This is a smaller update, but it includes a redesign of the in game HUD, which I think is a major upgrade. I got very positive feedback on last patches improvements to the controls and the addition of drag-click mode but I will be making a few more minor tweaks to those features in the next update.
Patch Notes 10-20-2023
Redesigned the look and feel of the UI
Added an audio cue and visual effect to the orbs when your attack charge hits the required threshold
Added the decoration for the kata of the burning sands
Added the background visuals for the kata training map
Fixed some bugs with katas and challenges in multiplayer when people would quit in the middle of a run
Updated the Modern controls within Retroa Retroa Builda to a kind of Modern/Retro version. As they were really only using modified classic controls. You now don't jump as high, but can double jump to cover the same jump distance. You can also control the direction of jump after initial jump.
I have updated the interaction with the conveyor's when using the modern controls. You now slow down when running against the conveyor and speed up when running with them, you can use "Stop" controls to move at the same speed as conveyor.
Made slight refinements to Classic controls.
PLEASE NOTE!
Sorry but I can't upload any Gifs to demonstrate the changes at the moment, they don't seem to want to upload.
The controls are still likely to change further, I have a lot of testing with my current created levels. I have to check how the change to the controls feel within the levels, I may have to make a lot of changes to the current levels, especially levels 2,3,10 as these levels use the classic controls.
I'm not sure if players would appreciate jumping back and forth between controls.
I may also include ledge grabbing, I'll see if I feel the game needs it, as I test and make changes to the levels, we'll see how it goes. Wish me luck.
Disabled selling a food stand 🚚 during the day. ☀️
Fixed burger and drink count in Recipe, Inventory, and Ordering views.
Added UI information for managing an empty stand spot. 📍
Implemented auto stock with inventory calculator 🧮
Finalized the research system.
Completed UI design for City view 🗺️ night.
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Playlist Of The Day - Earn rewards for playing daily!
Want to discover new Tasks to play, and get rewarded for playing them, every day? Look no further than the Playlist Of The Day, landing on the Home Tab! The Playlist Of The Day contains a selection of popular + fun Tasks that test the full range of aiming skills and are approachable for any skill level.
The best part? Upon completing the Playlist Of The Day, you earn free Aim Credits - our new virtual currency in Aimlabs! Save up your Aim Credits to purchase all your favorite items from our in-game Shop, like our new Dusk Runners themed packs, including 5 brand new Profile Pics/Banners, 2 new Gun Skins, and a new Target Skin!
Universal Sens Finder Recommendation - Improve your scores with an optimized sens!
Are you hard-stuck Ruby in Aimlabs Ranked Seasons, or just can’t seem to beat your Gridshot high score? Using Universal Sens Finder, you can finally figure out if your sensitivity is what’s holding you back! Universal Sens Finder intelligently changes your sensitivity as you play, guiding you towards the sensitivity you consistently perform the best on, on a per-Task basis! Start finding your optimal sens for your last played Task, straight from the Home Tab!
Recommended Tasks - Never run out of Tasks to play ever again!
Ever launch Aimlabs, but don’t know what you feel like playing that day? Now with Recommended Tasks on the Home Tab, Aimlabs intelligently offers Tasks suggestions that are similar to what you like to play, using your last played Task as the seed - so recommendations always feel relevant!
Discovery - Try the very first game-focused AI for free!
Curious about all the hype around Discovery AI? Try it out yourself for free! Preview how Discovery answers popular questions that Aimlabs players are asking, about aim training, improving in their favorite FPS games, and more! You can also learn about everything else Discovery is capable of, like providing personalized tips + strategies, customizing your favorite Tasks for you with ease, and much more - all straight from the Home Tab.
Your Stats - 4 New Widgets to monitor your performance!
We’ve reimagined old Widgets + added new ones to the Home Tab, to ensure you’re always provided with relevant stats about your training!
Last Played Task : Monitor your score history of your last played Task, and quickly see when your average is up!
Training Streak : Quickly keep track of how often you train in Aimlabs and how long your streak is!
Ranked Progress : Stay on top of your Aimlabs rank for every Ranked Season, and see how close you are to ranking up!
Valorant Training Center : Conveniently view all your Valorant stats, right inside Aimlabs!
Conditional Lobbies - Get reminded about cool features you’ve never tried before!
The days of digging through menus to find cool Aimlabs features are over! With Conditional Lobbies, Aimlabs reminds you about features you’re missing out on, and takes you straight to them from the Home Tab! Examples include becoming ranked in Ranked Seasons, customizing your Profile Pic/Banner for the first time to stand out on Leaderboards, finding your first optimal sensitivity with the Flick Optimizer, and many more firsts!
Incoming Updates
Cool new features for the Home Tab and Playlist Of The Day!
Exciting new in-game events with rewards!
An entirely new core experience in Aimlabs!
Much much more!
If you aren't already following us, check out @aimlab on Twitter & Instagram for more awesome events, memes, and training tips. Don't forget you can report any bugs in-game and join us on Discord or check out the subreddit to let us know of any feature requests you have or just to come and hang out with the community & our devs!
Version 0.9.3 is now live! See below details on this update to Astral Gunners. This update is mostly focused on introducing the real Hyperspace and addressing critiques from players that still needed to be addressed. Thank you for your continued support.
Hyperspace
The true version of Hyperspace finally makes its debut! Right now it's still being used as a placeholder final stage, but will eventually become a secret bonus stage.
The overall theme of Hyperspace is that it now utilizes any progression elements achieved within a run. Each shadow fight won creates a new bullet-generating portal in the stage. Assisting NPCs will reappear on this stage to help the player. The bonus waves from timeskips will play out where they left off. Shoot as many UFOs as you can to spawn bigger and bigger ones. And Golden Starshooter is back with a vengeance!
A new audio track now accompanies the stage!
Shadow Fight Updates
There was a distinct lack of risk/reward present in the shadow fights. Simultaneously they were also far too difficult for the average player (as of writing this less than 5% of players have been able to clear them at all). Our thinking is this makes the presence of the shadow fights feel mostly like a frustrating addition rather than a satisfying challenge. Overall these changes should allow the shadow fights to actually exist for more casual players, while also providing a more interesting scoring and survival experience for more dedicated players.
Special Meter: Instead of starting the level with only one special charge, atoms now continuously fly across the screen allowing for multiple special uses.
Consequences and Continuity: Instead of being kicked out of the battles upon dying once, you will now have to complete the level before exiting.
Easy Mode: Shadow fights will now be present in easy mode, however it will only be a slightly toned down version of the first phase of each fight. The associated achievements have been updated to require beating these bosses on normal or harder.
No more free Barrier: We tested these levels having a barrier allowing the player to get hit twice before exiting the stage. This never really solved any of the issues we had with the stages and is being removed in this version.
Blue and Violet: The shadow fights for Blue and Violet didn't ever have extra bullets for hard mode. This has now been added. Additionally the Shadow Violet fight has been tuned up a bit across the board.
Speed Matters: More of the challenge has been shifted to winning quickly. The boss timer has been reduced down to 75 seconds, and if you don't defeat them in the timeframe the bosses will leave and the stage ends.
Points: Shadow bosses now drop a treasure chest with medallions when defeated. The base point value on destruction has been reduced from 100k to 25k. It is now possible to enter System Overload on these stages, so while the minimum possible amount of points is lower, the maximum potential has been increased a decent amount.
Misc Changes:
[Player Suggestion] Crimson Peaks: The stage hazards that create flame bullets are now indestructible. The play pattern on this level was somewhat underwhelming on this stage due to the optimal strategy being just to destroy them before they were a threat, despite being designed to be a consistent threat. The middle section where you have to collect parts for the flamemobile should now be appropriately engaging and challenging. There is still one exception to this new rule, however.
[Player Suggestion] Training Mode Special Meter: You can now set an exact amount for the special meter in training mode.
Red Gunner: We fixed an animation glitch with Red's charge shot that functions as a slight buff. Red now charges their Shot 2 five frames quicker.
Samurai Gunner: Samurai's damage when attacking nearby enemies has been toned down dramatically. The damage total has been cut in half and the frequency of attacks takes four times as long.
Orange Worker: Orange previously did pitiful damage when helping fight minibosses and now does roughly five times the amount of damage.
Level Select: Changed the difficulty info for a few of the stages. Fixed some issues where Dystopia didn't display your assist character and Samurai didn't appear as the assist character in other stages.
Escape From Mandrillia: Local Asymmetric VR vs PC - Germanban
Hello there! Been a long time since the last update, because this one is packing a lot. Some of it boring but necessary, some of it unnecessary but pretty exciting!
Before continuing, a big thank you to all of you who have been on the experimental branch and giving feedback at the discord server. As always, a small reminder that you can join not just for feedback, but also to find other people to play with over Remote Play:
Also, the game is almost at 100 reviews! (and that's just counting users who bought it here) A year ago I would have never thought this hyper-niche, PCVR only, local only monkey game would get nearly as many, so another big thank you to all of you who left one, positive or negative. It really helps and means a lot!
Now, back to the update. The most notable thing coming up is the fully-reworked Mandrillian bots, but there's also some other juicy stuff...
IMPROVED MANDRILLIAN BOTS
Last year I added something I wasn't sure I could pull off: fully automated Mandrillian enemies. While... acceptable, they didn't feel at all like playing against a human player. For this reason, they had some extra features (like armor and damage-reduction shiny weakpoints) as a way to compensate. However, their behavior was almost zombie-like; they just rushed at the player and wailed until one of the two died. I didn't really like it so two months ago I started this rework.
BOT-HUMAN STANDARIZATION
My goal with the rework was to make bots feel like moderately skilled humans as closely as I could. For this to be possible, I started by standarizing most of the systems between bots and human Mandrillians, and adjusted the bot behavior accordingly.
Most Mandrillian-related match modifiers now affect them, they operate under the same 6-stamina-point system as human players, have to charge up their attacks, can heal with vent powerups, need to unlock a vent exit to respawn there...
The first thing you will notice is bots behave less like zombies (just charging towards the player and repeatedly bashing your head in). They will try different approaches when attacking the VR player: sometimes they will try to circle around you, feint attacks, and dodge your shots.
New behavior example: after dodging, each of the bots go to opposite sides of the room, then attack from two different directions
When running out of stamina or getting too damaged, they will run for the vents and try to heal up or recharge their energy by using the vent powerups (which have also been tweaked, more on this later). Their roaming logic has a less random approach, so they will tend to scout in places that make sense for the VR player to be in (for example, they won't search on the closed up Observation Chambers right after starting a match; and if all checkpoint gates have been opened they will start guarding the exit area).
And finally (and I'm kinda proud of this one) they now "communicate" with each other, which means not only they update each other about the VR player whereabouts, but also they will coordinate their attacks, try flanking the player and do some pretty neat looking coop strats to get the jump on you. Way better than just blocking each other trying to get an attack in!
All in all, I hope these new bots bring a decent single player experience to users that want to play some Escape from Mandrillia without hassling any friends... or a proper challenge for brave souls that feel like "just" 2 Mandrillians aren't enough (because yes, you can still combine human players and bots to get up to a 1 vs 4 match). And if you think even that is too easy for you, the "Armored" and "Juiced" versions of them are still available, if you dare!
THE SUPER SHOTGUN
Yes, there is now a beefier version of the sawn off, using its own massive shells. Said shells are so big they take an entire inventory slot (just like the grenade launcher and quad launcher ammo) but they absolutely annihilate Mandrillians. You can select it as a starter longarm, and it will also randomly appear in corpses and in longarm crates (spawner entry coming soon)
I added this weapon as a way to make the Super Soldier preset more fun and similar to its original inspiration, which brings us to the next point:
SUPER SOLDIER IMPROVEMENTS
The Super Soldier preset, while an interesting concept, was lacking in the fun department. Even with infinite ammunition, its loadout (starting with two sawn-off shotguns and a chainsaw) was a hassle to operate, and players spent more time reloading their sidearms than doing the actual run-and-gun the mode was intended for. For this reason, the preset has been reworked on top of also featuring the new Super Shotgun.
The new Super Soldier loadout gives the player a pistol, a pump shotgun, and a self-charging multitool with just the shock enabled, but keycard location display at all times (to mimimize time wasted looking for those).
The weapon unlock progression on the checkpoints has also changed; before it was Pump Shotgun > Minigun > Plasma Rifle. Now it's Super Shotgun > Minigun > Plasma Rifle.
Finally, the "self heal" match setting (that was mainly used in the Super Soldier preset) has also been modified. Instead of adding a little amount of health with every Mandrillian death, it now triggers when a monkey gets gibbed AND you are close enough to the explosion to get covered in their blood (totally original concept pls donut steal).
The self heal also triggers when gibbing a Mandrillian corpse so... yeah
MANDRILLIAN BUTTON-PUSHING
This started as a wild experiment but ended up adding some needed depth to Mandrillian gameplay (and countering some common but annoying VR Player strats)
By using either your face or your knuckles, you can interact with pushable buttons all over the map.
VR Players will need to think twice if they want to do the good ol "leave keycards at doors" thing. If you do, Mandrillians are now able to just... push the button and open them.
This also adds surprise strats like sneaking behind a deployed sentry turret to turn it off.
And, of course, mess up the gate-opening minigame to assert dominance.
SPECTATOR CAMERA: TOP DOWN AND IMPROVED THIRD PERSON
You can now cycle between the third-person view and an orthographic top-down perspective, both as a LIV output and for the ingame spectator view (when playing solo against the computer). The third person camera has also been improved to offer a cooler framing of the action, including visible ceilings.
MISCELLANEOUS THINGS
NOISY STEPS AND NOISY STEP VISUALIZATION
Sometimes it felt a bit awkward to gauge the running speed threshold before appearing on the Mandrillians' minimap. Now, there's a (very faint) footstep noise every time you are causing a potentially alerting footstep, but more importantly your Multitool will display a tiny circle around your location to let you know you're being a noisy fella.
VENT POWERUP BALANCE
Running around the vents desperately hoping for a 1up or health to spawn was frustrating and boring. To fix it, I've buffed the vent powerup spawn rates; there will be at least 1 powerup available at any given moment in the vents. To compensate for this, I've reduced the spawn rates for 1ups (which now also have the health item effect), and reduced the health powerup values from 20-45 HP to 20-25 HP.
MONKEY POINT SYSTEM
This is an important thing that will come in handy later. Won't go into many details, but very soon Mandrillians will be able to use these points to buy little perks before respawning. Stay tuned!
TIP CYCLE
Just a tiny thing I added while preparing these screens for the upcoming point stuff; now you can cycle between the Mandrillian tips on spawn selection by pressing RB/LB or Q/E
FULL CHANGELOG
Fully reworked Mandrillian bot's AI
Standarized most of the mechanics between human and bot Mandrillians
Added new weapon: Super Shotgun
Tweaked Super Soldier preset parameters to be more fun and include the Super Shotgun
Mandrillians can now interact with most buttons in the scenery
Doors can now crush the VR player
Improved overall gate-crushing logic
On-kill health regeneration is now applied by being close to Mandrillians being gibbed (as in being showered by their blood)
Added a new option for spectator camera: Top-Down View
Improved Third Person spectator camera
Added -very- faint step noises when the robot is moving fast enough to cause minimap sound pings
Added a small circle flashing at the center of the Multitool that flashes along "noisy" footsteps
Thickened all the walls of the map, making most gate frames less likely to get players stuck on them
Buffed vent powerup spawn rates (at any given moment there will always be at least 1 active powerup in the vents)
Nerfed vent health powerup from 20-45 HP gained to 20-25
Slightly nerfed vent 1up powerup spawn rates to balance the increased overall spawn rate
1up powerups now also act as health powerups (both HP and stamina recovery)
Very slightly increased monkey vent jump landing area damage
Virtual crouch is now a toggle
Slightly nerfed crouch walking speed
The "this is a local multiplayer game" warning that pops on first launch is now a physical screen that also mentions the Mandrillian bots
CEO keycard now acts as a cyan keycard outside of its main use
Physics timestep now tied to your headset refresh rate
Added a Mandrillian "point system" that will come in handy very soon...
