It's been a while.

I'm still alive.

Over the past few months we've been working on this new update for "Which way is up?", more or less actively. But now it is finally available to download in a beta state! Let's take a brief look at what is new in this update:

Overworld:

We have added an overworld that you can walk through instead of clicking through boring menus. With this, we can potentially add way more levels!

A new level:

There is one new level in the second area of the game: The City! That's right, we now have different themes for different areas so they don't all look exactly the same! The first two levels have also been visually improved.

Save files:

You can now actually save progress in an interesting way! For example, you can try collecting all coins in the different levels over multiple runs and they will get saved! (You will also unlock some skins when you do that.) The stars you get for your performance at the end of every level also get saved properly and unlock skins. So you can now get going and try 100%-ing the game!

Global leaderboard:

You didn't misread, we have a global leaderboard now implemented in this game! Now you can upload your scores for every level and see how you compare against other players (note: if other players play the game, for now you can compare your scores against our developer scores). Also a shoutout to abraakie, that legend hosts the server  that we put the scores on in his basement!

Assist Mode:

Remember the hyped up difficulty modes that got introduced in the last big update? They are gone now. It was just too much maintenance work, redoing four versions of every level when you wanted to change a small thing. Now instead of that, we added an Assist Mode that you can toggle on and off mid-level! It functions basically like the Assist Mode from "Celeste", if you have played that game. (If not, what are you doing with your life, go and play it. It is so much better than this thing!) In a nutshell, you can toggle different options, like double-jump and placing your own checkpoints to make the levels easier or to skip certain passages that you struggle with. (When you use this however, you won't be able to upload your score, for obvious reasons.)

Polish / QoL:

We also improved a lot of small things that add up. For example, we have slightly improved some sprites (like the spikes), we have a better menu system with menu-switch animations, we've tweaked hitboxes a bit, stuff like that. When you compare the versions side by side you really notice some differences.

Overall, this is definitely the biggest update so far (we also took the longest time for it, 3.5 months, sheesh). Though it is a beta right now and the list of stuff we want to add to the stable 1.3 version goes on for a bit, but we just didn't want to wait any longer with this update. So be warned, there might be bugs (will be, probably) and some things are a bit rough around the edges. If you run into any bugs or want to give constructive feedback and criticism, feel free to do so either on twitter or on our discord server.

Let's hope the next update won't take us another three months! (hehe)