The whole game with no helping hand
The game plays itself through every stage as an automated test. Until this week every full test run needed at least one helping hand somewhere. On 17 October the best run needed none: every stage cleared, every boss beaten, 0 assists, 0 time-outs and 0 errors, in 145.7 seconds at 20x speed. The "stuck" warnings fell all day, from 85 to 106 in the morning to 32 in the last run.
A few fixes were about what the test player could not see. Loose jar lids in the candy shop are a soft-sand trap, but they were missing from its map. In the flooded plant room a cat wades at about 60% speed, but it planned jumps at full running speed and kept falling short. Each one now plans with the right picture of the world.
Bugs a player could have hit
Three fixes are in the game itself.
- A boss intro that kept replaying. After you lose a life to a boss, a short version of its intro plays when you come back. It played on every step back into the arena, because the game only forgot the death when you won. In one run a single death replayed the intro 25 times. Now it plays once per death.
- Sugar that pulled you into a jar's rim. The open jars in the candy shop are full of sugar you sink into. Standing half over the rim, the sugar still sank you and dragged you into the solid rim beside it. Now the sugar only takes you when you are fully over it.
- A grab that could hold you inside the scenery. An enemy that carries the cat could hold you inside solid scenery. Now it only holds you somewhere you fit.
Also fixed: once a stage is won, nothing can hurt you any more.
Two-player climbs no longer cut short
In couch co-op both cats share one screen and neither can leave it, including the top: a cat jumping into the top edge stops there as if he hit a low roof. That edge was measured from where the camera was at that moment. While a cat is in the air the camera is deliberately slow, so an ordinary jump does not jerk the view around. On a big launch, like a bounce off the sugar domes or a spring, the camera had not caught up yet, and the top edge stopped the cat well short of the ledge he was going for.
The edge now uses where the shared view is heading, the point between the two cats, rather than where the slow camera happens to be. The rule is unchanged: neither cat can get more than a screen's height above the other. One-player games never had this edge.
The two-cat test run had run out of time in the candy shop in four of six runs that day. After the fix it had no time-outs, and the next was the best two-cat run yet: the whole game in 178 seconds at 20x speed, against 207 to 235 before, with no errors.
A little more forgiving to jump
Two numbers changed for everyone.
| Timing | Before | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Jump after running off a ledge | 0.10 s | 0.13 s |
| Jump pressed before landing that still counts | 0.12 s | 0.15 s |
The game's difficulty rule asks for generous timing here, and both stay under the point where jumping starts to feel floaty.
Smaller changes
- Controller names on screen now read "PS5 Controller", "Xbox Controller" and "Game Pad".
- The candy shop's jar staircase can be climbed step by step. Before, it needed a running double jump.
- Glow effects now brighten a night scene instead of turning it olive.
- One stage read some positions in the wrong units, so part of a scene was happening off camera. Fixed and checked on screen.
- A check of all 331 audio files fixed 12 clips: clicks at the start, sounds cut off mid waveform, and dead air that made one jump sound in four answer late.
None of this has been played by a person yet, and the new sound levels have not been listened to. Two people climbing the sugar domes together is the thing most worth trying.