Demo Changes and Progress Update

Demo changes

It's been great to see so many people try the first chapter of Fail to Win! After watching lots of playthroughs , though, there were many things I found a lot of problems, the biggest being the difficulty curve. There has been an alarmingly low success rate. Most people were finishing the first three stages in 20-40 minutes and then spending 2 hours stuck on level 4 before finally giving up. In my eagerness to demonstrate quickly what this game is about, I threw too much at you all way too quickly. If you downloaded the game more recently and were consulting earlier walkthroughs, you may have noticed some discrepancies. I've been making little tweaks here and there to try to make the game less impossible. Well, recently, I did an entire overhaul, and I published those changes today. The following are some of the more noteworthy changes:

• No more Level 4! I have a feeling this stage isn't going to be missed by many (I don't know if anyone managed to actually finish it without me guiding them through it). Maybe a modified version will show up as a bonus stage in the full game, but I realize it has no place in a demo, immediately after the tutorial. 
• Gamepad support. For now, it still says "SPACE to Respawn", but if you connect a gamepad, it should be mapped to X, or whatever the jump button is. I've actually only tested it on a Nintendo Switch pro controller, so configurations may vary. Let me know if you have any problems.
• More responsive controls. The old demo felt slow and awkward. I revised the controls to play more like a typical platformer. The animations don't look quite as pretty, but I believe it feels more comfortable to play. You turn and run faster, and you have better jump control. There is even a brief "coyote time".
• Better instructions. If you played in the last few month, you may have noticed that a goal will sometimes persist in the corner of the screen for those who don't bother reading the bottom text when it happens. Along these lines, I made a few other minor tweaks that should help communicate better how the stages work. It's a puzzle-platformer, not a scavenger hunt, and I don't want a huge penalty for not thinking to look at a certain corner of the ceiling.

The rest of the game

Over this past year, I've been actively working on the later stages of Fail to Win. This game dev stuff hasn't proved to be very profitable for me yet, so I can't yet devote myself full-time to Fail to Win, but at the rate I am going, we should expect a 2020 release.  The second chapter is really starting to come together, and I've even made a lot of progress on Chapter 3. Most of my time, however, has been put towards developing the stage builder. An earlier prototype is demonstrated in Stage Builder Builder Test Builder. The whole thing is flexible enough that it can be used in totally different games, and the code for the stage builder framework will be sold as a separate product for any interested game developers. The full version of Fail to Win will include a stage builder built with this framework.

As for what to expect for the next chapter, I've been teasing screenshots more frequently on my Twitter. Here are some samples: