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Late For Work - Early Access - Dev here!

retromario
Explorer
Hello! We just released our game Late For Work on Early Access. It's a VR Local Multiplayer game where you play as a giant gorilla and take on up to four human friends. Late For Work is very much in active development and we have lofty goals for it.

Before I go any further, here's a (3rd party) video review which I think fairly represents the game in its current state, both the positives and what we can (and will) improve:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR6J5TwdVhM

Here is our public roadmap: http://roadmap.lateforworkgame.com/

Right now Late For Work is best experienced with friends (or with your kids if you are a parent). It's up to 5 players on one PC (4 splitscreen using keyboard/gamepads and one headset). There's a basic single player experience, currently with 9 missions. There are AI bots but also a lot of room to improve (we will).

More about Early Access (as of August 17th 2017):
- Aiming for 8-11 more months of development
- Online support is important to us, but will happen a bit later
- Price: It's $10 right now. The game will not go on sale before we launch but the price will progressively increase as we add more content. So the earlier you support us, the better a deal you get.
- Our public roadmap is here and we continuously re-prioritize based on player's feedback.

This is long enough already but happy to answer any questions you may have.


19 REPLIES 19

retromario
Explorer
Hello hello!

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We just dropped a new update and this one is all about improving how you control the cars, tanks and planes. We had to give those puny humans a chance to take down that giant ape. The game should feel a lot more balance now.

What else did we do? Well, there's better VR control options, more variety, the tutorial has been polished, the first bits of the translation system are in and tons of bug fixes.

Changelog - Build 315

Improvements
- Camera no longer goes through floor when you look up with tank.
- Tanks gets less stuck going over objects
- Plane movement vertically and horizontally is consistent now. Camera always pans to better show where you're going and what you're aiming at.
- Clicking in right joystick shows rearview
- Aim indicator turns red when aiming at gorilla
- Car keyboard controls are much more responsive now. Accelerate, turn and brake are all better.
- Car boost is more controllable now can turn better.
- Hide billboards, bridges, basically every thing when doing the countdown for hide and seek and last man standing
- Countdown timer is now always visible.
- Head height toggle for standing/seated/kids mode.
- Initial translation system, with four languages partially supported (Polish German, French along with English).

Fixes
- NPC cars are moving around the cities better, including in seaport and valley map
- Fixed plane missile damage to gorilla to be consistent from shot to shot (5% each time).
- Plane missiles don't go through billboard anymore
- Lots of fixes to the UI and test for the Hide n Seek game mode result screens.

CrashFu
Consultant
Looks like a really fun party game!  I might have to give this one a go the next time I've got friends or family coming over. :+1:

Question:  Is the movement based on swinging your arms like you're jogging, or of putting (virtual) knuckles to the ground, gorilla style?
It's hard being the voice of reason when you're surrounded by unreasonable people.

retromario
Explorer
Hey! You move by dragging yourself around (or more precisely, by grabbing the world and pulling it towards you). It approximates "gorilla-like" movement (knuckles on the ground) but we don't force the player to reach down to the ground to be able to move. I feel/hope it's a good mix of being active without being strenuous.

retromario
Explorer
Hello again,

We released another big update to Late For Work. This one is heavily focused on improving issues that have been raised by the community.

z9shmwbv8dcj.png

Thank you for all your support and feedback so far. It's been incredible to read your reviews and hear your feedback and better understand how you play the game and want to play it.

Your feedback is invaluable to helping us improve the game.

We've been working on various new features to improve the balance of the game (powerups!), improve the controls (better tank and plane controls, more instructions), fixing a lot of bugs related to the different game modes. Stability is much improved (but there's still more to do).

Turning Off The AI
One of the biggest requests on the forums is the ability to turn off the AI => that's now in too! We added AI Bots and the new Powerups as Multiplayer options you can toggle off/on. This is an example of something that is relatively easy to implement (well...it revealed some other issues we then had to fix, but for the better) but was nowhere on our radar as a task, simply because we didn't think of it.

And of course, we continuously work on improving AI behavior. We know we've still got a long way to go, but to be completely honest, our focus has been first and foremost on the gameplay and controls for a fun local multiplayer experience. The single player experience is also important to us, but as a more secondary priority. We'll get there for both experiences.

A New Look
Finally, we also did our first tests towards dramatically improving the look of the game. For us, this is again something really important we want to work on, but has had to take a back seat to improving the core game experience. It doesn't mean we are not thinking about the look, and planning for it. We are laying the ground work for future changes which we think are going to be quite awesome both visually and content wise. We can't wait to share these with you.

In the meantime you can try out our new shader stack with a toggle in the Settings screen.



Changelog - Build 323

Improvements
- AI planes are better at avoiding objects, do escape maneuvers, fly into inanimate object less often.
- Better dead zone for gamepad controls
- Toggle to disable AI in multiplayer
- Powerup system for vehicles, including speed boost, firing rate boost, restore health, homing missile, disguise.
- New shader stack (post-processing effects): Fog, bloom, ambient occlusion
- Improved French translations
- Better car AI. A lot more to come on this front.
- Simple Tank Controls - you can now toggle between advanced (two stick) and simple (one stick) tank controls.
- Better vehicle instructions - we surface the control instructions a bit more often, fixed a lot of inconsistencies and show clear instructions for both keyboard and gamepad control.

Fixes
- Lots of fixes to the single player, multiplayer, scoreboards logics.
- Much better management of humand and AI players.
- Steam Controller support
- Missiles don't hit invisible walls



Tadin
Heroic Explorer
My son played this with some friends over the weekend and they had great fun.

I played with a controller and that part worked well, i couldnt get on to the VR as all his friends were clammering to have a go though :smiley:

retromario
Explorer
That's awesome, great to hear your son and his friends enjoyed the game. If you have any feedback, suggestions  or requests, don't hesitate! 

Tadin
Heroic Explorer
Well, after the recent Kong film, helicopters with a reasonably short range weapon might work quite well as one of the vehicle choices.

I'll chat to my son to see if he has any other ideas.

My only minor issue was that some of the hills weren't solid, which could be confusing, but apart from that i didnt really see any issues.

Fun game all in all :smile:

retromario
Explorer
Cool suggestion, I just added attack helicopters to our backlog (which you can see here: roadmap.lateforworkgame.com).

Some of the hills aren't solid, you mean the gorilla can go through them or the other players? We added some logic so that the gorilla can't "grab the world" inside of the hills, but yeah, currently you can still peak through.

Tadin
Heroic Explorer
I dont think the Gorilla can go through them, but some of the hills you can drive through with the vehicles.

I think one of the maps, you actually had to drive through a hill to get to the Town where the Gorilla started.