Surprise! We're releasing a localization update for You Will Fall!

There's now a new language dropdown in the menu where you can select from

• English (original)
• Japanese by CastanoTheCactus
• German by Yän (hey, that's me!!)
• French by Jirushi
• Turkish by MUHTEŞEM ROBOT
• Maltese by The HeadQuarters

Have fun with all the languages! We included these because people who speak them wanted to do the translations. So if you speak a language you'd like to see in the game, why don't you join our Discord server and let us know?

Ok, that's all, enjoy! Or actually, maybe I should say suffer?

1 Year Later...

Exactly one year ago, together with my friends Jirushi and Bobble, I've released a little game about trying to balance a tightrope while your inner voice, your anxiety and self doubt manipulate you and try to make you fall. Today is its Birthday and we've got some exciting news!

A massive update, out on April 8th!

Our brand new polished and updated version of You Will Fall is coming to Newgrounds on April 8th!

In the meantime, you can join our Discord server so you don't miss the grand release!

And now a little word from that pesky voice inside your head...

"Experience awesome new features such as

💀New ways to die so I get to mock you more!

🥺Easy mode so even YOU can get past 3 meters

🏅Medals and leaderboards on Newgrounds

😌Lots of quality of life features, such as revealing what killed you last!

🎆We've put an excessive amount of effort into what happens when reaching the ending. But you never will. You will fall.

Signed, Your inner demon❤️"

Hu everyone, River here once again! Last time we announced that my wife and I were expecting a child, and I just wanted to follow up that we did have a baby boy in October! He's three months old right now and we think he's a pretty cool guy!

What's been the main focus for you guys lately?

River's Imaginary Fan, via Imagination Land

Recently we've been more or less dedicated to conceptualizing and building the new game world.

Bonicle has blocked out the new starting area which is likely to be 2-3x the size of the entire map from the demo.

This is a room in the new area which already has tiled backgrounds. Enemy- and pickup placement still needs to be done.

For the full game world, we're targeting something 5-15x larger than the demo. Time will tell how crazy we end up being with it.

What can you tell us about the new starting area?

River's Imaginary Fan, via Imagination Land

The starting area is the Bandwidth Analysis Lab, and will be home to the Error Platform ability. In addition to this, it will house multiple ability modifiers in hidden or hard to get to places, encouraging later visits.

The region itself will be broken down into multiple sub regions tentatively including the Surveillance Screen area, the Electric Supply for the City Deck, the Abandoned Lab, and the Modern Lab.

To avoid spoilers and because details are still subject to change, we've obscured most of the map for now.

Yaen has been working on concept art for these sub regions and we plan to add unique background and foreground details like cameras and monitors, wires, laboratory equipment, and all sorts of stuff!

The centre piece of this area where you get the error platform (concept art)

A transitional room between the surveillance rooms and the old lab. (concept art)

Cool beans, but that sounds like a lot of art and design work! What's going on with programming?

River's Imaginary Fan, via Imagination Land

I'm right there in the trenches with Yaen and Bonicle, but instead of designing new rooms and set pieces, I'm working on new mechanics and interactive level pieces!

I've also got some less visual things going on like dreaded refactoring of the code base, and continuing to update tools and core scripts to support new stuff we want to do. One of the next things I'll be working on is level/scene transitions so it doesn't just freeze the frame and chug for a moment while a new scene loads.

For something more visual, I've been working with Yaen on this new enemy spawner/hatch door. Yaen loved making this aperture design and animating it. Ask him about how cool the process was for that. 😹

We developed a way to make enemies move smoothly through these pipes in the background based on generated animation curves

The idea here is that enemies can respawn in the level (sorry if I'm stating the obvious here) in certain cases. Basically, the lights will come on when there's an enemy in the tube and then after it finishes spawning the enemy, it will turn off until that enemy explodes. Then lights come on and a new enemy is coming, so you really can't get away from them forever here.

This opens up opportunities for enemies to not just be a nuisance but also potentially an important part of completing a level; hence the need to respawn them if the player needs a few tries to accomplish something with them. @The HeadQuarters (via Discord) I think this answers your question about the vents. If this isn't what you meant, let us know. 🤗

And here's how it all looks together!

Can you change Glitcheon's appearance?

Inns062 (via itch.io)

Great question! We actually did a video with Jonas Tyroller where we speed ran the game, and we added a feature to change the face on the computer screen for Glitcheon between social avatars for Jonas, Yaen (our artist), Bonicle (our level designer), and I (our programmer).

This feature is still in the demo, but the way to activate it is a guarded secret. You may find someone who could give you some clues in our Discord server.

For the full release, we have discussed the possibility of allowing people to opt in to have their Steam avatar appear on Glitcheon's computer screen.

You can use the Jonas-Avatar in the demo if you hold down f2, type in a special code, release f2 again and press thenumbers 1-3 on your keyboard.

Will this game have a boss? A giant spherical robot?

Inns062 (via itch.io)

I'm not committing to not making the spherical robot enemies gigantic, but if we do a boss it probably won't be that.

We've discussed bosses, boss fights, and related mechanics a lot. There's nothing set in stone yet, but it's unlikely that we'll have a traditional shoot 'em or hack 'n slash type boss fight since Glitcheon doesn't really have any real weapons. 

However, it is likely that some sort of a boss figure may appear and that unique challenges and mechanics may be presented during these encounters.

Will there be any new upgrades and if yes can you give us a hint?

The HeadQuarters (via Discord)

We have already implemented a new "ability modifier" system so that you can unlock new features for your abilities that you can turn on and off depending on what you need to do. We have already made three unlockable modifiers per ability from the demo.

We also plan to add two new abilities (each also with three unlockable modifiers), and one of those is already being worked on.

Here's the menu of our current ability modifiers, (excluding new abilities)

Are we going to get more hilarious ads, if so, can you show us some?

Lunar Snail (via Discord)

There will definitely be more new ads, both as background elements as well as for ad-platforms. Right now we're focusing on more general systemic questions rather than developing more content but there will be a phase where mass-content production will be our focus again and then Yän will no-doubt show off more funny and dystopian ads he's working on.

And there are of course the additions to the current ad-platforms. When you have a certain modifier active and stand on the ads, they'll change everything on screen and play a custom audio ad!

Every ad will have its own unique effects when stepping on it and they can get pretty wild!

Will the game be game of the year when it comes out?

Tipu (via Discord)

I can only say that for us it will be!

Will We got more of the secret lang stuff?

(Rako Games via Discord)

Looks like Bonicle has plans for that though they are very secret...

In the demo, you can find several secret text messages like shown above. Try to decipher them all!

Is the Glitcheopn language canon to the game?

(Rako Games via Discord)

We can definitely say that it's canon to the community - join our discord and check out the glitcheon-translator channel to find out more about this fun community project!

Come and join our fun little discord community. You can also ask more of these questions in the questions channel!

Which of the famous Might of the Living Spaghetti mechanics will make it into Glitcheon?

(putti via Discord)

Yän keeps asking me to implement all the Might of the Living Spaghetti mechanics into Glitcheon but I don't know... I feel like my spaghetti days are in the past and should stay there.

How many stupid questions are needed to be asked before you need to take a break? (this may or may not be used)

(King_Owl via Discord)

That one was the straw that broke the camel's back so let's wrap this up!

If you want to ask us more questions and hang out and see some Glitcheon development live, you should subscribe to Yaen's YouTube channel. He streams Glitcheon dev and other indie dev type schtuff on there, and I can be found in the chat during his streams from time to time as well. Of course you can also keep asking more questions in the comments here for our next devlog!

Hu Newgrounds! River returning here after toooo long for an update on Glitcheon's progress so far since our last devlog. We've been a little silent on this side of things, but rest assured the cogs of development are turning in the background.

 Before I dive into the details, I do have an off topic announcement to make! My wife (Brianna) and I (River) are expecting a baby in October. Brianna actually did the voice acting for Glitcheon's "database administrator" in the demo.

 ​Future family portrait

Okay, here we go with Q&A.

 If you'd like your questions answered in the next one, feel free to drop them in the #questions channel in our Discord, or @ us on twitter (@GlitcheonGame).

River's Imaginary Fan, via Imagination Land

At this point we're feeling pretty comfortable with the level design tools we talked about last time. Bonicle has been working on planning/blocking out a totally new game world to play in which we anticipate will be somewhere between 10-20x larger than the full play area of the demo.

We're playing to have at least 5 distinct thematic areas in the new world, each composed of multiple levels. Some of the details of exactly how they'll be split up are to be determined, but we want to introduce a new ability in each area.

For abilities, we've already talked about some major changes to the existing abilities through modifications that can be unlocked and toggled on and off, but we're also planning on adding two new abilities to the game. The details of those abilities are still a secret, even to us, as we are still debating and pitching ideas for those.

So, if you have awesome ability ideas for Glitcheon that you'd like to share with us, now's the last chance that we may consider it. Check out our Design Pillars for abilities below. We're using these as checks to make sure that new abilities are up to our standards and would fit into the game well. We're looking forward to reading any ideas you might have and that we could get inspired by!

​All new ability designs should fulfill these 10 requirements to be considered for addition into Glitcheon

In terms of story progress, we've been focusing on some world building and character building exercises and brainstorming sessions and are now at a point where we feel we've planned enough and need to cut me loose. Next steps here will be a plot outline and then actual dialogue! Usually once I write the dialogue for a certain area of the story, Yaen then goes in and turns it into a sort of screen play format with details of how we want to engage the user visually during those sequences.

River's Imaginary Fan, via Imagination Land

For sure! In terms of new stuff we could showcase right now, some things that come to mind are changes to the health bar/health system, and some of the new ad unblocker ability modifications!

We've been feeling for a while like the health system was a bit too rigid, and didn't allow us to have as much granular control on the individual player's experience and progression as we wanted. In the demo we had an integer based health system where you could start with 1, 3, or 4 health depending on your difficulty setting. Players who were up for a challenge had the opportunity to find 3 more hidden health upgrades, for a maximum of 7 health on normal mode.

​​​​​​

​The new health pack graphics

Taking damage was always instant death or just one point of damage, and gaining health was always a full restore or just gaining 1 health.

At this point we have totally updated this to replace the old health bar with a totally new aesthetic that allows us to comfortably play with the max health settings and fine tune things better. At the moment, we are experimenting with a starting health of 200 instead of 4, and having enemies deal 50 damage by default instead of 1.

​Glitcheon's new health bar comes with a numerical display and a bar or stackable segments that fill vertically with 100HP each.

Those numbers mean basically that the balance is the same for what I described. However, it allows us to play around with new damage types and scenarios. For instance, difficulty settings no longer change your maximum health, but instead change how much damage you take from different sources, and how much health you gain from others!

We intend to leverage this new health system in lots of ways for the full game. Things like damage over time, temporary damage reduction and such are not off the table and we'll be ideating on how to take advantage of the new features for a bit.

​

​The overhaul of the health system also comes with a new look for health related items. How do you like our new heart graphic?

One of the ability modifications we've added is about "High Security" ads. When these ads are blocked, instead of a hologram you see a solid wall, sometimes with floors on top. They come in all shapes and sizes.

This makes them function in some ways opposite to how traditional ads work in the game. With a traditional ad when they're not active you can pass through them unharmed. With a high security ad, you can't pass through it at all when they're not active. In most cases you can only pass through high security ads with the required modifier after the ad activates and then an enemy spawns.

​The high security ad graphics can come in various different shapes and sizes, hiding all sorts of malicious scam-ads behind their locks.

Another of the ability modifications we've added allows ads to stay open for a longer period before releasing enemies, but it also has the negative side effect that the advertisements become much more distracting. We're employing all sorts of audiovisual effects to make this immersive and cool… and distracting.

Distracting ads will talk to you, play sounds that make it harder to hear critical audio queues about enemies, and obscure more of your screen at times, making it a little harder to navigate.

As a reminder, ability modifiers will be able to be toggled on and off rapidly during gameplay, so in any given level you get to pick your poison on what you want on or off, and what consequences/negative side effects you're willing to deal with.

Tipu, via Discord

Absolutely yes. I mean, no promises. Seriously though, we have not discussed removing difficulty options. We do want to improve how they work of course!

I view difficulty options as critical to ensure that people can play how they want to play. We hope to have an appeal to players who are drawn in by the story and by the gameplay challenges, and we want people to be able to have at least some control over the difficulty so they can enjoy it how they want.

As mentioned above for Health Systems, we are changing how difficulty settings work and how they adjust gameplay. One of the things we employed beyond health adjustments in the demo was enabling and disabling hazards and enemies for different difficulty settings, and we'll likely preserve that in some form as well.

We'll likely stick with the three difficulty setting situation where the default is normal, which is also the "easiest." We want to design the game where the default difficulty setting has the broadest appeal and is well balanced, and allow people who have tried it or are into that sort of thing to up the challenge from there.

If you have suggestions for things to tweak depending on difficulty, definitely let us know!

​Difficulty options available in Glitcheon

The HeadQuarters, via Discord

I think this might have been a joke question but it sparked my interest. Glitcheon DID walk backwards if you did the inputs in a weird way in at least some versions of the demo. I'm not sure if that's the case anymore, but I used to use this little trick in speed runs so he could walk backwards so I could get a faster/easier glitch pulse push for long jumps.

​We even had a custom face animation for the weird backwards walking glitch back then!

Due to not having provided a dev log for a little while, we've got a lot to say, and a lot of questions to answer! I wasn't able to get to everything today, so if we didn't get to your question yet this time around it doesn't mean we missed it. Definitely expect more questions answered next time!

Hey everybody! I'm River, the coding guy from the Glitcheon dev team, back to check in and provide a new progress report for Glitcheon development. We've got my imaginary fan back to guide us with some targeted questions, and this time we're also going to answer some of your questions too! :O

If you'd like your questions answered in the next one, feel free to drop them in the #questions channel in our Discord, or @ us on twitter (@GlitcheonGame).

What's been your primary focus since our last scoop?

River's Imaginary Fan (Imagination Land)

Recently we have been focusing on leveling up our level design tools and overall workflow.

This has been a process for the entire team, as I (River) have been focusing on custom tools to make it faster to build and modify levels, Yän has been making new staple building blocks for the levels, and Bonicle has been working on some new prototype level sections that really work well with the latest changes to abilities and their new modifiers.

Some of Yän's new tiles integrated into our test scene

Also new to Glitcheon: Slope tiles!

I am generally a proponent of not re-inventing the wheel, and as such we did quite a bit of research and experimentation with existing tools to see how we could improve our level design so it could be done better and faster, and what we found is that our requirements really are quite unique, and they need a custom solution.

Here's a quick look at the tool I've been building

I expect that we will continue to iterate on the tools we've made, but in the past month we've definitely seen great improvements in what we can do and I hope it will be a solid foundation for moving forward.

What will you be focusing on next?

River's Imaginary Fan (Imagination Land)

We are at a point where we need to make some hard and semi-final decisions on some major story and plot points before we get too deep into designing new levels. We of course have many ideas and a lot of story elements we've talked about that didn't make it into the demo (at least not in an explicitly obvious way), but there's not too much set in stone.

Over the next few weeks, we are challenging ourselves to ask thought provoking questions about the world and Glitcheon's part in it, and then come up with cohesive answers that can be incorporated into the game's story and lore. So far, it's going very well, I think, but we have a ways to go!

Some of the lore-questions we've been discussing so far. Have some of your own? Send them our way!

If any of you all have questions for us about Glitcheon, The Forum, or anything else in the game's story or lore, please send them our way! However, don't expect an answer for those questions (yet). ;)

What was the inspiration for the game idea, and how did that idea evolve up until now?

TheRealBerry (Twitter)

The idea was originally formed as a response to the game jam theme of "intentional bugs" in Jonas Tyroller's Wowie Jam 2.0. We wanted to do something fairly ambitious in the 72 hours we had for the jam, and spent probably an hour coming up with the core concept and some details about how we would implement it. The idea was initially documented as this:

"Metroidvania where you need to escape cyber-prison(?) by creating bugs in the system"

Our initial ideas for the game jam: We decided to go with the green card but it could have been any of these!

Of course after the jam, we decided to continue working on the game and invited others to join our discord server and share feedback during the process. I can't speak to every way the community has helped to evolve the game off the cuff, but I can say with certainty that it wouldn't look or feel the same without you.

Since the jam, we expanded on "cyber prison" or edited that idea to actually be associated with a mega corporation known as The Forum, and the ideas have been pouring in since then, to the point that the game feels significantly different now and actually has lore (and soon™, a plot and fully fleshed out narrative).

What are you guys using to plan out stuff, with all those notes and stuff?

Ganmakurel (Discord)

We use an online tool called miro, which allows us to drop shapes, text, sticky notes, etc. and even draw directly on a shared white board. 

Our current miro board in all its glory (anything on here is subject to change of course)

Recently we also started using trello for task assignment and tracking, but we still use miro a lot for the free form of expression for any sort of ideas we want to convey. 

Will you make an official guide?

TheHeadQuarters (Discord)

We don't currently have any plans to make an "official" guide for the game. However, I think it's likely that if there were to be a Wiki in the future, especially when we release the game, you would see us helping to maintain that sort of information.

Right now it's hard to pull away from actually doing the thing to write about it in that way, especially since many elements of the game are still subject to change or not yet implemented.

Let us know if you'd be interested in an ingame guide like the ones in games like Mario Odyssey or Metroid Dread though! We may or may not do something like that if there's an interest in it.

Do you have anything else you want to share?

River's Imaginary Fan (Imagination Land)

If you'd like to learn more about something or engage with us and our community more directly, you can join our Discord! We have an announcements channel in there you can subscribe to which will let you know all sorts of cool stuff, like when Yän streams dev work, when one of us releases a new project, when new dev logs drop, and all sorts of glitcheon-news.

Thanks for your questions this time around, and I look forward to sharing more in the next one.

- River

Hello all! It's been a while since we've been able to provide a nice progress report for Glitcheon development. River's Imaginary Fan has really been pushing us to spill the beans, so we subjected ourselves to an imaginary interview that we'll share with you now.

If any of you real people have questions for us that you're looking to have answered, feel free to drop them in the #questions channel in our Discord, or @ us on twitter (@GlitcheonGame).

That's true… since we released the demo update for Newgrounds, I don't think we've shared too much about what's going on internally.

There are several reasons for that, and we've all had some personal things going on… for instance, River and his wife bought a house, Bonicle moved to another country, and Yän… well, Yän took multiple vacations and remixed a lot of Castlevania songs. Not quite the same, but that's likely why Yän is really pushing us to get the ball rolling quickly again.

Despite what we've had going on, we have been meeting routinely, doing lots of planning, and we are starting to make real tangible progress towards the full release.

Lots of planning is going on!

We are actively working on the full release for Glitcheon!

If you've played it before, what you experienced was our demo, which is a reasonably large vertical slice of what we intend to offer in the game.

What some of you may not know is that so far, we've released everything we have done. In other words, when we built the demo and released it, that was the entire game so far.

As you can see, the content we made for this demo is already a lot! (and this is just Yän's assets)

Now with our demo available on a variety of platforms including itch.io, Newgrounds, and Crazygames, we're finally looking ahead. 

We can't answer questions like when the full release will be finished yet, as we are still working on answering a lot of questions internally that will heavily influence decisions like that.

We do have some pretty hefty goals for the full release though, including making the world much bigger, adding more characters, fully exploring the story/narrative that the demo hints at, designing more interesting level and enemy interactions, adding new abilities,... I could go on.

Rather than talking a lot about what we can't talk about, we do want to share with you one of the things we have been working on since the demo that is coming along quite nicely: ability modifiers.

In the demo you will have become familiar with the Error Platform, Glitch Pulse, and Ad Unblocker abilities. These abilities are introduced by interacting with terminals found throughout the along the path of the main story.

In the full release, we are also planning to have terminals or similar features that grant the player the ability to toggle on/off modifiers for their abilities. These could give some significant advantages (and disadvantages). 

What is this? An ad? An error platform? An error adform??

For one example, there is currently planned to be a modifier that allows you to use two error platforms before touching the ground. However, being that this is producing more errors/glitches simultaneously, the behavior is also more glitchy as a result… so in addition to being able to have two of them, they are also less stable and start falling in the level shortly after appearing.

Two for the price of one!

We are currently planning three unlockable modifiers (each with a positive and negative effect) per ability, which would result in there being 9 unlockable modifiers for the three abilities from the demo. More abilities that we'll add later should then also get such modifiers.

As far as seeing them, Yän is planning to do more live streams on his Youtube channel starting most likely in January where he'll be able to share more details (spoilers) and hopefully collect your feedback.

Trying them out yourselves… we're not sure. We are definitely going to want playtesting and beta builds going on for the full release, but it may be in a different format than we did for the demo. That's something we'll have to talk about more as we get further along.

There's so many directions we can go in, and at the same time there's some things we probably want to remain hush hush about. 

However, it's definitely clear that we need to spend more time soon on narration for the story and world building.

Another area we are working on is fleshing out our level design tools so that we can build bigger, better levels that feel more seamless without Bonicle losing all of his hair in the process.

One of the level design tools we've been working on, using Unity's sprite shapes: Hazards can now take all kinds of shapes!

Expect to hear more from us, and more often. This format is something we're going to try out and assuming it goes well, we'll try to do a dev log of some sort at least once a month.

Thanks again to River's imaginary friend for all those interesting questions. Now go and write some of your own so we have some from real people for next time!

Big news!

Today, we're finally launching a new version of the Glitcheon-Demo on Newgrounds! This will most likely be the final major update to this demo so we all hope you'll enjoy the new features!

If you want to try it out right away, please visit this link: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/814662

To fully enjoy the new features, a Newgrounds account is recommended for now since a lot of it is specifically designed for Newgrounds. To find out more about that, keep reading.

Leaderboards

On Newgrounds only, your run will now be added to the leaderboards if you're logged into your Newgrounds account and finished the run in one sitting without loading in between. Try to finish a playthrough as fast as possible! Can you get the lowest time and make it to the top of the Leaderboards?

There are categories for all 3 difficulties. Just for fun, there's also a category that just counts your deaths. Who has the dedication to die the most??

Medals

We also added Newgrounds medals - collect medals for doing certain things in the game and earn points for your Newgrounds account! Medals are basically Newgrounds' achievement system.

Even if you're not connected to a Newgrounds account, you'll see medal popups in the corner of the screen when you get one. Can you collect all of them?

Visual changes

There are also a few visual details that we added for this version.

Throughout the game, you'll now be able to find parts of previous glitcheon-generations that failed but weren't fully removed from the simulation. How long has this been going on??

In the intro section, the Lockdown Zone, we added one more row of custom sketchy THE FORUM accounts. We hope you enjoy them!

UI changes

The speedrun timer has been updated: It now shows hours, minutes and seconds! There is also now a checkbox to activate it in the settings. Gone are the days of trying to figure out how many minutes are in 712 seconds!

We also updated the logo in the main menu to the game's new logo.

The pause menu can now be opened with "p" as well. No need to exit fullscreen for pausing anymore.

Thank you

Aside from some minor bugfixes and improvements, that's pretty much it! We'd like to thank everyone in our amazing community for your support and the fun times on the discord server, twitch and youtube streams and so on. If you're not part of this community yet but would like to join the fun, consider joining our server: https://discord.com/invite/EEZeCfK

Alright, thanks for reading, now go and play the Newgrounds Update!