We've just uploaded a new version of Smith and Winston with a cornucopia of new features, updates and bug fixes. While it's downloading why not read this lovely blog post :)

Shattering

For a long time we’ve had the world blowing up in to tiny voxels. This has been very satisfying for everyone. We’ve made it even more satisfying now by creating big chunks of floor and walls from the world when you blow it up.

Tree Collapse

Cutting the bottom out of a tree is one of the first things that players do. When it doesn’t fall a lot of players feel cheated. So now the tree will fall down shattering in to bits in the process. This is oh.. so… good :)

Head over Heels for Coop.

We recently showed Smith and Winston at EGX Rezzed in London. Coop mode went down a complete storm. “Best Game of the Show”, “So satisfying” were just two of the many comments we got from all different types of gamers and we’re still beaming from hearing all the kind words.

Coop mode isn’t complete and there are still a few issues but it’s so much fun we want everyone to join in with a friend and blow some stuff up.

One notable ommision is that we haven’t got save games working and when a player dies there is no way to revive them just yet but fixes for those are coming soon.

Dig in.

Better Debris

One of the challenges with Smith and Winston is managing all the tiny cubes that fly around. They are relatively expensive to draw (for what they are) and they are very expensive to do the collision for but oh they are so satisfying.
So in this update we’ve added a more flexible system where if they are getting too expensive we remove them from the scene more quickly keeping the framerate up for all players and allowing players with monster machines to get even more debris!
This is especially useful in coop where people seem to spend most of their time mining out the floor from under their ‘coop partner’ :)

Mining freeze

At the EGX rezzed show we learned that a lot of users were just using the mining laser to shoot everything, the world and the enemies. This is cool but when someone said “I don’t think you should give the player a shotgun from the beginning!” we realised that we’d got the mining laser all wrong.

So for mining the laser hasn’t changed at all but now it freezes enemies it hits for a second or so giving the player time to change weapon. Give it a go and see what you think.

Quicker level restores

With all this new destruction we started to notice that when the player died and we have to revert the level back to it’s original state it was taking too long. This has been even more optimized now so it doesn’t get in the way of your fun.

New title page and new intro movie

No one likes a long boring intro movie but we’ve made one just to annoy you even more. Trust me it’s very short, gives you an insight in to Shippy and why she’s a little mad and hopefully as we finish up the single player mode you’ll enjoy her more as a character. We’re working really hard to making her a richer and more rewarding part of the game.

We changed the title page just because it so cool to see Shippy in space!

Thanks to all our supporters

Lastly but definitely not leastly we’d like to say thanks to all that have bought the game and supported us. We are just two guys making a game. It’s completely self funded, we don’t have a wealthy backer or publisher and sometimes we need to take on contract work to pay the bills. It’s really frustrating but that’s life. Once again, thanks for your patience and kindness.

Tweaks

A lot of small things that players have asked for:

• Disable ALT-F4 from killing the game.
• Better controller detection and actions when unplugged/plugged in
• Correct controller names in the HUD
• Enemy shots are more controlled, sometimes they fired at weird angles which sucked
• Turn on/off Depth of Field (video menu)
• Turn on/off Shadows (video menu)
• Turn on/off Bloom (video menu)
• Enable/Disable screen saver kicking in (video menu)

Thanks for reading all this, I’d forgotten we’d done half of this stuff. The next update hopefully won’t take so long to get out.

Have fun exploring and destroying.