Firstly, let's dive right into the rundown of the game! Spaceslingers is a space-time bending interstellar ride requiring careful use of gravity and time dilation to navigate through interstellar hazards and land on a target planet, delivering your payload with the lowest possible time taken.
Featuring bizarre cosmic objects, both real and imagined, like blackholes, whiteholes and wormholes, you control the direction and power of your ships launch and then let gravity do the rest. By skimming close to space-time warping objects, the time you experience slows down, allowing you to top the leader-boards by being the most daring and risking life and limb skimming event horizons, all in the name of delivering packages for your employer, Spamazon!
With over 50 deliveries and an in-built delivery editor allowing you to create custom levels, the potential for cosmic couriers is endless. Just try not to get spaghettified on the way! Now for something a little more personal.
It's been a long road for me, developing this title. What started out as a little prototype of me throwing blocks around a circle that I had coded gravity into has finally morphed into an actual game! A game that people can play! I'm excited and nervous for it to be finally live.
In many ways, it's quite emotional. I started making the game because I have a deep and abiding love of the universe in all its glory. I wanted to make something that was interesting and showed some potential aspects of the universe that people might not be aware of, like time dilation, or the concept of whiteholes. I loved the idea of toying with gravity and it was a lot of fun to see how real-world Newtonian physics interacted in the various situations I concocted.
Making the game has been my life and soul for many months now. There's something akin to loss that comes with finally releasing it. I've still got updates coming and I will be actively working on it for a while yet (and helping people with any bugs/problems they might encounter for the rest lifetime of the game), but this is the culmination, the pinnacle, the apex of the development. My baby is out in the wild now!
I hope that everyone who plays it has fun! I hope to see your name at the top of the leaderboards! And I hope it inspires a little bit more love and fascination with space, astronomy and all the cool things that are as yet undiscovered in our vast, wonderful and mildly terrifying universe!
If you like Spaceslingers and want to see what I'll be working on next, head on over to https://refreshertowel.games!
Big announcement today, but I'm going to post the patch notes first. A lot of small issues and bugs were fixed in this patch, mostly the placeables system and some character deletion/recreation/disappearance bugs.
Patch Notes:
New:
Steam Cloud Saves!
Didn’t move Penny
Improved:
Items all sell for 40% of their initial value now
Minimum of 1 gold for any item with a value
Clyde now loans you a unique axe with no value
Fixed:
Horses can swim again
Placeable items disappearing act
With this, the price changed back up and growing times increased
Various dialog typos
Removed some Witch’s Eve dialog
Various reported bugs fixed
You can now use deleted character names on new characters
Fixed an issue with characters disappearing when one is missing or deleted
Announcement:
It’s been a busy couple of months since we launched in early access. In that time, we’ve made a lot of progress and released a lot of patches, updates and hotfixes (in conjunction with community feedback - thank you as always!). We’ve also learned a bit about how we can position ourselves to keep working effectively in the future. So here’s an announcement to break down and explain some changes we’re making to our update schedule.
The last update (with planters and wind whirlers) did what it needed to do - stress test some early implementations of the placeables system, which will form a fundamental part of the housing update. It exposed a lot of bugs, which we’re working our way through and will result in a good, robust, housing system, not to mention the somewhat unexpected side effect of a brand new save system with Steam cloud save support! However, the bugs were disappointing for many players who had the planters they’d spent their hard earned gold on vanish. We hotfixed a patch to lower the cost so people could stress test them more and recuperate their lost items. But in hindsight, we should have been making proper use of our amazing dedicated testing team with at least a week for them to test and report major bugs before we pushed anything to the public build. Recently, while rushing to get these builds out on time to meet our deadlines, we've been working up until the day of release, sometimes only giving our testers an hour or two to rush through before we need to publish the build. So here’s the plan:
Starting in January, we will be doing updates every second and fourth Tuesday of the month. We will have quarterly goals to meet, which will be in a roadmap we’ll publish soon. So we’re doing away with the old plan of minor and major updates each month. You can still expect updates to be the same size and frequency as normal in terms of content - like before, some updates will focus on quality of life, some will contain new, minor features, and some will have major features and content updates. But instead of minor/major milestones, the updates will align with the new quarterly feature roadmap. And importantly, on the new timeline, all updates will be tested properly by our team of dedicated testers, with plenty of time to find and fix bugs. Speaking of which, we’re still looking for more testers right now, so go check out the form in our Discord in the #faq channel and sign up if you’re interested.
Now, the roadmap isn’t up yet, (we’re still finalizing the specifics within the dev team,) but I should flag that the housing update won’t be coming out today as planned after the initial delay. I know, it hurts me too, but the object persistence issues we discovered last update absolutely had to be resolved first. We really don’t want anyone’s homes vanishing after they’ve worked so hard and waited so long for them.
In the meantime, we’re workshopping some exciting changes to inventories and storage, including the ability to expand your inventory with different gear, spells, potions, mounts and even pets. This will come along with a host of new quality of life features like category tabs and changes to how stacks and splitting works. This system overhaul has been totally driven by player feedback and is designed to play to the strengths of the game, so we hope you’re excited to try out the changes for yourself as soon as it’s ready.
Thanks for being understanding about the delay, and thank you especially for being along for the ride as we endeavour to hit our stride as a team and keep making this game hand in hand with you all. See you on stream!
Improved the tutorial to better explain the interface and the game loop
* If you want to try the game again with the new updated tutorials, you can do so by going into settings and disable and enable the tutorial again. Then simply start a new game :)
We will be performing scheduled maintenance beginning on Tuesday, November 17, 2020, 6:00 PM (PST) and expect the service to be unavailable for approximately 4-6 hours.
Reason:
Routine server checks and modification,
Halloween event will end. You can find full event details here.
Thanksgiving event will begin. You can find full event details here.
Kunlun Raid Boss update. You can find full update details here.
Raised level cap from Immortal Spirit 6 (246) to Immortal Spirit 10 (250).
RTE quests have been added for reaching level 248 and 250.
Removed 2nd Role Upgrade requirement for Sacred Flower Mistress of Cloud skill Protection of Departed Souls.
Fixed an issue where a box in the Gold Coins Mansion's top-left treasure room cannot be opened.
The localization of the Sacred Flower Chi Kung skill, Kung Drain Summoning has been addressed.
Fixed an issue where you are still able to attack with the Chi Breathing UI open.
Fixed an issue where you cannot use Creating Guide of Blood Sorcerer (Repel) and Creating Guide of Blood Sorcerer (Wave) in F11 UI.
Fixed an issue where the Seastorm White Dragon Weapons are showing incorrect stats after Patch 222.
We'll update this post when the maintenance is complete and servers are available. Additional Patch Notes, including improvements and new features, will be added after the maintenance. Thank you for your patience during the maintenance.
No surprise here but I have been unable to continue working on this game for a while now for various reasons. This is just the official announcement that this game is closing down. I think some of you who have tried playing this recently weren't even able to log in or were experiencing other major issues due to lack of maintenance, especially on the database side. I'm really sorry about that.
I am now unable to keep the payments going to keep this game online and, as some of you know, the game project itself broke on me and data was lost. This was my own fault for not being as careful as I should have been and not being familiar enough with game development. I would love to remake this project with all the things that I've learned, including database management, but that's for the future. For now I will be contacting Steam to take this game off the store.
Thank you to everyone who supported this game in any way, and my sincere apologies to anyone that experienced any major issues that didn't let them access or enjoy the game.
Finally some "dev news" 😎 Many of you asked how game development was going and what are we working on (and when it'll be live).
After a daily meeting, you can check the update "plan" on the Trello.
First big change, complete art rework
We weren't happy with the overall look of the game and the menus, so we are completely reworking the art in the whole game, from zero (and this is nearly finished by the way).
It is more consistent, full Pixel-Art with less hesitation.
This means new UIs, Pilots, Ships and Arenas with new FXs everywhere!
Second big change, modular ships!
We are changing the "ship system" to a “modular ship system”: you craft your ship with modules.
What does it mean? You now have to craft modules from resources you will gather by playing. Then chose a cockpit, wings, thrusters, battery and a weapon.
Each module has different properties and statistics and can drastically change the gameplay of the ship. A quick preview of what the modular system will be
This “setup” will now define the ships and the limit will be based on an "energy consumption system" for each module.
And because we think it’s gonna be fun, you can choose only a few modules to play with your ship (no weapon at all will be possible).
The skinning system will now work "by module".
If this is the main feature of the next big update, we will also bring: server regions gamepad navigation a new progression (now "player level" will be useful) many bugfix + minor improvements here and there and... the ranked mode !
Third big change, the ranked mode!
It is still not completely defined yet, but it'll be locked to new players. We want this mode to make you climb the floors of the giant tower of Pongarena, and arenas will change along your rank.
The ranked mode will be explained in a next update post so please keep following!
An ongoing concept art of “The tower of Pongarena”
What’s next?
This new modular system gave us a lot of ideas which are planned for 2021 🤗😉
So when will it be live? We don't know yet but we target it before the end of the year.
Ah and we should have new servers starting tonight, which should bring WAY BETTER performances 👀 Join us for the “Dev Challenge” on the Twitch channel.
All feedback and suggestions are welcome, let us know what you have in mind 🕵️♀️
And before leaving each other, here is a teaser of the new design 😎
We'll be starting at 10pm EST / 2a UTC on the US-Mid Official Server and voice chat on http://discord.gg/playhanako
We are now using the new Steam Playtest feature for our Wednesday Events. Anyone can request access and play during these events from here on out and access will end when the event ends. To continue playing anytime, simply purchase the game.
Note: If you requested access this week it will be granted Wednesday morning to download in time for the night event. Keep in mind that access may be disabled outside of events.
See the testing initiatives below for what we'll be testing tonight.
Testing Initiatives/Test Patch Notes
- Bug fix for AI issues in CTS mode. - Bug fix for AI being able to capture their own point in Castle Raid mode. - Audio improvements for ritual UI cues. - *NEW MECHANIC* - Ground stabs. Since KD's are a big part of our game we are trying an early prototype of a ground stab mechanic. You can press back + click quickly to execute one. We plan to have ground stab auto-detected on your stab key (usually middle-mouse) in the future. - Art improvements to Hanako Castle map.
We do development streams of our dev and preparation for our weekly events usually Sun-Tues around 11pm EST on http://twitch.tv/hanakogame
We can't express how happy we are! First of all, because the game has gotten more attention than we could ever wish, and secondly because we've got a lot of criticism that would help us build a game you like.
Pretend is a project started by a small group of students, that wasn't meant for public release, but after many suggestions, we saw an opportunity to bring players a concept they love with additional cool features. We had to overcome many difficulties during development because we are new to making games for the public, and we had relatively big goals. It is necessary to mention that the development process is very active but slow - because it is hard to study and work on the game at the same time.
Now, we are working hard to port the game to Android, iOS, and browser, implement all the cool ideas that we received during the pre-release stage and fix the tremendous amount of bugs.
Here's a list of things we plan to add before or during early access:
Leveling system
Steam invitations and overall API integration
Roles - and at the same keep the game balanced
Own cosmetics, that you can draw and wear.
Local servers. Currently unavailable because the connections are peer-to-peer and require connection to a signaling server.
Browser support.
New maps with new sabotages.
And many more
We also can't ignore the hate that comes towards us - blaming the fact that Pretend is heavily based on another popular title. As mentioned above, we do everything that is possible to bring players a new experience with familiar gameplay mechanics (and we need your ideas !).
Pretend is currently in development and we hope to release the game as soon as possible. The original release date was set for November, but we still aren't sure considering the amount of work left.
In a world... where Mayonnaise is all but forgotten, this sole sequel could rekindle the flames of its former glory... Huh? Too much of a dramatic kickoff you say? You won't think that when you play the new game!
That's right, the Team at Green Lava released a sequel for My Name is Mayo! Give it a shot, if you wanna go for another round of clicking mayonnaise around. This new game now has some mini games, a collectable album, good old mayonnaise stories, hidden secrets and more!
