v0.4.4: Gumsy and Gomar Theme Park
--- Update will be posted to Steam on March 16th (MST) ---
The Yang Family has finally reached their destination: the Gumsy and Gomar Theme Park! The final four Yang tracks are now available. Can you complete the Car Parkour course in one run? It will put your car driving skills to the test.
Gumsy and Gomar is the most popular children’s show on television, dedicated to teaching kids about safety—by demonstrating all the things not to do! It’s kind of a parody on Itchy and Scratchy from The Simpsons (big fan!), as well as poking some fun at Five Nights at Freddy’s (not a fan! But I admire the developer for his success).
Plus the theme gives me an excuse to add some wackier content like oversized hammers, giant baseball bats and The Blender from the original Yang Family Demo. I received a few requests to add Flip Pads, so I went ahead and built some of those too. All of these new items will be added to the Level Editor in a Workshop update next week!
Lessons Learned (#gamedev)
I learned some painful game development lessons this week. First, it’s essential to have good version control setup. I accidentally released the wrong build of a patch to the Settings Menu update, causing some confusion to new players installing the game for the first time. Luckily I was able to get this cleared up by the next day, but sorting out the bugs ate up a lot of time.
Second, I am never making multiple Maps for one Track Group again. John and Jimmy’s tracks all shared one large map. Same thing for Earl. But when I built the Yang tracks, I wanted them to be on a road trip, which involved building 4 different maps… which created 4 times as much work. While I’m very happy with the end results, and glad that it brought more variation to the game, I also wish I had planned it a little differently so I could have had more time to develop other aspects of the game.
What’s Next?
Here are the next updates planned, in order:
- Big Workshop content update
- Localization beta (Google Translate)
- Linux version
- Kickstarter In-Game Rewards (this will be in multiple parts/updates)
- Localization final (proper translations to Spanish, Chinese, and hopefully some others)
- Larry
- ________ <-- Community Votes!
Community Votes
When Larry’s update is near release, I will start posting Community Vote announcements. I’ll post 2 different development paths, with concept art and content outlines, and you can weigh in on which one should be built next and what content would be involved! I'm hoping to do these on a monthly basis.