Hey!

After a bit of a release-hiatus, we’re happy to announce a new version of Friendship Club!

Sorry about the slow progress this past six months. Due to slow Early Access sales, we’ve had to spend quite a bit of time trying to get money together to work on the game (cough indiepocalypse cough :D). Fear not though, things are coming along and we’ve worked out a pretty good balance now to allow us to make consistent progress, it’s just that we’ll have to be splitting our time a bit more than we had hoped. Anyway, new stuff!

Major new features:

• Up to 8-players!

• New, never been seen before placeholder characters! (don’t get too attached please!)

• New stats screen featruing pie charts (all imaginary friends compete for something, right?..)

In future we’re going to be releasing less frequently than we did in the first year of development, but each update will have major new features, rather than the incremental ones we had in the past. We decided that this would be the best way to work on the game, meaning that there would be less downtime spent doing the releases (compiling builds, testing, contacting press etc.) and hopefully means we might get a bit more media coverage for the releases. I guess we’ll see…

Speaking of which, if you’re a fan of the game, we’d be really grateful for any help you can give us in spreading the word, whether it’s reviews, tweets, getting people over to play the game together, whatever. The more time we can dedicate to Friendship Club, the faster it will come along. We’re trying to make the best darn local-multiplayer game we can and we’re not taking any shortcuts along the way. It’s going to be worth it, I promise - there’s SO much we want to get in there, your support is vital to us.

Take care everyone,
Nick, Ash, Sophie and Tom… and James!

Full Changelog:

Main Features:

• 8 player support

• New stats screen

• New, never been seen before placeholder characters!

Code:

• Bug fix for empty custom mode names in mode list

• Relaxed play with 8 players now fits on the screen properly

• Added scale variation to destructible wall gibs

• Fixed occasional pie rendering bugs

• Button remappings to prevent people accidently quitting games or dropping their heads

• Previous controller configuration is now deleted before the player tries to reconfigure a controller. (No duplicate/double mappings).

• Added all ASCII characters to the Wonky Wagon in-game fonts.

• Stop paintings appearing more than half way up a wall when switching between arenas

• 8-player debug/controller options

Art & Animation:

• New stats screen assets and spine animations

• Updated gibs for both armchairs in Timmy’s house

• Extra hat for team select

• Sorted the Finger of God inverse kinematics rig

• Placeholder characters and rugs

Audio:

• New wall gib sounds for when an object is run into by a player

• Added sounds for wall objects in The Wonky Wagon

• Updated Dash sound to make it less…annoying

• Sound design for stats screens (pie splats etc!)

• Music transition for curtains closing/opening (filter/fade)

• New music for stats screen (including randomised start point)

• Swapped a bunch of sounds to 2D events for better stereo imaging

• Remastered some of the ingame music

• Placeholder sounds for placeholder characters

Misc:

• All modes now have Turbo Bullets set to ‘on’ by default

• XBOX ONE controller support

• More consistent keyboard mappings