Early Access V0.0.5.0 — Repair to your Precious Outriders!


Posted by Chad Yates

New Features

  • Repair power-ups can now start repairing your attached outriders, if your ship has not been damaged, or is only mildly damaged.
  • Player reticle will show recently lost power-ups as color coded rings.
  • Attached outriders can now help pickup power-ups.
  • Attached shield now tinted to the player primary color.
  • Support Alt+Enter to toggle full-screen/windowed modes.
  • Support Alt+Tab to switch applications.
  • Updates to Russian translation.
  • Updates to Dutch translation.

Issues Addressed

  • The player tied to a steam account (player one) is no longer allowed to edit their name.
  • Fixed overlap of key images in HUD when ammo goes over 999.
  • Support rendering of TM character.
  • Show top X leaderboard entries when the steam player doesn’t have an entry yet.
  • Increase number of visible leaderboard entries from 20 to 30.
  • Increase number of characters displayed in leaderboards for player names.
  • Fix jitter transitioning from splash screen to title screen.

Gameplay Tweaks

  • Increased size of the power-up hit area by 50%.
  • More tweaks to end of level boss arrangements.
  • Increase the default strength of the player ship.
  • Decrease damage inflicted by some enemy bullets.
  • Increased the strength of the shield power-up by 25%.
  • Weaken smaller “mini-bosses”.
  • Bosses with missile ports now fire all missiles at the same time.
  • Increased the time where you see the missile port open (loaded or empty).
  • Increase strength of attached outriders.

Happy blasting!


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Early Access V0.0.4.0 — Quicken the Pace!


Posted by Chad Yates

This update mostly includes game play updates to re-balance some elements, but also includes a few fixes.

Changes

  • Added enemies to the end of the first level.
  • Introduced rapid-fire power-up at level 1 instead of level 2.
  • Moved shield power-up from level 1 to a later level.
  • Introduced atomic power-up at level 2, much earlier than previously.
  • Balanced boss strength.
  • Adjusted boss encounters.
  • Adjusted strength of the burst “shotgun” power-up.
  • Bosses are now introduced away from edges of arena.
  • Fix depth issue with respect to players and enemies.
  • Adjust multiplayer split-screen visibility to the equivalent for single player. You can now see further.
  • Fix crash when a steam leaderboard name uses non-typical characters (i.e. TM, etc.).


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Early Access V0.0.3.0 — Language Updates and Tuning


Posted by Chad Yates

Many thanks to those that have jumped in and started playing and reviewing! Your feedback is very much appreciated! Please continue to let me know of any issues you encounter or ideas that come to mind.

This is a small update that contains several fixes and tweaks.

V1.0.3 Changes

  • Reverse thrusters no longer supersede forward thrusters.
  • When a player attempts to exit the game before losing all lives, it is now a request to forfeit their session/score instead of exiting to the title screen.
  • Machine Gunner achievement is now obtainable.
  • Only scores greater than zero qualify for leaderboards and local high score listings.
  • Players no longer spawn when other players are in the way.
  • Small adjustments to gameplay balance with respect to enemy spawning.
  • Updates to the following languages:
    • Spanish
    • German
    • Brazilian Portuguese
    • Polish
    • Serbian


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Early Access 0.0.1.0/0.0.2.0 — Day 1 Patches


Posted by Chad Yates

Changes

  • Limit displayed steam names in high score listings.
  • Fix level achievements.

New Known Issues

  • You are currently allowed to change the name of player 1 (the player tied to the steam account). Note, that if you do this, then the score will only qualify for the local high scores.
  • When using the keyboard, adjustments to ship colors and player name indicate left/right arrows, but in fact it is both left/right and up/down that can be used. Note that for colors, this is primary and secondary colors, and for player name this is left/right movement and up/down to cycle the letter.


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Early Access V1 (V0.0.0.1) Released!


Posted by Chad Yates

The day has arrived to let Solaroids: Prologue out into the wild. Early Access began today at approximately 2:40pm PST. I hope your as excited as I am — this is a big step for me as a solo/part-time indie developer.

Many thanks to all those that helped with play testing and localization.

Most of my goals for hitting this milestone have been met, but there are a few stragglers.

Known Issues

  • Japanese translation is currently rough and incomplete both in game and missing from the store page. I expect this to be resolved over the coming weeks.
  • The planned Turkish translation had to be put on hold.
  • The game credit screen has not been translated yet, and some of the high score text. This should also be resolved in the coming weeks.
  • Due to current steam limitations, only player 1 can submit to Leaderboards using a steam ID. All other players only qualify for local high score tables even if you enter your steam ID as the name.
  • No mouse support for menus.
  • If you reconfigure the keyboard or controller controllers, they are not saved between games.

Issues / Feature Requests

It’s my expectation that no one should encounter any serious issues, but we all know that is a silly expectation. Please post any issues you may encounter to the Issues sub forum.

Also I’ve created a Feature Requests sub forum, so please post any suggestions for enhancements and tweaks. I want the evolution of the game to align as much as possible towards what the community would like to see.

Early Access Tips

A full option menu will come later during Early Access, but there are a few hot-keys that can be used for some rudimentary options now:

  • LeftShift+F1 – Toggles the bloom compositing effect on/off. If you happen to have a system with an extremely weak GPU, turning this off can remove some burden at the expense of some visual ambiance.
  • LeftShift+F2 – Changes the music to a random selection within the soundtrack.
  • LeftShift+F3 – Cycles between system supported resolutions. This can also be useful for systems with weak GPUs. <i>Solaroids</i> defaults to the highest resolution supported (so 4k if you have it).
  • LeftShift+F4 – Toggles between fullscreen and windowed mode. At the moment there are some known cosmetic issues with windowed mode scaling on Linux/OS X.
  • LeftShift+L – Cycles between supported languages. Currently this is the only way to access languages that steam doesn’t support. For the current build this is Catalan and Serbian.
  • LeftShift+Minus – Lowers music volume.
  • LeftShift+Plus – Raises music volume

Notes:

  • Pressing the Enter key or Start/Select/Options on a controller brings up the pause screen.
  • From the Pause screen you can change the controller type by quickly pressing the left/right bumper/shoulder buttons. This is not yet documented in game.
  • Playing the game starting at level 1 without continuing qualifies you for the “First Credit” Highscores/Leaderboards.
  • Joining the game after level 1, or continuing qualifies you for the “Any Credit” Highscores/Leaderboards.
  • Local Highscores are mirrored via Steam Cloud between your machines.
  • Currently <i>Solaroids</i> supports levels 1-10 officially, though level 10 will “repeat” at that point allowing continued play indefinitely.
  • The Free Play mode unlocks all powerups and bosses and is effectively the same as level 10. Don’t go into that mode until you’ve sufficiently practiced or you could get frustrated pretty easily.
  • I’m planning many other features, some of which are listed in the Early Access description in the store page. On-line multiplayer is one important feature I’ll be working to complete.
  • I’m planning to include Trading Cards, they just aren’t ready yet.

I hope this is helpful. Please ask questions, post reviews, let me know what you think, what you like, what you don’t like, and where I should head!


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Track Other Players and Enemies with the New Player Reticle


Posted by Chad Yates

Solaroids has a large playing area, and as such it is easy to lose track of your friends when trying to coordinate an attack on the more difficult bosses or for those times when your “friends” have gone rogue and they need a little justified payback.

When bosses first enter the playing area, often it isn’t till they are on screen, or you start seeing a barrage of incoming missiles headed your way, that you realize where they are attacking from. While sometimes the surprise is warranted, with a resulting spike in adrenaline as you attempt to quickly maneuver to evade sudden destruction, sometime it just feels unfair, and a way to anticipate the interaction better would really streamline things.

I’ve had it on my radar, so to speak, for some time to create a basic way to indicate player positions and other threats or items of interest. It is the current #1 requested game feature that comes up during local multiplayer sessions.

So, without further ado I introduce the new Player Reticle feature. Currently, a Player Reticle will show three types of information:

First, small triangles arranged around your ship indicate the direction to distant players using their respective colors. The current orientation of the other players are also show, as well as relative distance indicated by size. As another player gets close enough to come into view, the indicator fades out.

Demonstration of Player Reticle when tracking other local players.

Second, the locations of active enemies are similarly indicated with small red squares.

Finally, enemy missiles that are currently locked onto you are indicated with smaller red triangles, and the reticle ring will change to red to indicate the incoming threat.

Demonstration of Player Reticle for tracking enemies and detecting incoming missiles.

This feature will be ready in time for the Early Access release of Solaroids: Prologue on Steam this spring.


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Solaroids: Prologue Soundtrack


Posted by Chad Yates

While developing Solaroids I composed a number of tracks of various styles in my modest home studio.  The following are those included with Solaroids: Prologue as the default backing tracks. I hope you enjoy!


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Solaroids: Prologue – Trailer 1


Posted by Chad Yates

As a solo developer, my ultimate vision for Solaroids far outweighed my production capacity.  Perhaps to a fault, I have a keen aversion to releasing inferior product, and want everything to be as close to perfect as I can. I have a list a mile long of potential things to include in the game, and they run the gamut from additional power-ups, characters, environments, backstory, engine enhancements, and multiplayer possibilities. Some of them are in the unreleased game waiting idle till I can wrap them up to my satisfaction.  I guess you could say that my eyes definitely have been bigger than my belly so to speak. Even the software I used for project management no longer works on modern iOS devices and I have to use my old iPod 4th generation to manage the project!

To focus my efforts on actually completing a version of the project, I decided some time ago to hone in on a much simpler game.  Something that is still in the spirit of Solaroids, and still fun to play for Asteroid fans whether it be alone or with friends.  I’ve given it the name Solaroids: Prologue, and development has been wrapping up over the summer culminating in a undesired mad rush to iron out any kinks on the Xbox 360 version of the build.

The game is currently being reviewed for inclusion in the Xbox Live Indie Games catalog for the Xbox 360.  It may very well be the absolute last game to be published to the service as submissions have been closed.  Not exactly the claim to fame I originally intended, more like a booby prize.  It will still be an achievement for me personally, as I have slowly inched closer towards a releasable title.  Those that keep asking, when is it going to come out, can finally have an answer other than, when it’s done.

So without further ado here is the first and probably only trailer for Solaroids: Prologue:


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