Hi everyone!

We're working on the next Trombone Champ update, but as always, it's taking a bit longer than expected. In the meantime, we'd like to highlight a bunch of related Trombone Champ / Holy Wow projects... We sometimes post about these on social media, but haven't really mentioned them in Steam News! Without further ado...

---

Flat2VR Studios are working hard on the official VR port of Trombone Champ, which we're calling Trombone Champ: Unflattened. This has turned into a much larger & more ambitious game than we were imagining, and we have lots of plans for post-launch content and support. Flat2VR is doing the vast majority of development, but we're helping with a lot of stuff, like art assets, sounds, storyline, writing, ideas, etc. One of the things we like most about this project is that one of the primary developers is Raicuparta, who made the first VR mod for the PC version of the game shortly after it launched! Trombone Champ: Unflattened comes out later this year for Steam, Meta Quest, and PS VR2, so pre-order today!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3151670/Trombone_Champ_Unflattened/




Around a year ago, indie board game designer Jason Anarchy approached us and asked if he could prototype a Trombone Champ card game. We told him to go for it, and a few months later, he showed us a prototype via Table Top Simulator. It was really fun! Even as people who play a lot of board / card games, we genuinely had a great time. Jason is currently running a Kickstarter for the game and there are a few stretch goals left to hit... check it out here!

—> Trombone Champ: The Card Game on Kickstarter




We're excited to be taking part of NYU's "No Quarter" event, at the NYU Game Center in Downtown Brooklyn. At No Quarter, a small number of game developers are invited to show a new game. The experience we're developing is very ambitious: a nine-player competitive typing game, with nine keyboards centered around three vertical screens. Every part of the game was designed to be shown in a public space... it should be super fun to play and for others to spectate. Consider stopping by if you're in the New York area!

—> No Quarter 2024 Official Website[gamecenter.nyu.edu]




Our iam8bit vinyls were briefly sold out, but now they're back in stock! They did an amazing job with the artwork and packaging... these truly look beautiful in person. Once they sell out, they will probably be gone forever, so grab one if you're interested. A handful of these contain a special collectible Tromboner Card like the ones from the game... and a VERY small number of these contain a golden Babi card. It's possible that nobody on earth owns the Babi card yet. We really hope someone finds the golden card and lets us know!!

—> iam8bit | Trombone Champ Vinyl Soundtrack[www.iam8bit.com]




We have pins, t-shirts, and stickers available at our Etsy shop! We screenprint the shirts ourselves, basically right next to the computer where we make Trombone Champ. If you're looking for a shirt and the site says we're out of stock, feel free to message us - we may be able to screenprint another batch (we have a box full of blank shirts).

—> Holy Wow Merch World on Etsy[www.etsy.com]

---

It blows our mind that Trombone Champ—a game we expected to have "mildly-viral success" at best—is still trucking along in 2024. Thank you all for your amazing support.

For the next game update, we have a lot of stuff in progress: a much-improved level editor, a main menu refresh that lets you actually access the level editor, a whole batch of new tracks, and additions to the level select screen that allow you to choose "collections" of tracks. This "collections" system is probably the largest piece of work... It allows you to browse and play tracks you make yourself, but is also extendable so you can theoretically load it up with multiple collections of tracks. Building this is critical for workshop support, DLC support down the road, etc.

We'd love to get this update in your hands ASAP, but we've been so busy with the stuff listed above that this may end up being a holiday release (we already have two holiday tracks that are almost done). However, we'll release a smaller version of the patch as a beta, so people who are interested can at least try the improved level editor in advance. Thank you for your patience!

Eternally in your service,

Holy Wow Studios

Hi everyone! We pushed a very tiny update today, which does nothing except hide the "Save (Binary)" button in the Tootmaker level editor. This was intended to be hidden. We literally have a checkbox called "enable_developer_features" and left it checked. Whoops! This is the karmic punishment we deserve for making last-minute updates right before setting this version live.

It's not reflected in this hotfix, but we've already have made a LOT of improvements to the level editor since this last version went live... we may push a beta soon that adds a lot of level editor features, so keep your eyes open!

(The next "real" version will add more than level editor features, so keep your eyes open for that too.)

Anyways, apologies for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience... and now, to continue working on the trombone game...

Forever in your service,

Holy Wow Studios

Hi everyone! Trombone Champ has been updated to 1.23E!

⚠️ As usual, this update may require updating some mods! In the meantime, if you need to, you can play the previous version of the game by right-clicking the game in Steam, choosing Properties, clicking the Betas tab, and choosing last_version in the dropdown. But if you do this, please switch back to the newest version whenever you can!

Apologies for the long wait: in addition to spending a *lot* of time on the "Tootmaker," the built-in level editor (more on that below), we've also been helping the folks at Flat2VR Studios with Trombone Champ: Unflattened, the VR port of Trombone Champ that launches later this year. Flat2VR is doing the vast majority of work, but we're helping with lots of art, assets, music, writing, etc.

Anyways, this update adds two tricky new songs: "The Can-Can" and "Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2!" These are both pretty fast and difficult! Personally, "Hungarian Rhapsody" is now one of our favorites, with lots of very tricky rhythms and mode changes.

---

https://youtu.be/9o-3brNQOns https://youtu.be/47qsxSRoEJs

---

The biggest update here is something slightly hidden: a preview of the work-in-progress Tootmaker level editor! You can find it hidden in the Settings menu (you shouldn't have to look very hard to find it).

The main reason this update took a while is because we worked really hard to make this tool as polished and nice as possible... it takes a long time to put together tools like this!

We think the Tootmaker is a great way to introduce new users to the world of custom content creation. If even one person tries this out on a whim, and has their first experience creating their own content for games, it will all be worth it to us. I certainly have a lot of fond childhood memories hacking together DOOM levels, building maps for Worms Armageddon, etc... the first time you see your own stuff working in a "real" game is a magical experience.

However, if you're a power user or someone with a lot of experience making custom tracks for rhythm games, you will probably be better-served by one of the community-made level editors out there, since those have been out for a while and have tons of features that this one is probably missing.

The next update will hopefully make the experience much more full-featured:

• Updates to the Track Select screen so you can browse and play levels you've created without needing to launch them from the Tootmaker itself.
  
• Adding a proper button for the Tootmaker from the main menu.
  
• Localizing the text (currently it's only in English).
  
• Trying to integrate Steam Workshop so that Tootmaker levels can be freely uploaded and downloaded.
  
• Of course, fixing bugs & adding new features.

If you find any bugs with the Tootmaker, or have any suggestions, please leave a comment in the
Tootmaker Steam Discussion thread.

Hope to share more soon... as always, thank you for playing the game and for your continued patience!

Forever in your service,

Holy Wow Studios

Hi everyone! Trombone Champ has been updated to 1.22D! This update adds three new songs, each of which we're very excited about: "Toccata and Fugue," "The Four Seasons (Summer)," and a "Trombone Champ Medley" that unlocks after beating the game. There are also some other small bugfixes and tweaks "under the hood."

⚠️ As usual, this update may require updating some mods! In the meantime, if you need to, you can play the previous version of the game by right-clicking the game in Steam, choosing Properties, clicking the Betas tab, and choosing last_version in the dropdown. But if you do this, please switch back to the newest version whenever you can!

https://youtu.be/PGFfuH1OCV8

https://youtu.be/yJR650Wk4Bo

On the PC side, this update isn't that huge - we spent a lot of this time researching input stuff for the Nintendo Switch™ version of the game, which should also receive an update today. That update has the potential to make Joy-Con™ performance better, and we're really excited about it!

Meanwhile, we're continuing to plug away at stuff that will eventually allow us to enable Steam Workshop. We've gone quite a bit of work on something very fun, which we hope to be able to share soon... we're at that slightly frustrating point where we have lots of cool stuff we'd love to show, but it's not quite ready to show yet. Trust us when we say we're working on it!

Thanks to a user on the discussion boards, we're now aware that the game's performance on Mac is not great on Sonoma. Previously, our primary Mac was a year behind on OS updates. We upgraded that machine to Sonoma and noticed an immediate performance hit. Needless to say, this is super annoying... a game dev's worst nightmare is an OS upgrade that breaks their game. However, we're looking into various ways to fix it!

Ultimately, the solution will probably be to release a Mac version built with a newer version of Unity. This will most likely address the performance issue, although it will probably cause other issues in terms of compatibility: specifically, any user-made content that uses Assetbundles will not work in builds that use newer versions of Unity. In the meantime, apologies, and thank you for your patience!

(On the bright side, we've added two resolutions to the Mac version that may fit Mac laptop screens better.)

Hope to share more soon... as always, thank you for playing the game and for your continued patience!

Forever in your service,
Holy Wow Studios

Wow! Trombone Champ has been updated to 1.21D! This isn't a huge update, and mostly adds two songs: "Korobeiniki" and "Hello! Ma Baby!" We really love both of these tracks... especially "Korobeiniki," which is probably the most fun tempo-changing track we've made so far.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqqaxEl6_Y8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if4qryyqKCw

⚠️ As usual, this update may require updating some mods! In the meantime, if you need to, you can play the previous version of the game (1.19) by right-clicking the game in Steam, choosing Properties, clicking the Betas tab, and choosing last_version in the dropdown.

Temporarily, this branch is going two versions back instead of one, since there's such a technical jump from 1.19 to 1.20 (anyone using 1.19 for any reason will probably have their stuff broken by 1.20, which introduced localization and really shuffles around the game files).

But please, we beg of you - switch back to the newest version whenever you can!

This is a fairly small and simple update, but we're also working on bigger stuff! We mainly wanted to get some new content out quickly, because the Nintendo Switch version of the game hasn't received a content update in a very long time. This is because we were swamped with PC localization work for a solid month!

Anyways, here's everything that's new in this update:

• New tracks: "Korobeiniki" and "Hello! Ma Baby!"
  
• Replaced "The Blue Danube Waltz" with a much, much better-sounding version, plus made the background animations nicer. People complained about this track a while ago, and we finally realized how bad it was. Apologies!
  
• New setting: "Streamer Mode," in the Audio section, which completely hides tracks from the base game that may possibly get flagged during streams. With this checked, you should be able to play the base game to your heart's content without worrying about any songs getting flagged.
  
• Small updates and fixes to localized copy.
  
• Many optimizations to assets in the Baboon screen, which should load slightly faster now - with more to come!

We have a variety of bigger updates (new features) & smaller updates (new songs, new content) coming down the pipeline... Don't worry, we hear you in the comments! We know what we should be working on!

Thank you for your patience, and happy tooting!

-Holy Wow Studios

Hi everyone,

We're very excited to announce that we're releasing a vinyl version of the Trombone Champ soundtrack, courtesy of iam8bit!

This version of the soundtrack features the music from volumes 1 and 2 of the soundtrack, with amazing art by Iri Chen. If you thought the game had too many baboons, just wait until you see the record...


This vinyl also contains all three songs produced by Max Tundra - if you're a music nerd, you know this is a big deal!


SIDE A

• Trombone Champ
  
• Warm-Up
  
• Long-Tail Limbo (by Max Tundra)
  
• Baboons!
  
• Card Shopping
  
• Trombón Fuerte
  
• Trombone Skyze
  
• Click That Chest!
  
• Eine Kleine Nachtmuzik (Trap Mix)
  
• Skip to My Lou
  
• Weird Little Guy
  
• SkaBird
  
• Auld Lang Syne (Champ Mix)

SIDE B

• Gymnopédie No. 1
  
• Max Tundra's Silent Night (by Max Tundra)
  
• Flight of the Bumblebee
  
• Are U Ready 4 Thiz??
  
• Danny Boy
  
• Happy Birthday (Ska Mix)
  
• Funiculi, Funicula
  
• Old MacDonald
  
• Sakura Sakura
  
• Martian Killbots!
  
• The Sailor's Hornpipe (by Max Tundra)
  
• St. James Trombonery
  
• Cmdr. Tokyo, the Dancing Robot (by CV)

We've been making music for a very long time, even before we got into video games. We can remember the first time we recorded music to cassette, and later, the first time we were able to burn our music onto a CD... it's very cool seeing your music in a physical format for the first time... Needless to say, it's an honor to have our music stamped onto vinyl, especially alongside tracks by Max Tundra and CV.

The vinyl is now available for preorders! {LINK REMOVED}http://bit.ly/8bit-trombone

(We also have updates to the game coming soon, so stay tuned for that too.)

Thank you for your support, and happy tooting!

-Holy Wow Studios

Hi Everyone! Trombone Champ has been updated to 1.20F - the "F" stands for "Full of several fixes."

All this update does is fix a handful of tiny issues with localized text. It also makes the dropdowns in the Settings menu a lot better - although that change also came about because the previous dropdowns had trouble fitting some text in Spanish.

As a reminder, if you speak any of the languages we've added support for and find something that's mistranslated, feel free to ping us here: https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/app/1059990/discussions/0/4291439686300865495/

Meanwhile, we're working on more substantial updates... thank you for your support and patience!

Have a great weekend and happy tooting!

-Holy Wow Studios

Trombone Champ has been updated to 1.20, which is probably by far the biggest update we've done since launch! Unfortunately, if you're a native English speaker, you shouldn't notice that much in this update. However, if you speak one of the ten languages that we've added support for, this should be a big update for you!

We've tested the localization as thoroughly as possible: however, it's nearly impossible for us to be 100% certain that every word is 100% perfect in all ten languages. Luckily, it's very easy for us to fix language issues, so please let us know about any language problems you find in this Steam Community thread.

⚠️ Since this is a large update, most mods will almost definitely need to be updated. If you absolutely need specific mods that don't yet support this version, you can play the previous version of the game (1.19) by right-clicking the game in Steam, choosing Properties, clicking the Betas tab, and choosing last_version in the dropdown. But please, we beg of you - switch back to the newest version whenever you can!

Anyways, here's everything that's new in this update:

• (⭐⭐⭐ Biggest Change) The game has now been localized into ten languages: English, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, & Spanish! (We may add additional languages in the future - now that the game supports localization, adding more languages isn't that difficult from a technical perspective.)
  
  Since this work required adjusting every piece of text in the game, many tiny things will have changed throughout the game. Some examples:
  
  
  • Structure of song data files has been adjusted. This is why the download size of this update is larger than most. (This will also help us support a map editor and add Workshop support later on!)
    
  • Tromboner Card graphics replaced. Previously, each card was one image, with all text baked into the graphic. Golden cards look a lot better now!
    
  • There's a new "Language" section in Settings.
• (⭐⭐ Second-Biggest Change) Due to several scoring changes, the maximum scores for all songs should be significantly increased!
  
  
  • Score change: Notes split up into multiple slide segments should now be treated as one note rather than multiple notes. This also looks less weird, as you will no longer see multiple "bursts" and animations throughout complex curved notes.
    
  • Score change: Note weights have been adjusted so that short notes aren't completely dominated by long notes. Previously, notes were simply multiplied by their lengths, which make very short notes worth almost nothing.
    
  • Please note: these changes don't affect letter grades (S, A, B, C, etc.) because those are based on percentages rather than point totals.
    
  • Leaderboards: Since all scores are now higher, we did not reset the Steam Leaderboards. If you care about leaderboard rankings, you should replay the songs you care about, because you'll probably be able to get scores almost twice as large as your previous ones!
• (⭐ Smaller Changes) Here are some additional things that have been tweaked:
  
  
  • The MacOS version should now support Retina screens better.
    
  • The Trombone model in the Character Select screen is now better-lit.
    
  • If you play a song in turbo or practice mode, a small popup now appears in the score screen that informs you how this affects your toots earned.
    
  • The flame effect that appears when summoning an NPC looks so much better!
    
  • The tool that allows you to adjust timing / latency has been tweaked and should give better results.
    
  • The credits have been expanded to show the teams that helped with localization.
    
  • Other bugfixes, optimizations, and tweaks.

This update ended up taking longer than expected, so thank you for your patience! We're very tired, but here's what you can look forward to in future updates:

• We expect to push small updates that fix language issues and add songs. We have two songs that are almost done already!
  
• Gyro support is near the top of our list - we hope to have a "work-in-progress," testable version of that soon!
  
• Later this year, we plan to push bigger updates that finally add better support for user-made content: a proper level editor & Steam Workshop integration.

Thank you for your patience, and happy tooting!

-Holy Wow Studios

Hi Tromboners,

We're excited to announce that a Trombone Champ update is coming soon, which will allow the game to be played in 10 languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Korean!

This update is a lot larger than the usual ones, because adding support for multiple languages means adjusting every single piece of text in the game. This is also why it's been a while since we've posted an update here! It's time-consuming work that requires a lot of testing.

While we finish up this update, we'd like to take a moment to discuss it in (perhaps too much) detail!

Unfortunately, since almost every single piece of GUI has been adjusted and all of the track assets have been restructured, this update will be around 500mb. This is a bummer, since people playing in English shouldn't see that many changes. Apologies for the inconvenience, but this is unavoidable!

Additionally, this is definitely one of those updates that will destroy most existing mods when it comes out. As usual, check for mod updates - and if you need to, you'll be able to opt-in to the previous, un-localized version of the game using Steam's "Betas" tab.

The vast majority of localization was done by Keywords Studios. They've done a tremendous amount of work... all of the GUI, all 50 cards, and the metadata for every base track has been localized! That's more content than you'd think, especially now that the game ships with almost 60 tracks!

Keywords Studio's work was mostly aimed at the Nintendo Switch™ version of the game, so there are a lot of very small text fields specific to PC that we had to add and adjust ourselves using online tools, such as graphical settings, some button language, etc. We took care to double-check these for accuracy, but it's difficult to ensure that every single piece of text is perfect in every single language. When the update comes out, we will make a thread in the Steam Discussion page dedicated to mistranslations - so if you see anything that's mistranslated or awkwardly translated, don't hesitate to mention in there! Luckily, it's very fast & easy for us to adjust / correct text problems.

One of the most challenging parts of getting localization working was adjusting how track metadata is saved and loaded. In the previous version of the game, all of the track metadata (track titles, descriptions, artists, genres, etc.) were kept in one enormous file. Needless to say, adding ten languages to this already large and messy file wasn't a great idea.

Ultimately, rather than hack together a quick and ugly solution, we decided to significantly rework how the game loads track assets. The new system is much cleaner and actually makes sense! Each track simply has a folder, and this folder contains everything the track needs: metadata files in various languages, the track's level data, the sample audio clip, etc. Previously, these files were scattered all over the place.

Even though normal gamers shouldn't notice that the data has been restructured, this restructuring comes with a bunch of benefits:

• Half of the work we'd eventually need to do to get an official level editor working has been done, thanks to this updated structure.
  
• Likewise, half of the work needed to eventually get content loaded via Steam Workshop should also be done thanks to this restructuring.
  
• If you're the type of person who likes to tinker, it should be much easier to dig into the game's files and mess around (just don't complain to us if you break the game).
  
• As the game grows in size, it should be much easier to add songs to all versions of the game.

If you're playing the game in English, the new version should look & feel almost identical to the previous version. However, since we needed to adjust basically every single piece of GUI, we've made some tiny improvements and polished up a number of items throughout the user interface. Some of these updates are things already present in the Nintendo Switch™ version of the game.

Notably, the "Tromboner Cards" look a little different - previously, each of these was a single PNG with the text baked into the image. In order to get these to display in ten languages, we had to break them up: the text is now rendered in-engine. One benefit of this is that we're able to make a much nicer "golden" effect!

If you have the Nintendo Switch™ version of the game, you might have noticed that it already supports localization. So why did it take so long to come to PC?...

To make a long story short, we had to split the Nintendo Switch™ and PC versions into separate projects - and stupidly, we did this before beginning localization. So, we essentially had to do all of the localization work twice over.

Fortunately, since we've already done this work for Nintendo Switch™, we were able to do it much more quickly this time. Also, of course, we were able to re-use huge chunks of code to speed up the process even further.

This update also changes how scoring works: short notes are worth a bit more and long notes are worth a bit less. Also, notes that consist of multiple "slides" are now treated as one note, rather than being broken up into a bunch of individual segments.

As a result of this, the maximum scores for every track are increasing! If you're competing with your friends on the Steam Leaderboards, you'll want to replay the tracks you really care about!

We plan to continue to update Trombone Champ for the foreseeable future! However, once this update goes live, we will finally be close to having a version to which we can say: "if we were to disappear from the face of the Earth, we would be ok with where this game left off."

As mentioned earlier, the next "large" update will likely be centered around an official level editor, which then will lead into Steam Workshop integration (unless we hit any unforeseen roadblocks).

Of course, in addition to "large" updates we have planned, we also plan to add more tracks and continue improving the game in incremental ways!

We hope to release this update very soon, and are already working on new content for the updates beyond that. Thank you for your patience as we finish up!!!

-Holy Wow Studios