Hello!

Over the last few days we have been hard at work doing a complete recode of Cactus Rush. The vast majority of the changes that have been made are internal, and are designed to help us add more content in the near future. However, there are a couple changes and new features I thought were important to note.

▸ Arena Overhaul

The arena system has been entirely redone to make them easier for us to maintain and add to. Previously, each map had it's own world, and players were teleported to that world when queueing. Now, each game makes a new world with a copy of that map when queuing. This means that multiple different games can use the same map at the same time, which the previous system did not allow.

This also gave us the ability to pick what modes each map work on. Gone are the days of finding Grape in the 1v1 queue.

Here are the current maps and what modes you can find them on:

  - Banana: 1v1, 2v2, 3v3

  - Blueberry: 1v1, 2v2

  - Dragonfruit: 1v1, 2v2

  - Grape: 3v3, 4v4

  -  Mango: 1v1, 2v2, 3v3

  - Peach: 1v1, 2v2

  - Pear: 1v1, 2v2

  - Watermelon: 1v1, 2v2, 3v3

▸ New Duel System

With the new arena system, we were also able to introduce the ability to duel someone else, rather than entering queue. This also works with parties, so you can have lopsided duels with set teams. You can pick a specific map, or a random map in a number of categories.

Duels also do not track any statistics.

▸ Stats Overhaul

In addition to redoing the arena system, we have also redone the statistics system. Unfortunately, to do this we had to reset everyone's existing stats. This is a change that had to be made eventually, and we felt it was better to get it over with now than wait and let people continue to build up their old stats. Legacy stats are not lost, and will be making a return in some form in the future. If you have any ideas on how we can display these stats let us know either here or in the discord server.

Here's a list of just some of what we are now able to track:

  - Per-Mode statistics.

  - Per-Arena statistics.

  - Number of deaths, split by type: Ability (Deathball), Cactus, and Void.

  - Play time

  - Ability uses

While these new statistics do not appear currently in game, we plan on working these into updates over the next couple of weeks. Expect to see new leaderboards and other ways of displaying these stats soon.

▸ Map Fixes

Lastly, there have been a few small map changes to improve the flow of the game.

  - Dragonfruit: Made right-side push easier to match left push difficulty.

  - Mango: Edited corner jump for right side push to allow more options for attackers.

  - Blueberry: Minor wall changes, fixed holes in the barriers.

▸ Plans for the Future

As this is a largely internal update, with the goal of helping us add more content, I wanted to talk a bit about the future of Cactus Rush. We see lots of potential in Cactus Rush, and while server activity may fluctuate throughout the year due to other obligations, we have no plans of abandoning it. Here is some of our plans for future content:

  - Cosmetics, purchased with Cactus Rush Coins. We have a lot of ideas for these, but we are always open for more.

  - More abilities. We are also open to ideas for these.

  - Per-Mode leaderboards

  - In-game stats viewing

  - Ability to view stats and leaderboards through the website.

  - New maps.

If you have an idea on how we can improve the game even more, feel free to make a thread or tell us about it in our discord server: http://discord.gg/YWGFeNA