First of all, a big thank you to everyone who tried our demo! Especially those of you who posted videos of it, whatching you play this game we have been spending our lives on for months was a blast, and it really helped us understand how to improve it!

Here are the major things added to this new update of Toasterball’s demo :

1 - Gamepad compatibility

We heard you loud and clear : gamepads are here! You can choose your controller to play with gamepads, keyboard (WASD, ZQSD or arrows), or even with your mouse (made possible by our 3 button gameplay).

The input system was already ready for the complete version of the game, but our original intent was to make the demo as simple as possible with prechosen keyboard controls, everything already ready to play.

But seeing people play made us realize that even on this demo, playing with gamepads could be essential to the experience. So we added a simple little menu at the begining of the demo to make this possible (on windows build only, as this is a bit more complicated for WebGL).

After all, we are called Couch Game Crafters and our goal has always been to make games you can play on your couch with of a couple of gamepads, so here you go!

Sidenote : ZQSD compatible.

Even for this early demo, we decided to go the extra mile and add a little switch for our friends in europe with AZERTY keyboards, to avoid the hassle of changing keyboard layout. We live in France so this is really to make sure our friends and family could play easily (You’re welcome, mom and dad).

2 - Game Variants

We added a couple of variant that will pop up randomly to add some variety to the gameplay.

There are only a few ones right now, including “Dual balls”, “Mini Toasters” and “Pong mode”, but the idea was really to put in place a system that would allow us to easily implement more variants as the development goes on.

We spent a bit of extra time on a probabilty system that would be easy to work with, and that would allow us to make sure that some variants don’t repeat too much, to make the game experience as varied and balanced as possible, while keeping that randomized factor.

Try it now and see if you can discover all of the current variants !

Bonus : Retrowave Pong Filter

One of our variants is a retrostyle pong mode, with a no-gravity ball, immobile toasters and a nifty little image effect shader that we made to really sell that retrowave style.

Here’s a breakdown of how we achieved this retro-style filter :