automatically
- Fixed item/ability buttons showing a white rectangle instead of the correct buttons
- Made Demon-Grunt way more likely to spawn than Demon-Bomb
- Made Demon-Grunt death-gibs smaller
- Fixed Demon-Grunt attacking you after he's already dead

- Changed clothing of NPCs - Those with a certain clothing now always have important hints so that you will subconsciously get attracted to them
- Fixed cave under farm being too dark and foggy
- Made facility less foggy
- Demon-Bomb now explodes instantly if the damage dealt is very high. If you just barely kill him, he will turn into a bomb for you to explode whenever you want.
- Demon-Grunt now explodes with gibs and splashes (you hardly noticed him dying before)
- Replaced 2 money chests with sword upgrades
- Shopkeeper in redtown now tells you where to put the barrel instead of telling you to "bring them to me" - people would put the barrel into his face without anything happening
- Made puzzle in front of giant carrot easier to perform by making the button larger and quicker to press
- Added some more wood pieces here and there to make backtracking with the force beam easier
- Added more checkpoints
- Gun-Pickup-Coin upgrade only works on small coins, not on big ones
- Fixed ForceCube-Light tutorial not showing which button to press
- Fixed lots of other small things