Big shift since greenlight campaign

[supersmo]

Hi,
Congratulations on reaching early access :-)
The game seems to have changed quite a lot since the Greenlight version. I'd like to hear your thoughts and motivations regarding the changes.

• Before Smash Pixel Racing looked like a cool one button game where the player moved at 45 degree angles. Is that control scheme, game mode and visual style scrapped.
If so why???
Will the classic mode be available as a game mode?

• When I read "PS Does anyone actually have 8 Xbox gamepads hooked up to their PC?" in an announcement I was hoping to see the game support more than 4 players. What's the status and plans for this feature? (I have 8 Xbox game pads.)

[JollyfishGames]

Hi there!

Thank you for checking the game out again since the greenlight campaign, that means a lot!

There have indeed been massive changes. The old style is completely scrapped, there were like 2-3 versions of the old style game and I just could not get it to a state where it was satisfying/fun in playtesting. I ended up losing motivation completely on the game and took a break from development.

The new changes, actual physics, analog control, having HP and Energy bar that you can hold and use when you want, being able to identify yourself on screen as a actual ship etc just really tied it all together and we started to have some great fun in testing. I was going to keep the 45 degree movement but the full control just felt too good in comparison, I wanted to make a more complex experience, having it as a one button game was cool but I also wanted to add things like boosting and shooting buttons so it had to grow somewhat.

I don't think the classic control method can work with the new physics and stuff, maybe... Right now I have no plans to add that, but I do plan on adding other modes that we can come up with.

The old game I felt needed more than 4 players to be interesting at all whereas even 1v1 the new game can be a good time. However I would like to increase the player count at some point in Early Access, either to 6 or 8. I tried to hook up 5 gamepads at some point in development and any more than the 4th seemed to not work. The old game used extra keyboard players and a mouse player to reach 8 players, I may go down this route again but I would rather just use gamepads as everyone would be on the same level, same control scheme etc. I would like to hear how you got 8 gamepads working though! I do think 8 ships on screen would be crowded top to bottom (maybe two columns of 4, staggered start for some) but I'm sure it's doable somehow and I can only imagine the chaos/fun of 8 players in the new game!

Anyway thanks for checking out the game and coming back after all this time since the greenlight, it's cool to see someone who noticed the (huge) changes!

Well this turned into a long post!

[supersmo]

Thanks for your lengthy reply.
As for the 4 player limit it has to do with the api. XInput has a stupid 4 gamepad limit because Xbox 360 had that limit. A lot of frameworks have options to access all gamepads via directinput instead. When this done you are able to access all game pads but Xbox controllers loose rumble effect and you are unable to detect when both right and left trigger are held at the same time because of Microsoft's intentionally flawed implementation of their drivers. Hot plugging can be done with the direct input api but if your framework of choice doesn't support it the easiest is to tell everyone to plug in the gamepads before starting the game.
On a side note... Microsoft has a new api for the universal Windows platform that supports more than 4 XInput devices but I don't know if the game has to be compiled as a windows store app to use it.

What are you using to access the gamepads?

[JollyfishGames]

Thanks for your help, the game is made in Construct 2, I can't seem to find whether C2 is using xinput or directinput, and there's no option to change. I will do some more testing with this soon, see if I can get more than 4 working, as you say it might actually work if they are plugged in before.

[supersmo]

According to what I read about Construct2 it probably only supports XInput: https://www.scirra.com/forum/html-5-gamepads_t91446?start=10

If you are able to call dll:s from construct2 you would be able to get around the limitation. I know too little about how construct works though.