We're back with the biggest patch in Saleblazers history with The Immersive Update!
Your shop will feel much cozier...
And the outside world will be more dynamic!
We want you to be fully immersed as an everyday shopkeeper living in a beautiful but dangerous fantasy world.
We've also upgraded the RPG aspects of our game with all new Constitution, Strength, Endurance, Dexterity, and Intelligence stats along a comprehensive item attribute update that will allow you to make interesting builds!
These fantastic foundational systems will allow us to have much more interesting quests and encounters from now on.
Best Way to Experience This Update
Start a new character
Create a new world save
Hang out with Pop Pop for a bit
Do a little shopkeeping
Head over to Kazai Village!
Your old saves will work just fine, but to fully take in the new systems all at once you should start a new save.
Warning: This is a Massive Patch
Since this is a Saleblazers 2.0 in spirit, there are a lot of changes to check out and to get used to. Here we go!
Shopkeeping Updates
New: Shop Shelves and Counters
There are several variants of all new shelves that snap properly to floors and walls, accessible through the building hammer.
Standing Shelf
Wall Shelf
Counter
Vertical gun/sword rack
You can now build shops that look a lot neater and play a lot better. The new starting Pop Pop's Shop Shop will already include these, so feel free to make a new save to check them out.
New: Shop Stocking Mechanic
For containers that customers buy from, you will now stock them up by tapping E to insert the current item you are holding.
Each item will physically fit within the shelves, showing the name and rarity of the item on a plaque underneath. You can also now stock stackable items in shelves, with a satisfying orderly look to it!
Tapping F while looking at the item will take the item off the shelf and into your inventory.
This has been a dream of mine for a while, where you can sit back and admire rows of goods in your shop.
New: Customer Voice Feature
You'll never feel lonely in the shop with the all new NPC voice systems!
We've added many different voicelines and voice types to different customer types in the store, which serve to give you more information about how your customers are feeling and add more life to your shop.
Here are a few examples out of the many new scenarios you'll encounter:
Time of day and faction based contextual greetings
Thanking you for cleaning up
Being sad when your shop is closed and they're waiting outside
Reacting to your outrageous prices
Letting you know there are no items in the displays
Getting scared by ghouls at night
New: Dynamic Pop Pop Voice Lines!
For those of you with Pop Pop still at your shop, we've recorded 300+ new Pop Pop voice lines with our new NPC voice systems. He'll react to everything you do and feel much more alive.
More Forgiving 3 Strikes Haggling System
It's not very fun to get instantly rejected when you take a risk haggling with a customer, so we've reworked haggling to give you 3 strikes before a customer decides to rage quit.
Refined Haggling Mechanic
We've simplified the haggling UI greatly, allowing you to better see what shop policies and other modifiers are affecting the base sale price.
In order to encourage you on to swing for the fences, the music and camera field of view will become more intense as you haggle for higher prices!
New: Display Shop Name Option in Signs
We've added a new option to signs that will dynamically display the name of your shop.
New: Control Over Hours Slept
You can now choose when you wake up.
New: Rested Attributes
If you sleep for long enough, you'll gain "rested" or "well-rested" attributes that will grant you extra stamina and health to start the day off strong.
New: End of Day Summary
Should you sleep to pass the day or stay up until the morning, you'll see a summary of everything you've done that day and information on what you've unlocked by leveling up.
New: Calendar Events
Each day will bring about new challenges for you to handle now! Customers will come in more on the weekend, cultists will roam about during the Blood Moon, and more!
The end goal is to make the island a living, breathing character of its own where NPCs will celebrate New Year's Eve, dress up for Hallow's Eve, and wear ugly holiday sweaters for the winter!
Examples of events added this update:
Seasons - affects crop growth rate and weather
Blood Moon - cultists roam the lands all day
Hallow's Eve - customers dress up as villains
Winter Holidays - customers have bigger budgets and wear ugly holiday sweaters
And much more!
We've written this all in LUAJit, so we're hoping that we can someday have some cool Steam Workshop feature for you to write your own daily event mods.
New: Calendar Bulletin Board
We've added this in front of Pop Pop's Shop Shop so that you can keep track of all the cool new event system. However, some truly random events will not appear ahead of time on the calendar.
New: Time of Day and Date Display
You'll be able to roughly see what time of day it is via a day and night cycle display.
New: NPCs Sleep at Night
As the night goes on everyone on the Island will start going to bed.
From 9PM to 8AM, customers will no longer show up. It's better to go to bed too so that you can be well-rested for the next day.
Sometimes if they can't find a bed, they'll opt to just sleep on the ground. If you're trying to find an important NPC, try looking down below on the floor!
Enemy outposts will also go to bed, leaving only a few guards to patrol the area.
Roads and Pedestrians
Citizens and police will walk along many of the roads on the island. In combination with all our new voice, NPC senses, police, and random day systems the island will feel very lively and exciting now!
Customers will physically come in from the road for most shop plots.
New Character Class and Item Update
New: Constitution, Endurance, Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence Attributes
We've converted the basic health/stamina/damage player level upgrades to instead give you 5 points to allocate to the following stats.
Constitution: health
Endurance: stamina
Strength: melee damage
Dexterity: gun damage
Intelligence: magic amplification
Attributes and skills will have special bonuses at certain levels. Hover an attribute or skill to see what you can unlock next!
If you want to reset your points, you can visit Ambrosia for a mental reset.
Each attribute brings a different playstyle! Constitution makes you hardy and able to deal damage just by shoving people, strength flings people really hard, dexterity relies on accurate attacks, intelligence improves magic, and endurance lets you run around more!
New: Character Classes
You'll be able to select from a series of character classes each with their own outfits, starting inventory items, and attribute bonuses.
Each playthrough will be a different experience depending on if you're a melee tank, gunslinger rogue, or mage!
If you've played before this update, you'll unlock a unique Airstrafer Shopkeeper class that you'll automatically be transferred to and also be available in the character creator.
New: Item and Armor Attributes Update
These stats will also unlock a series of new attributes that we've added to items all across the game to complement our character stat change. We'll be adding more of these fun attributes throughout Early Access.
New: Improved Treasure Loot Tables
These new attributes will have increased chances to roll for items in treasure chests, making looting even more exciting!
New: Dynamic Item Names
Depending on what combination of attributes you get at higher tiers, items will have unique names to describe them.
New: Zone Balancing
We've rebalanced a few zones to be a little more challenging, so gear up and try it out.
In this update rainy weather reduces NPC hearing, night time reduces NPC visibility, and NPCs will sleep at night which allows you to plan out attacks at night!
If an outpost is too difficult for you, consider revisiting it at night when the calendar shows it'll be a rainy day.
Kazai Village
We've also got new quests, updates to many quests, and a complete layout change to make Kazai Village more of a central hub to the game.
This along with the minimap and NPC voice feature will make this feel significantly more lively than what you are all used to!
New: Kazai Village Walls and Gates
Instead of this dinky little blockade...
We have a gigantic wall spanning the entire village complete with its own gates!
New: Kazai Village Blockade Quest
With the increase of violent outsiders, Kazai Village is closing itself off to the rest of the world.
You'll have to acquire legal identification papers from the west gate or through other "methods" if you want to enter Kazai Village legally.
Make sure you talk to every NPC! We may have some hidden quests in there...
New: Kazai Village Dialogue and Posters
We've added new dialogue and posters all over the place in Kazai Village for greater environmental storytelling.
Just by taking a stroll through the village, you'll be able to absorb the state of the world!
New: Kazai Village Police Department
We've added an all new police department complete with a functional jail to Kazai Village.
New: Jail System
When arrested by police, you will be sent to jail where you must atone for your crimes either by waiting out your sentence or by crafting License Plates.
Ring the bell when you're ready to call an officer over!
You'll be able to see our new dynamic NPCs and new voice systems in action here as well.
New: Jail Quest
Should you find yourself in jail, there's a member of The Syndicate you can talk to...
New: Trespassing Feature
Police officers will kindly remind you to leave the area if they catch you in a restricted area. You'll also experience our new voice system where police can talk to you!
Complete Kazai Village Layout Update
The entire village has had large layout changes, built around the new narrative and new city walls.
Named Doors
Doors in Kazai Village are now labeled to facilitate a more personal feel to each unique building.
Updated Encounters
With the help of the new minimap and ability for NPCs to shout out in the open world, you're bound to come across new encounters!
New Saleblazers Physics Systems
Physics is now integrated in most parts of the game for a more dynamic and grounded feel to the game.
Rewritten Physics Based Movement System
The movement system for both players and NPCs have been completely rewritten from scratch to allow for more premium physics interactions.
New: Shoving Characters
You can now shove characters by moving into them with enough speed.
New: Knocking Over Characters
If you slam into a character with enough force or land on top of them, you'll knock them over! Just be careful because you can also knock yourself over if you're not grounded enough.
New: Pushing Items
You can now push most items simply by moving into them thanks to the all new movement physics system. Don't worry -- it will not work inside your shop.
New: Diving Feature
Swimming is reworked to have full movement physics instead of sticking to the water's surface.
You can now dive underwater! While moving forward, look down to dive deeper and look up to swim up. Pressing the jump button (space bar) will propel you upwards towards the water's surface.
New: Dragging NPC Bodies
You can now hold F to drag NPC bodies around.
Enemies will now react to bodies and can even resurrect unconscious allies, so you should drag bodies out of sight whenever possible!
New: Grabbing NPCs
You can also hold F to pick up characters while they are still alive.
You can even physically throw customers out of your shop.
New: Physics Impulses From Ranged and Melee Attacks
Where you land melee or ranged attacks now cause accurate physics impulses. It looks very cool in a firefight!
Persistent NPC Bodies
NPC bodies will now remain instead of disappearing and be more interactive gameplay-wise.
No More Tele-Med
Instead of respawning with Tele-Med, death is now permanent in the lore.
New: Reviving NPCs
However, those with Rune powers can bring people back to life with a little magic and money, which is very useful for pacifist players.
Reviving unconscious characters is free, while reviving deceased NPCs with your Rune powers costs a little bit of money.
New: Unconscious State
Dealing non-lethal damage will cause defeated enemies to enter an unconscious state. Unconscious NPCs will naturally wake up after some time and can be revived by nearby NPC allies.
New: Persistent Physics Ragdolls
When you defeat human enemies, instead of poofing into thin air their ragdoll will now remain on the ground and be fully physics interactable.
New: Looting Bodies
Instead of looting NPCs' death boxes, you now loot their ragdoll bodies.
New: Perma-Death for Important NPCs
If you defeat an important NPC, they will stay defeated even if you leave and come back.
New: Destroying Bodies
You can burn bodies with fire damage or by dragging them on campfires to get rid of them.
New Self-Revive Feature
Self-Revives
You can now revive yourself with money by holding the interaction button (E) when downed.
Increasing Self-Revive Cost
The cost or revival will continuously rise with each death, until you go to bed to reset the costs. Being well-rested will provide some discounts to self-revive costs.
No More Money Loss on Death
You will no longer lose money when you die. All money will be kept in your inventory.
As a shopkeeping game, we want you to bring your money with you since it's no fun keeping it all in the shop.
(Also, in this patch your Steam status changes dynamically with how much money you have which is pretty cool).
Backpack Inventory Slots
When you equip a backpack to your character, you can now directly see its inventory slots in your inventory menu below your inventory slots!
Perhaps this doesn't belong in its own gigantic header, but this is probably the most requested feature of all time so I thought it deserved it.
Item Holstering
Item holstering is another frequently requested feature by our community and I'm happy to announce that it's finally here!
New: Manual Holster and Unholster
You can now press H to holster and unholster your weapon. Unholstering will take some time, adding some strategy to combat.
New: Faster Holstered Movement Speed
Holstering your weapon will increase your movement speed. Holder heavier items will incur a larger movement penalty.
New: Visible Inventory Items
Items in your hotbar will now be visible on your character's back. Rearranging your hotbar will also rearrange the items on your back.
A player blocks bullets with an Iron Shield, with several inventory items stored on their back.
Better Town Immersion
Previously in Kazai Village, shopkeepers and police officers would hold weapons up to your face like insane individuals.
Now, NPCs will keep weapons holstered until they need to use them.
Better Alert State Behavior
NPCs will holster or unholster their weapon appropriately depending on their alert status.
Completely Updated Combat
Combat is much more methodical and responsive. Fights should feel much more dynamic with physics integrated at every step!
New: Melee Combat Aim Control System
We have reworked our janky melee lunge system to be a lot more intuitive and responsive. It's a lot easier to attack while moving now!
New: Physics Based Knockups and Knockdowns
Instead of playing a canned knockup/knockdown animations for strong melee attacks (hold left click) there are now full on ragdoll physics.
New: Ragdolling Ragdolls
If a character collides with another character hard enough, it'll also send them flying!
New: Headshots
Shooting characters in the head now deals extra damage.
New: Hand Inverse Kinematic Animations for Guns
All new animation code brings reactive animations to your right and left hands now. You'll just have to hop in game to try it out, since it's hard to describe.
New: Shooting Legs to Trip NPCs and Bullet Knockdowns
You can now shoot NPCs in the leg to trip them up or use burst weapons like the Trench Shotgun to knock weaker enemies down.
New: Dealing Damage to NPCs While They Are Down
You can now deal melee, gun, thrown, and explosive damage to NPCs when they are down.
For dishonorable players, an effective combo may be to shoot an NPC's legs to trip them up before landing a series of headshots while they're down.
Improved Item Throwing Physics
You can hold right then left click to quickly throw items. The longer the press, the harder the throw will be.
Throwing an item fast enough will also knock over enemies and items at their exact point of impact with improved full physics simulation.
Faster Bullet Speeds and Improved Bullet VFX
Bullets are much faster now for more responsive gunplay, with improved VFX to help you keep track of what's going on.
We've also improved the netcode for multiplayer bullets.
Reworked Gun Aiming and Recoil Systems
Aiming and shooting your gun will require more thought in your movement and aiming down sights ability (right click).
Aiming down sights will take a bit longer, but will offer more variety in weapon handling.
The Repeater Rifle is great for long range encounters, with increased zoom, less damage falloff, and faster bullet velocity.
The suppressed C17 Pistol is better suited for stealthy close quarters combat.
New: Bullet Physics Impulses
Bullets will push items and characters around now, making firefights more exciting and dynamic.
New: Gun Hand Inverse Kinematics
When you hold a 2 handed gun, your left hand will stay appropriately attached to the barrel of the gun.
Aiming also employs a new inverse kinematic system that dynamically points the barrel of your gun at your target, adds dynamic recoil depending on the type of weapon, and adds a more reactive feel to shooting!
New: Enemies Take Radiation Damage
You can even knock off enemies' helmets in the Crater to make them take damage!
New: Drowning Enemies
You can now kill Ronin and Outlaws by knocking them into the water. Combined with our new physics changes and character attribute update, this will be a great option for Constitution heavy characters who need a little extra help with damage.
New Reactive NPC Systems
NPCs can now interact and talk to you in the world seamlessly without going into a dialogue screen, properly rotating their head and eyes to look at who they are speaking to.
New: Rotating Heads and Moving Mouths
When speaking to a target, NPCs will properly look at their target and move their mouths. This isn't that complex of a concept, but it really adds a lot of life to the game!
New: Saying Hello and Goodbye
NPCs can now say hello and goodbye in a variety of situations. My favorite is that it just works seamlessly in your shop, giving a nice cozy feel to shopkeeping as your customers greet you.
New: Highly Reactive Voice Lines
Enemies will react to what you do:
Picking them up causes them to complain
You'll get mocked by enemy Ronin if you run out of stamina or get an attack blocked
Enemies can say things out of desperation if they are low HP
Freak out over seeing something bad
Get annoyed when you push them around
Get shot in the leg or head
Mock you when you're out of stamina or get your attack blocked
React to mass events
This section could be quite long, so I'll leave it up to you to discover everything in-game! There is a LOT more to this.
New: Stationary Barks
For quest NPCs with something special for you, they'll often shout out into the ether even if no one is around.
Hidden Quest NPCs
We actually have a lot of quest characters that you may not even know about because not all of them have a giant question mark over their head.
With the new NPC voice feature, we added idle voice barks to a few important NPCs in the world. As you run around the island, you'll get to hear them talk from far away making the world feel very lively.
New: Immersive Revenge Encounters
When NPCs seek revenge on you for killing their friends, instead of forcing a dialogue with you, they'll simply run up and start talking while attacking.
New: Immersive Crime Reactions
NPCs will just talk to you and tell you to stop doing that instead of forcing you into a dialogue now.
New: Bystander Behavior State
NPCs will sometimes watch fights at a distance instead of instantly fighting or fleeing.
New: Seeing and Reacting to Bodies
NPCs will now be able to see ragdolls and react accordingly. Make sure you drag them out of view or into a bush!
New: NPCs Reviving NPCs
Some NPCs will revive downed allied NPCs.
New: Advanced NPC Senses Behaviors
Instead of instantly knowing your exact location from far away, NPCs now respect sight and sound more logically.
If NPCs hear something, they'll first investigate the source of the sound to look for a target.
There is now more support for sense impulses. For example, NPCs can now hear items landing on the ground or gunshot impacts.
New: More Dynamic Pathing
Thanks to our new movement physics system, NPCs will now be able to move, jump, and mantle towards their target even if they fail to find a good path. They'll even say a unique voice line sometimes!
New: Alert Status
A new alert state has been added serving as a transition between their relaxed state and investigation/combat/flee states, which is also visible visually above NPCs' heads.
You can also see this on the edges of your screen.
New: Hiding in Bushes
You can now break line of sight by hiding in new bushes we've added. Entering a bush will automatically place you into a crouching position.
New: Advanced Police Behaviors
Police now have a variety of new voice lines and new behaviors.
Instead of forcing you into dialogue, they'll more naturally run up to you and instruct you to stop moving.
They can also drive Golf Carts to pursue you.
Police will dynamically switch to more lethal ranged weapons if you're out of range or are fighting back.
Once in range, they will begin to handcuff you.
If you let the bar fill up...
They'll send you to the new Kazai Village jail!
You'll be able to track your current wanted or police searching status on your minimap...
... as well as your main map in the Escape menu.
They've also been added to more areas in the game, so you won't be able to escape them quite as easily!
New: Paramedic NPCs
Since bodies now remain permanently on the field, we've added a new government NPC type that will respond to reported bodies and revive or dispose of bodies using the same Rune powers you will have.
Learn More About Saleblazers Passively
With voices, we can now pursue a more immersive storytelling method where you can learn more about each character and the world just by passively listening to dialogue.
New: Subtitles
There are now subtitles available, toggleable in the settings menu.
New Emotion System
Human characters, including players, will now exhibit emotions as things happen around them.
Customers will appear absolutely terrified when you scare them off.
NPCs will generally be annoyed when you bump in to them.
Characters will show pained expressions when they're hurt.
Characters will even have emotions during dialogue.
When you respond to NPCs in dialogue, you'll be able to see your own face making appropriate emotions.
We've implemented this emotion system all throughout the game to add even more life to the Island.
Saleblazers Network is Online
We've decided to add some cool online functionality so that you can chat and hang out with each other.
Updated Chat Interface
The entire chat interface has been updated, letting you see information much easier. There are a lot of little tweaks, like chat animations and actually leaving the chat up long enough to read messages.
New: Global Chat
The Saleblazers Chat is fully upgraded to feature cross-server global chat!
Press Enter to bring up the chat, and press Tab to cycle channels. You can even whisper to other players.
A little portrait image of your character will appear to all other players next to your chat messages!
Clicking on a player's name will bring up a more detailed player profile view and the ability to open up their Steam profile.
If you don't want to participate in this feature, you can just click the "disconnect" button at the top right of the chat.
New: Friendly Hangouts
For those of you who are not interested in Player Invasions (found on the Island to the west of Pop Pop's Shop Plot by talking to The Stranger) we have now added Friendly Hangouts where you visit other players' shops peacefully!
You can also invite specific players by clicking on their name in the chat, and inviting them through the player menu.
To join a hangout, you can keep an eye out in the global chat or for invites to pop up on your screen.
Reminder: Proximity Voice Chat Exists
You can hold V to use push to talk for local proximity voice chat. We've added a funny talking animation to your character when you do this.
Default Minimap
Minimap by Default
You now see the minimap at the bottom right by default, instead of having to equip your minimap item.
For those of you who prefer a minimap-less experience, you can toggle the minimap in the ESC menu settings.
More Minimap Icons
You can see shops, outposts, attribute givers, runes, and more!
Check out Kazai Village! There may be some things you've missed but have been in the game the entire time.
New Starting Pop Pop's Shop Shop
In new save files, you will now start out with a fully-fledged shop complete with a Modern Bed, Research Board, Bamboo Table, Bamboo Cups, and new item displays.
We wanted to improve the Saleblazers experience for new players as well as provide more groundwork for the upcoming story missions.
New and Updated Music
We've added more new music and changed up some music throughout the game!
New: Pop Pop's House
A beautiful orchestral version of Pop Pop's theme to illustrate his caring and overly optimistic nature.
New: Starting Area
This new track should invoke a cozy, warm, nostalgic feelings for the beginnings of a grand adventure!
New: Kazai Village
We've added a brand new track to better convey the story of a beautiful, yet fragile, kingdom.
New: Dojo Shop Plot
This shop plot near Kazai Settlement has some new mysterious music to inspire intriguing builds centered around the Shepherd pieces.
New: Main Menu
We've added 15+ tracks that continuously play in the main menu! Some of these amazing tracks were unused and from previous iterations of the game.
New: Haggling
With the new haggling mechanic, we've brought back our dynamic shop music tracks!
New: VIP Customer Waves
During each customer type's VIP wave, a unique piece of music tailored to their personality will play.
Large Shepherd
This track is updated a little to make the fight feel more grand and special.
You can take a listen to our existing Saleblazers music over at Kenny Regan's spotify album.
Big Visual Update
You may have noticed that the entire look of the game is different in all these new pictures.
An after (top) and before (bottom) comparison.
We've changed virtually everything in the game in some way.
New: Better, Softer Lighting Model
Before, we would have very harsh lights across the game that created hotspots and didn't let us light large areas.
Now, lights are a lot softer and can light across a larger distance!
Updated Global Lighting and Post Process
The game should look a lot more relaxing and beautiful now.
New Item Icons
We've completely updated the rendering method of item icons for greater collection satisfaction. You'll also be able to see them when hovering over things now.
Before and after:
You can even see item icons in dialogue!
And when stocking displays!
New Keyboard + Mouse Keypress Icons
There's now more readable and themed button presses!
New: Vegetation Shaders
We have a new shader that offers much smoother interaction and wind effects. You'll also be able to see trees from much farther while still maintaining performance.
New: Water Shader
We've updated the water shader with a ton of new effects.
New: Reflection Probes
More surfaces will properly reflect and blend properly throughout the day.
You'll now be able to see beautiful reflections in the waters of Kazai Village.
Visual Effects
We've updated effects across the game, like for example...
Blood. (Blood is toggleable in the settings)
Footsteps.
Muzzle flashes.
Water splashes (and characters/water looking more wet).
And much more!
Better Textures
There are new textures all over the game, like this new mud terrain texture (which includes new sounds and fx as well when you interact with it).
Dynamic Camera Angles
We've pulled the camera in to get you better immersed in the world, while also adding the ability for the camera to automatically pull itself in and out depending on the situation.
Camera Distance Option
If you prefer a farther away camera, tryout the "Camera Distance" option in the gameplay settings.
"Less is More" UI Update
We've gone through most of the main UI screens to reduce the UI footprint in general so that you can focus on the game world instead.
Some of them are even interaction related -- for example, the shop sign now can be flipped with a tap and options are now relegated to holding the interact key. For the shop sign UI itself, it dynamically resizes depending on what you actually have enabled instead of showing everything all at once.
Cool UI Glass Shader
There's also a new UI glass shader to keep more of your focus on the world. (Characters are shiny here because it is raining and they are wet).
Updated Attribute UI Display
Instead of a generic icon, the attribute UI display at the top left will communicate your state of being better using color-coded words.
Swimming Damage Rework
Instead of taking damage at 0 stamina, you'll only take damage if your head is below water. You'll use up more stamina if you're underwater.
And More!
There are a ton of other visual changes throughout the entire game that I just cannot fit into these patch notes, like how bullets have lit, curved tracers now which is very cool especially at night.
Dollars and Cents Price Update
For immersive and balance purposes, we converted what would previously be $520 to $5.20 and rebalanced many of the prices across the game to account for this.
Previously instead of $2.47 this Ronin Bamboo Hat would be something crazy like $247.
For this patch, we've applied a slight rebalance but nothing should really change gameplay-wise. The goal of this change is mostly for immersion.
Sprint, Dash, and Stamina Changes
We want you to feel like a relentless hero who does feel tired at times, but never gives up and pushes through to success.
Combined Sprint and Dash Ability
Instead of using Left Control to dash and Left Shift to sprint, pressing Left Shift will dash into a sprint which should feel much more natural and make stamina usage more interesting.
Sprinting at 0 Stamina
You can now continue sprinting even after depleting all your stamina, as long as you keep up your momentum and don't slow down. Your character will begin panting and sweating, but will not give up!
Blocking at 0 Stamina
You can now block at 0 stamina, but it will momentarily stun you for a "Last Stand" feel.
More Responsive Sprint Attacks
You'll be able to cancel into a sprint attack much quicker than before.
Better 0 Stamina Melee Attacks
Your 0 stamina melee attacks will deal slightly more damage than before and now apply hitstun effects. They're still going to be much slower than regular attacks and not be able to knock up enemies though.
Optimizations
We had to do quite a lot to get our frames looking steadier:
New occlusion culling system
Memory usage optimizations
Changing all shaders from alphatest to opaque
Reduce SRP batches by fixing shader keywords
Spot optimizations in sections such as Kazai Village by hand
Rendering optimizations
Tons of script optimizations, shaving 0.01 - 0.05ms here and there
We're happy to report that despite all this new systems and updated visuals for this patch, we see a general boost in framerate especially on the Steam Deck!
Narrative Changes
We're improving the story as we work towards 1.0, since we want Saleblazers to both have great gameplay and tell a great story.
Lore Shifts
Here are some major narrative changes:
Kazai Village is protecting itself now too, instead of relying on just the Ronin. However, they are a bit of a nation in decline with its people and government not being quite as sharp as they used to be...
Dying is now permanent. People do not have Tele-Med from the CEO and cannot revive themselves.
However, people who possess Rune powers can resurrect themselves and others.
People have been living on the Island for a very long time.
Instead of being teleported from the mainland then to the CEO Airstrafer Base tutorial, the main lore is that you start out at Pop Pop's shop and that you have been living on the island since you were born.
Random Things
I tried my best to structure these patch notes as best I could, but there were just too many things to cover.
Here are a few stray points that I couldn't really find a good category to put them in but I wanted to mention nonetheless:
Steam Rich Presence
You can now see if your friends are in a lobby together, what level they are, what mode they're in, and how much money their character has via the Steam friends list!
I'm a big fan of Steam and this is something I've always wanted to implement but never got the time to do so.
Unity Engine Upgrade
You shouldn't even really feel it, but we're on Unity 2021.3.45f2 now. We had to do it for a few new features and optimizations.
Customer Reviews
The shop UI will now display total amount of reviews (starting from this patch) as well as the recent percentage of positive reviews from the last 7 days. Let's see how many reviews you can rack up!
Teleport Screen Effects
I put a lot of effort in making the teleportation transition cooler, since you do teleport a lot in the game and it's not very immersive to stare at a basic loading screen. I'm pretty proud of it!
Handcrafted Item Value Bonus
If you craft your items in-house, you'll receive a small boost to their value.
Shop Shutdown Removed by Default
With all the new NPC behaviors and physics, it's a little too easy to get shut down. We've removed the shop shutdown change for all shop plots except the Desert Shop for now.
It'll most likely come back, but with more upgrades like the police system thanks to our new voice and NPC systems.
Better Request Customer Behavior
Instead of being forced to attend to customers every now and then, they'll only ask for help if they cannot find their item themselves. This should make autonomous shopkeeping much easier.
Immersive Death Screen
When you die, all the sounds of the world slow down and there's a whole new piece of UI.
Flame Lights
Flame lights will slightly move around and flicker now.
Customer Type Narrative Changes
We've polished up the customer types a little bit to improve the overall gameplay and narrative.
Replaced the following:
Fashionista
Athlete
Gamer
College Student
New Bedstone Villager
With these new customers:
Snowville Villager
Scientist
Kazai Castle Villager
Acolyte
New Bedstone Villager
Updated Customer Personalities
The world is already mean enough out there, so we've also removed "mean" dialogues and improved the personalities of each customer to make shopkeeping feel much more cozy.
Chat Text Over Head
When you type a message in chat, it will appear over your head. This should allow for more roleplay experiences.
Foliage Rustle Noises
If you walk in deep grass or wade through bushes, there is now a satisfying rustle sound! This was rather tough to do cheaply, so I hope it was worth it.
Updated Dialogue UI and Interaction UI
Just looks a lot cleaner with a cool glass effect.
Misc. Combat Tweaks
There are a lot of combat tweaks that you'll just have to feel out. For example, heavy attacks (hold let click) now require you to commit and have cooler effects now. Enemy attack patterns were also adjusted a bit to match the new combat. Or, ranged attacks are tweaked to land easier shots up close now.
Updated Main Menu
The main menu looks a lot cooler and is more optimized now. I've added a ton of tracks to it as well.
New Logo
The new logo serves to reflect the slightly more serious and much more polished direction Saleblazers will head in towards 1.0. I'm sad to see our familiar logo go, but it is for the best!
Wind-based Cloud Shadows
An epic cloud shadow system has been added to really make you feel like you're there!
World Improvements
There are many misc. world changes, like adding an actual VIP hotel room that you can use Sylvester's hotel key card on to unlock or a few places in Kazai Village to test our new water diving mechanics.
Building Window Collision
You can now jump out of the starting window building pieces!
Damage Type Rework
For example instead of not allowing the Bamboo Tool to deal any damage to Iron, it will just deal more self damage and do less damage. It's still much more worth it to use the proper tools per material, but if you're in a pinch you won't be hard locked from progress.
Sprinting into Doors to Open Them
With all the new movement changes, it only felt right that you should be able to fling open unlocked doors if you sprint into them!
Large Shepherd Fight Update
Large Shepherds (ones with many rings) can now perform a stomp attack if you're up close. You'll also be able to destroy each ring to bring down the Shepherd as an alternative to climbing up to the top.
Large Creature Physics
Apex now have physics accurate limbs, so you can actually run underneath them!
Seeing Your Shop From Afar
You can now see your shop from very far away! There was some hard work involved to maintain performance, but it's definitely worth it.
"Wet" Character Effect
Characters will now be shinier when you're wet, instead of seeing some general particles.
Lightning!
When it rains really hard, you'll see thunder flashes now.
Improvements to Food/Drink
Added cold, hot, fresh attributes to food that work with the Fridge! Also, various improvements to the eating/drinking FX that make consuming items way more satisfying.
Looting Clothes Off Characters
Since looting involves interacting with the body instead of their death box, looting clothes off them will physically remove it from them. It's a little weird, but with this patch I do want to introduce some morality in your decision making. Perhaps you'll consider crafting your goods from this patch onwards.
More Server Chat Message Updates
You'll be able to see what other players in your server are up to, with chat updates for many events such as unlocking research nodes or unlocking fast travel Totems.
Physical Item Interactions
You may have noticed that when you stock items in shelves they physically travel from your hand into the display, making shopkeeping ultra satisfying.
This behavior also applies to regular item interactions like item pickup and placement!
Inventory Interaction Sounds
Interacting with items in your inventory will play animations and item-appropriate sounds, for full haptic immersion.
Getting Up From Ragdolling State
We've added a ton of animation and gameplay polish for when characters recover from a ragdoll.
Updated Locomotion Animations
We've added hefty new jog and sprint animations to add extra weightiness to our new movement system!
New: Momentum System
You will now preserve proper momentum throughout all your movement, which should make the game feel a lot more grounded to move around in.
New: Ground Slope Now Affects Speed
Running uphill slows you down while running downhill speeds you up.
New: Speed Based Locomotion Animation
The speed of the animation also now matches how fast you are moving.
New: Ragdolling From Great Heights
If you fall from great enough of a height, you will start ragdolling.
New: Ragdolling Knocking Over NPCs
You can also knock over NPCs with ragdolls
Improved Collisions
You will no longer pass through NPCs by walking into them and should see less NPC clipping in general due to better collision detection.
Various Physics Improvements
There are also a more misc. changes, like how NPCs will physically throw up their held item or how physics impacts between items are more physically accurate.
More Skillful Parries
Parrying now requires you to still be holding down the block button.
Responsive Impact VFX
Updated blood and impact VFX will actually play exactly where you hit the enemy or environment.
Item Discovery System
If you haven't picked something up, its name will show up as ???. You can hover over it to discover it or pick it up. Discovering an item will show its description in a new discovery UI.
New Character Creation and Character Selection Screens
This is to prepare for some potential cool features that'll make you want to replay Saleblazers more as a different character!
Updated Force Feed Mechanics
Previously when you threw an item (G) at a character, they would instantly consume the item. Not only was this un-immersive, it was also incredibly unbalanced since you could defeat enemies by throwing 500 Poison Potions at them to stack 500 ticks of damage a second.
Now force feeding a character will cause them to switch to the item, consume it, then switch back to their old item. They cannot consume another item if they are already consuming.
Feeding or Petting Animals Gives Items
You can now force-feed animals and they'll drop you a unique item as thanks. You can also interact with them to get an item sometimes.
Zone Discovery System
When you discover a new zone, it'll have a unique effect to it and it won't show the zone area popup anymore again unless you teleport there.
Unfortunately, we've only started tracking zones this update so you'll have to rediscover zones again to track them.
Tracked Quests and Main Quests at Edge of Minimap
You'll be able to see tracked quests and main quests at the edge of your minimap, giving you easy information on where to go.
Quest UI Polish
I've updated how the quest notification looks and there is also now a cool little animation that plays!
Improved Golf Cart Mechanics and Handling
We've improved how this cart runs, added some effects, added an on fire -> explosion state, improved how you can run people over, added self-damage to it to balance, and more.
A Lot More Changes and Fixes
There are even more changes than what I wrote about, but there are too many to cover. Some of them are really niche, like how the Garand rifle requires you to empty all your bullets to reload or that the sound of each bullet will slightly pitch up as you run out of ammo.
In the future, we will use our new changelog tool at https://saleblazers.com/sections/changelog/ to track everything. Unfortunately, I only just made this tool a few days ago.
What's Next?
Quests
I've been talking a lot about how this patch will set us up nicely for future missions. We already had 70+ hours of Saleblazers, but were creatively limited in making new quests due to a lack of system depth since we didn't want to make more of the same content.
We're no longer limited to simple fetch quests and combat anymore, so we're planning out the rest of the main quests! I'm planning on having the new quests be directly linked to new mechanics.
Maintenance
We've been thoroughly bugfixing and optimizing this patch for the last few months, but due to its sheer size we'll be on standby to see if any hotfixes are necessary.
Please use the in-game bug reporting feature in the ESC -> Settings menu if you experience any issues.
More Devlogs
We're looking to put out more devlogs and Steam news so that we don't just work on a large patch in the dark for months anymore.
Ideally, future patches will be much smaller/quicker now that we've redone most of the foundation, but since we're a small team it may still be a little slow. Either way, you'll hear about it more instead of just wondering if we're even alive.
Why Is This Patch So Big!?
Saleblazers already has 100+ hours of gameplay, so if we are to make more content we want to meaningfully make more interesting quests and encounters, which is only possible with a deeper foundation of mechanics and worldbuilding.
We didn't intend for it to take this long but some things really were interdependent.
Take just persistent ragdolls as an example: "this means you now have to be able to drag them for stealth and shopkeeping... customers/enemies need to react... but we need to have the player be able to revive them if they're pacifist... and need Paramedic NPCs to clean up the shop... oh and we added voices so now customers have to react to all of it... oh but you can't deal damage to ragdolls so we need to add that... oh but it's weird our game doesn't have headshot damage... perhaps now we need ragdoll physics to react to bullets... and melee... maybe we need to rework combat if you're allowed to hit ragdolls in general... hmm, also our new movement system makes it so that touching a body causes you to glitch out and fly across the map in 1 second... just crashed so need to fix that... alright and now that it all works it's suddenly laggy so we need to optimize again..."
You can see how this easily spirals with many such features implemented at once. You may have heard about "the door problem" in game development where making a door is seemingly simple but in reality complex. We essentially did dozens of "door problems" all at once.
There were also plenty of features like item displays, physics systems in general that were just generally very difficult to code even by themselves, especially in multiplayer.
Why did we do this? Because we love Saleblazers and we want it to be a really good game for you. I hope that when you play this patch, you truly experience being transported to a different world.
Before and After
Once you've gotten a chance to fully immerse yourself in this world, watch this old video by Kage848 in 2023 to see how far we've come!
You can play the old build by selecting the "Legacy" branch via the Steam properties. (Back up your saves and do not load your new saves though!)
Thank you for reading until the end!
We are a very small team and are incredibly grateful for all the support we have gotten over the years. I hope you enjoy what we have in store for you!