50% off in the Steam Autumn Sale

I've discounted Positron to it's lowest price yet (50% off) and I'm pushing ahead with release plans for in-developments features and updates I've had in the pipeline for some time!

I've had a lot going on this year, and haven't really had any motivation to continue working on Positron. I did have a good couple of months mid-year when I was making progress on Arena mode and other changes to the progression system in the game, but then my laptop broke (screen cracked) which put an end to my pubdev sessions.

With the impending Steam Autumn Sale I had been firing up the solution again from time to time, making a few small tweaks, then finding myself getting sucked in to little visual polish changes or tweaking 'AI' behaviour in Arena mode. This sale period gives me a good excuse to push out some of the changes I've been working on, even if they're all a little rough round the edges. I need to get back my motivation to work on the game again, but when no-one is buying it or playing it, it seems a little futile sometimes.

So, throughout the coming week I'll be dropping a few updates to the game, including:

• **Arena Mode **Consider this a work in progress. You can play vs CPU controlled opponents in a 3 minute deathmatch. Get opponents to crash in to your trail to score a point. Crash in to your own trail and lose a point! This mode introduces Boost. Your trail grows as you drive, which also charges your boost bar. Once the bar has passed 50% charged boost is available to be activated. Activating boost consumes your trail and boosts your speed. This is a key tactical feature to be used in blocking off opponents or trying to quickly escape from an attacking opponent! If you crash in Arena you instantly respawn elsewhere in the level, meaning matches are quick and frenetic.

• **Achievements **Ten new achievements for the game across different game modes. Some based on level completion, and some fun ones too.

• **New Music **Chris sent me a new track for the game a few months ago, but I still haven't pushed it in to the live game. Enjoy the real human-made music custom made for the game.

• **Positional Audio **My sound playing system is very basic, but I finally got round to making it work somewhat spatially. World sounds should pan based on their position relative to the camera, and volumes should reflect the distance from the camera too.

• **New 'World' and Progression System **The biggest change I've been toying with for some time. The game world will be represented as Zones, in a sort of city-block layout. Each zone containing 9 levels. When starting the game you have access to any of the starting 9 levels, 3 for each current game mode (Maze, Snake, and Arena). Completing levels, and doing well in them earns Stars (name and iconography likely to change at some point). Spend these stars to unlock access to adjoining zones, giving access to a further set of 9 levels.

The idea of the zones is that ultimately each zone may also have a distinct visual feel to it, and may also introduce zone-specific special game modifiers that mix up the gameplay a little and add more variety. Further achievements will be added with the new progression system too for completing levels and full zones.

• **All New Levels **Along with the new progression system, all current levels in the game will be replaced with brand new levels. This includes an 'easy' set of 9 starter levels for a gentle introduction to the game.

Along with these feature releases there are more general changes I've made to my engine and the game in recent months:

• Statically linked executable. I have removed all DLL dependencies from the game except the Steam API lib. This has no impact for most players, but fixed an issue on some machines or networks with issues running with the DLLs.

• General size reduction of the game. I know it was already tiny, but the game is literally now just a single executable, sitting at just over 100MB. As a programmer with a background in optimisation part of me really wants to squeeze it down further (for no real reason) but admittedly the bulk of the file size is in the game's custom soundtrack, and I'm not going to sacrifice audio quality just to save a few megabytes!

• Rendering optimisations and CPU optimisations. Everything just runs faster and smoother, particularly on lower end machines and on Steam Deck (I have made sure for a solid 60/90fps experience on each model of Steam Deck).

• Improved controller and Steam Deck rumble. Now has some background haptic rumble when near key elements like the maze exit, the snake orb, or arena opponents.

There are also other features I've been dabbling with which won't be live this week, but will hopefully roll out later this month:

• Splitscreen local multiplayer (with Remote Play support). This ideally suits Arena mode, but works well in Snake too if you want a head to head game. I'm also dabbling with procedural maze generation for head to head maze multiplayer too.

• Vehicle customisation. I've been drafting up plans for this for a while. Apply shapes and decals to your bike, as well as defining custom colour schemes (and expect to remove the current random colour shifting in the game). You'll also be able to customise the look of your trail, and apply various special shader effects to the bike and trail too. There's much more I could do with this, custom boost effects, explosions, and later taunts and other multiplayer elements.

• Replays. Re-watch your best runs, and even watch the runs of the top players on the leaderboards. All of this information is already recorded, but I'm not uploading it for retrieval on client machines. I think this would be a useful feature people would use. I could even show a ghost of your best previous run, or of the top few players on the leaderboard (though in general the paths taken will be pretty much identical in maze mode anyway).

• I had been toying with the idea of a proximity boost a long time ago. The closer you are to a wall, the faster you go, just a slight boost for living dangerously. This could greatly vary the strategies in trying to set the fastest time on a maze leaderboard. Something I'm still considering adding to see if it works.

• Better leaderboard interaction. I'd like to display the target times on screen mid-run, so you know what you're aiming to beat, and provide a better interface for the leaderboards on level completion. The current implementation is very basic but functional.

• More Discord incentives. I plan to run some competitions and would like to encourage people to post media in the Steam Community and on the Discord server. I have a few plans for this.

The next big thing on the list is the multiplayer networking. Given the game is made in my own C++ engine, this is no small feat. I currently have it functional, but there's very little accounting for slow network transfer, which I need to read up on further and how to handle this in such a fast paced game. It's the one feature I really want to work well, and not frustrate players with lag and desync issues. This will come later down the line, if I can actually keep my motiviation to continue working on the game!

So keep an eye out for the updates releasing over the following week, and please do let me know if you have any ideas or suggestions for the game too!