Happy April Fools' Day!

(...bit late, but still!)

We hope you enjoyed our silly little April Fools update! There were some technical difficulties, but overall considering how much we rushed it (lol), we'd say it turned out pretty good!

As of today, we've reverted the downloadable version back to 1.0.1. A patched version of the April Fools update with most of the issues ironed out will be available on our GitHub in the following days.

Big thanks to everyone who helped out, but especially Zeo and Wooky for dialog, Marc for the best voice acting I've ever heard in my life, Moldy for the music and a certain code, Meta for all the sprites and modeling, and Astrl, for programming pretty much the entire dang thing.

Here's some silly behind the scenes stuff:

(These Rupert sprites were from a scrapped phone call - the only one we actually teased. Funny how that works.)

(Scrapped facial expressions for the Police Call characters.)

...Alright, but what next?

Right now, we're working on a minor update, 1.1, that adds (among other tiny fixes and changes):

- More VFX Filters

Gaussian Blur, Retro TV,  Neon, and a couple other funky effects.

- Auto-Swing

Now you don't just have to chart songs with straight rhythms!

- "Advanced" Events Tab

For more in-depth things that mess with the scene, like...

- "Play Animation" Event

Allows you to trigger any animation on any object in the game scene.

- "Play SFX" Event

Allows you to play any sound in the game at any time.

After 1.1, we're shifting our focus to the next update, 1.2.

We have a couple ideas on the table, which may come in 1.2, or may come in a later update. Regardless, here they are:

- AssetBundle Loading

Basically, full custom asset support. This is the big one, and will allow for major expansions on what you can do with a remix.

- Stickers

Want to import an image and move it around and stuff? Cool! This will let you do that.

- Better Controller Support

We currently only support Nintendo and Playstation controllers, but we'd like to expand that. Mainly to XBOX, but who knows what else? This one could take a while, though.

- Proper Localization, JP/ENG Separation

We'd like to make it so you can freely switch between Japanese and English sounds, per-game. We'd also like to localize the whole program. From the beginning this was always the plan, but it will take a bit of work. A lot of text and other stuff is hardcoded right now. Probably expect this one past 1.2.

Past that? We're going to start polishing the work-in-progress minigames, and hopefully get Release 2 out with all of them! Tentative release date could be... late this summer? Not sure yet. It's still a ways away, though.

We'd like to thank every single one of our community members (35,000 members in the Discord as of yesterday!?) for supporting us throughout development. It's been a crazy ride so far, and we'd love to keep seeing it through.

<3

- Maddy, HS Dev Team