The first update for Vroom! is now available on the App Store. Changelog below.
Hey folks!
The first update for Vroom has just gone up on the app store. I’d like to thank all ya’ll for all the feedback. Some of you love it and a few of you hate it passionately, and you’ve all got some good points, some of which are addressed in the update. Also, I have here a couple of promo codes.
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Here’s a changelog that is 100% certain to have some things missing. As always, tip us off if you find anything broken or have any suggestions, we're listening.
- Fixed the issue where the entire game looked inexcusably absymally terrible on the iPhone 3GS and 3rd-Gen iPod Touches
- Vroom theme now plays in the main menu
- Added congratulatory notification when you beat a previous best lap time
- Added admonishment when you fall off a cliff
- Added signs with big red arrows on ‘em to help guide you around the tracks
- Fixed some of the stupid movements the zombies would sometimes do
- Fixed lighting on truck and truck items so they’ll never show up all black and stupid-looking anymore
- Fixed round end score text sometimes displaying over the top of the loading screen
- Made round end/timer text larger and more in-charge
- Improvements to the smoothness of the camera tilt, it should feel less sluggish now
- Fixed some collision issues on level 2, where really amazing people could sometimes get on top of the world
- Fixed similar issues on all maps, actually
- Fixed the issue that was causing level 2 to be pretty much impossible to lose
- Zombies will now also spawn when you drive the wrong way around the track. Added “wrong way” text but then took it away again because that’s no fun at all. Drive wherever you want, you guys
- Various optimisations to hopefully improve performance somewhat on most platforms. Certainly load times are better. More FPS improvements on the way
- Improved blood effect, it actually looks like blood now
- Fixed zombie LOD issue on 3rd-gen devices
- Other Stuff Also
People on the shotgun sunrise page only want to hear about shotgun sunrise, if we wanted to hear about Vroom we'd go to Vrooms indie db page.
and another thing, if you're not going to finish Shotgun Sunrise then just come out and say it, don't use this page to beg us for your support on a separate project, when our support got us nothing but disappointment on this project.
Update the SS page if its SS related, not to beg for attention.
It's SS related because it's a Shotgun Sunrise game. We'd have called it Shotgun Sunrise Racing if it would fit on an iOS icon label without truncating. Nobody's begging for anything.
Shotgun Sunrise fans, I would hope, would be interested in supporting the team who made the mod, making it more likely for us to be able to do more with SS in the future. Honestly, while I wish we'd been able to churn out more updates for the mod, don't you think it's a bit entitled to complain that you didn't get a big enough return on your $0.00? We're three guys with no money doing what we can to make fun games. My assumption is that that is a thing that some people want to get behind.
With Shotgun Sunrise, there are a bunch of reasons it's gone the way it has. The biggest reason that it has stagnated some is also the reason why it shipped at all: it released when I realised that everyone's schedules were ramping up so hard that it was a "now or never" situation. It was release or probably die completely. This is why Shotgun Sunrise is buggy and laggy and largely unoptimised. The amazing thing is that people love it anyway.
After release, our coder had to throw in the towel. This was when we put up the post saying we needed a new coder, and started asking around all over the net. We had a whole bunch of content and just needed code to pull it all together. Over the course of the year about 5 guys came forward and none of them wound up doing anything. There was no serious programmer interest in the mod at all, so there wasn't a lot we could do, so we moved on to a few other things. Something like Vroom for instance is a lot more achievable on a perpetually shrinking time budget, since it mostly uses Shotgun Sunrise assets.
>>contd
I want to stress here that we didn't just stop giving a **** about SS. We love it, and we love all ya'll. We love that 42% of you rated it 10 out of 10 despite its obvious flaws. The reason I haven't marked this thing as "development discontinued" or whatever is that we still go back to it every now and then and get a few things done. It wasn't realistic in hindsight, but a whole bunch of times we've thought that pushing out another update was something that could happen soon.
Our dream is to become stable enough to be able to make Shotgun Sunrise a real game, on a better engine, and give it the attention it deserved all along, and maybe sell it, but give it to everyone who's posted on this moddb profile for free. We love Shotgun Sunrise but working on smaller things is all we can do right now.
I hope this longer-than-expected post has been reasonably enlightening for you, and I hope you understand the whole thing better now.
I know you want some kind of actual Shotgun Sunrise news though so here's the best I've got: we want to go open-source with it. A lot of mod teams have come forward and asked to take the mod over, and we weren't really comfortable with giving it to any one of them. Open sourcing it sounds better. Honestly, I would have uploaded everything weeks ago, but you know how I mentioned we have no money? Yeah, my internet's been cut off. I'm tethering.
Also, I'm sorry I didn't reply to your last private message. Time time time.
PART 2
I'm never saying you did, its just bad PR to wag a game in front of our faces that uses the assets for an incomplete game we're still waiting for.
I too understand the programmer hunt. Its something about them that makes them come and go A LOT. I was formerly working on a remake of insurgency because of the whole controversy of the previous team splitting and handing it off to someone else who then put the mod on lockdown until he got money (yes, this is a true story). We'd gotten very close to the Alpha milestone on a orange box conversion when I'd had computer troubles and out programmer dropped off the face of the planet and quit. So we just sat in Programmer limbo until the original INS team decided to take up a remake, which my team may or may not be absorbed into.
TL;DR Mod making is hard, but that's no reason to have everyone set their standards low.
I appreciate the response to my comment, but please try to st-ray away from the "Its free therefore your expectations should be bottom-of-the-bin low" statement. It insults me as a player.
Mods are made because you think of a concept you fall in love with, and want to build it up and thrust it into the world to get praise and a sense of accomplishment, which it does bring IF you deliver it in quality. However, you cannot say "well so what if its incomplete its free" and expect people to think you'll deliver any more quality than what you've shown in the past.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Vroom is **** or anything, actually it looks quite fun to pick up and play, but waving a completed project in the face of the audience that is STILL waiting for another project is just bad PR man. It makes us feel betrayed in a sense.
Good to see the FPS improvements on Vroom, my 4G ipod wasn't handling it too well for some reason, though I do still hope to see more SS at some point, congrats on getting Vroom up to speed. (Apologies for the horrific pun)
Thanks man. Are you getting much better performance on the 4G now?
There'll be more perf improvements in the next update, which shouldn't be too far off. Working on it right now.
Modplay Monday is Shotgun Sunrise!