You may have heard Kid Hallow is coming Nov 1st...
It's pretty awesome. But since anybody who actually finds their way to this blog is a true Hamumian (probably, that is. If you're not, get out before you are discovered), I figured we can talk about the true details of what's new vs. the original Costume Party. We can get into the meaty details that aren't appropriate for press releases, or too nitpicky for "normal people", or just require that you remember playing the original game.
Big thanks to SpaceManiac for his huge role in reviving this game - he did all the real techno mumbo-jumbo, while I scribbled new pixels and goofy stuff (but speaking of pixels, we also have HSB on the project who did the awesome new title screen and backgrounds, like the title you see above!). So let's start with new features that are techno mumbo-jumbo:
- You can now play the game offline! Of course you can't play any online levels when you do that, but what this means is that you can save your levels offline, and just share them with other people as normal files (you can find them in the /local folder of the game's installation folder - in Steam you can right-click on a game and select Properties/Local Files to explore the installation folder).
- What else it means relates to our new pause menu:
As you can see, you can just click to download a copy of any level you play! This means you can figure out what all the secret tricks in the level are, or tweak it to practice different parts, or make an offline copy for your own use or for a historical archive, or make a remix of it with your own twist.
- Also new in that menu is "Die & Rate Level" which is kind of dumb - you can always just use Restart to die and play again. But Die & Rate Level was added because in rare cases, someone might make a level that is near-impossible to finish, but also prevents you from dying (it can't be impossible, because they have to win it to submit it, but close enough). In that case, there's no way to rate the level and warn everybody about how terrible it is. So we added this button. Yeah, we have to plan for people being terrible.
- We've also got a bunch of tech under the hood to make the online experience more functional and tidy than in the past. It automatically logs you in with your Steam or Itch.io account depending on which platform you use, and just works magically. And - fingers crossed - we hopefully have better tools for handling bad players who are ruining the experience for others.
- Speaking of that, now when you see your friend is playing Kid Hallow (on Steam), you can click to take on the exact level they're playing! Make it a contest. We also have a discord bot coming who will announce newly made levels, and you can click the link it shares to instantly play that level. We'll see how spammy that gets (I guess we should hope that it IS too spammy!).
- I may be misremembering, but I think the original Costume Party would only run in a window. True or not, it's not true with Kid Hallow! You can seamlessly swap between full-screen and windowed mode any time, even while playing (Hit F11), and everything scales quite nicely, including our lovely new smooth fonts as you see in the picture above.
- There's also a variety of new and improved menu elements and smoothness - cool transitions that make a clunky noise, decently highlighted buttons in the editor (that was hard to see before!), and a bunch of changes to the menu flow and function to clean it up.
- And of course, the game now has 100% gamepad support everywhere! Play from your couch! You can even type in level names with a handy onscreen keyboard. Level editing with a gamepad is far from ideal, but that's about as good as you can expect. Gameplay with a gamepad is fantastic.
There's a lot more new stuff, but we'll get to those things in our next installment of Kid Hallow Insider Info!
