Box Party [Demo v1.5]

[catoidi]

Hello again again. Got another cool new thing to show off today.

Next new feature coming to v1.4: More difficulty options!


You can find these options in a new area in the Difficulty Select level.
These options are applied on top of which one of the 3 Difficulties you select.

I'll gloss over these options real quick:

• Enemy HP/Damage: You can control how much health/damage the enemies have. Pretty simple.
• Glowstick Start: At the start of each level, you'll lose all of your weapons, except the glowstick. Like a Pistol Start in Doom.
• More Max Ammo: Gives you 50% more max ammo for all weapons except for the glowstick, which gets double the ammo.
• HP/Ammo Drops: Control how many health and ammo drops can spawn from defeating enemies.

When you choose any of the options that make your game easier, your score will begin to drain over time so that you can't cheese the high score system.

[catoidi]

Hello once again. Took a real actual hiatus from working on Box Party during the summer, so I haven't been able to get as much done as I had planned to this year.

Therefore, instead of releasing in 2022, I'll be delaying the full release of Box Party until further notice.

This doesn't mean I haven't done anything new in the game. Far from it, actually! I've gotten a good amount of work done on the game these past 9 days.

Here's an imgur album of some new stuff.
I'll give you a rundown of all the new stuff:

1. I've replaced the old BIGFONT with a new one that has much better shading and has been shrunk down to better fit in menus and such.
2. I've done the one thing that no gzdoom modder should ever do: Replace the options menus.
   -All options not related to Box Party have been removed, and now there's new tooltips that'll appear to explain what most of the options actually do.
   -Also some of the menus will now do an animated transition like all the other cool and epic menus do.
   -You can still find the original gzdoom menus if needed.
3. Updated the visuals for a buncha different enemy attacks.
   -All onion based enemies will now use exclusively water-themed explosions instead of the regular explosions.
   -All of the exploding missile attacks spawned from enemies/bosses now leave bullet trails behind them so it's easier to tell which direction the projectile is heading.
   -Nerfed the Bell Pepper boss's rage attack by not allowing them to turn in random directions while moving+shooting.
   -Big Pizza's projectile attack should now be more predictable and easier to read.
4. The color of the player's glowstick now matches the color of the secondary attack's thrown projectile.

There's a buncha smaller stuff I did too that you might not be interested in, so I'll put em here:

---

• Added an option for Boss HP Bars to not fade away when you stop looking at them.
• The blue exhaustion bars for Bosses will now go down instead of going up.
• Consolidated all of the duplicate boss code into a single parent actor that all bosses now call from.
• Replaced that one ACS script that would set all of your hats to default with a new ZScript-ified version that will grab all hats loaded via BOXHAT.txt and reset them all to default, therefore giving the script modded hat compatibility. This is good for debugging new hats. (I'm probably gonna be the only person that ever uses this, but that's okay.)
• Removed some default keybinds that don't make sense to have available in Box Party, like ones that point to old GZDOOM menus, or the ones that change your screen size.
• Also fixed that one issue where you would sometimes click an option in the main menu and it'd choose the wrong option due to the options not being sized correctly.
• There's now an option to toggle discord rich presence in the options menu. In v1.4, it's enabled by default.

So with that out of the way, Demo Update v1.4 is almost done. I just need to put the finishing touches on 2 side quests, and maybe add in some other ideas I can come up with, and then I'll upload it to steam and itch.io.

Since I won't be releasing the full game this year, I'll instead be doing a public beta testing of what full version content is currently available sometime at the end of the year.

And lastly, I'll show off a bit about all the side quests for level 3 once they're in a ready enough state to show off. Stay tuned.

[catoidi]

Only 1 side quest left to finish for level 3, then the v1.4 demo update will be ready.

One of the side quests involves mirrors in some way...

[catoidi]

Surprise surprise, the v1.4 Demo Update is out now!


You can go ahead and download the update on itchio or steam. Whichever one you prefer.

Just read this changelog here to see everything that's new (there's a lot)
https://catoidi.itch.io/box-party/devlo ... update-v14

Also, there's now a new Linux build available on the itch.io store page!
I haven't been able to playtest this version, so be sure to tell me about any issues related to it and I'll fix it immediately.

There's no Linux build on steam yet, unfortunately. I haven't been able to get Steam Cloud Saving across Windows and Linux to work properly.
For now, you can just play the Steam Version using Proton. (Works just fine from my playtesting)

[KynikossDragonn]

There's no Linux build on steam yet, unfortunately. I haven't been able to get Steam Cloud Saving across Windows and Linux to work properly.
For now, you can just play the Steam Version using Proton. (Works just fine from my playtesting)

I'm not entirely sure how all that is setup from Steam development, but I generally like running things natively outside of Steam just to avoid the issues with "STEAM_RUNTIME". I've actually always disabled Steam Cloud (even back when I was still on Windows 7) because of horror stories of it destroying peoples save progress in some games.

It's good to see how much progress has been made, looking forward to the full thing when it comes out!

[catoidi]

I'm not entirely sure how all that is setup from Steam development, but I generally like running things natively outside of Steam just to avoid the issues with "STEAM_RUNTIME". I've actually always disabled Steam Cloud (even back when I was still on Windows 7) because of horror stories of it destroying peoples save progress in some games.

Yea I've heard of people having issues with Cloud Saving before related to Steam's Offline Mode or if a game doesn't separate save files between different users. I've not really had that problem myself, though.

Right now my issues involving Box Party and Cloud Saving are:
-Everything except for save files is stored inside an .ini file that is autogenerated using the name of the user. If playing Box Party on a separate PC, it will transfer everything just fine, but your settings and hats won't load by default because the user will most likely use a different name. (The way I could fix this is by forcing Box Party to load 1 specific .ini file. But this would cause all current players to lose all of their settings and hats unless they go into the game folder and change their old .ini's name to match the new one. I will probably wait until the full version releases to do this update.)
-The Windows and Linux versions of GZDOOM handle the naming and locations for the .ini files and save files differently, and I've been having trouble getting the two to work properly with Steam Cloud's cross-platform features.

It's good to see how much progress has been made, looking forward to the full thing when it comes out!

Thank you, v1.4 is probably the last major update for the demo version for the foreseeable future, as basically all the big important stuff I need to do now is for the full version.

[KynikossDragonn]

-The Windows and Linux versions of GZDOOM handle the naming and locations for the .ini files and save files differently, and I've been having trouble getting the two to work properly with Steam Cloud's cross-platform features.

Oh, yeah I remembered this with Terraria on Linux, as well as other native games, they will always spit out somewhere in $HOME, never in the working directory of the game itself. (despite a steam prefix directory exists in $HOME to begin with!)

For example, with Darwinia it always outputs to: "$HOME/.darwinia/full-steam"

And for Terraria: "$HOME/.local/share/Terraria"

"$HOME/.local/share" is a XDG specification I think?

[catoidi]

There's gonna be a minor update coming within a few days to the demo that'll include some bugfixes and stuff.

Here's basically everything that's gonna be in v1.4.1:
-Changed how the "paintings" work a bit so that it's now really easy for me to add new paintings to the game, among other things.
-Also added like 25 new paintings.
-Added 3 new hats, and also a new way to unlock the monthly hats for people who are impatient but also like unlocking things ingame without messing with system settings or console commands.
-Added a new sound for when a boss enters RAGE MODE, and when you hit a Jump Pad.
-Made it where you don't get ginormous amounts of points from enemies if they currently have an HP multiplier active.
-You can no longer change the difficulty CVARs mid-game anymore without enabling cheats.
-Fixed pepper boss rage mode effects not being removed when they die, again.
-Fixed certain item pickups sometimes not giving you it's associated points if you come into contact with the item in a specific position.

here's an image of 3 smaller images on a wall:

[catoidi]

Box Party Demo v1.4.1 is out now on Steam and itchio.

as per usual with these updates, your save files from v1.4 or before are incompatible, but your hats and your settings are fine.

New Stuff:
-Paintings got reworked a bit. 25 new paintings were added. Some paintings only spawn in specific levels. It's much easier to add new paintings now.
-Added 3 new secret hats. Added a new way to unlock the monthly secret hats.
-Added a sound to jumppads and for when bosses get mad.
-Added a new secret mechanic to the game. (hint: try not murdering stuff this time) (also: you can disable this mechanic via console commands.)

Smaller Changes:
-Fixed Pepper Boss not losing rage effects upon death, again.
-Certain scaling effects can now also change the hitboxes for actors. (Large/small objects should now have more accurate hitboxes.)
-Reduced performance by 90%.
-Nerfed bonus points given via enabling the Enemy HP Multiplier.
-You can no longer change the new difficulty modifiers via menus/console commands, without enabling cheats.
-Fixed rare cases where you could pick up specific items but not get any of it's associated score points due to differences in hitboxes.
-Changed the demo endscreen.
-Added some new obituaries.
-You can no longer carry trash bags across levels.
-Fixed the boss hp bar fade CVAR not being ON by default.
-The game now knows if you are playing on the demo version or not.

here's a random screenshot that 100% has zero relation to this update whatsoever:


also: itchio and youtube analytics tell me that a majority of people consuming Box Party content are coming from ZDoom Forums, so thanks for your continued interest in Box Party.

[catoidi]

Hi there. It's been a while. Long story short, I've been working on a new game this whole time. I'll post about it in a separate topic soon enough.

But I've got 1 more update I wanna do to Box Party Demo. This update contains new features that I've wanted to add for a long time, but didn't know how to add until recently.

Not gonna show off everything just yet, but I'll leave you with 2 screenshots of this new and improved New Game Menu, which has support for unlockable characters + levels, and per-character high score tracking. (you may recognize the design of this menu if you've seen my other game.)

This update is currently planned to release on April 15th.

[catoidi]

Demo v1.5 is out now!

Here's a quick link to the patch notes:
https://catoidi.itch.io/box-party/devlo ... update-v15