Hello Bōmmunity!
Thank you once again for all the feedback we have received so far. Despite some initial disruption post-launch we are beginning to hit our stride when it comes to updates.
For our second update, we've concentrated on enhancing game stability, refining gameplay balance, and improving the overall user experience. Key areas of focus include resolving bugs that affected progression and some interactions, ensuring a smoother and more reliable performance.
We've made adjustments to gameplay mechanics to provide a more balanced, intuitive, fair and less frustrating experience, including changes to recovery times after taking damage and enemy interactions. We’ve made changes to certain player controller elements such as the grapple ability, the shine dash ability and air attack combos. Visual and UI updates have been implemented to create a more immersive and cohesive experience. Additionally, we've enriched the game's content and lore with some new art assets and adjustments to some in-game areas.
These updates aim to deliver a more enjoyable, seamless, and engaging experience. If you left a negative review concerning the issues we've addressed in this patch, it would be greatly appreciated if you flipped the review to positive!
Thank you again for your continued support and feedback, this is just the beginning!
Much Love,
The Squid Shock Studios Team
Version 1.1 Patch Notes
New Content and Art
- Added new art assets in the Lower Kitsune Burrows for lore purposes.
- Once a player builds the "Statue of the Hero" construction project in Sakura City, the stone inscription in front of it is now interactable and provides additional lore to the game.
- Updated end credits to include additional Kickstarter backers' names.
Player Controller Changes
Grapple Ability QoL Improvement
The problem: Many players have perceived issues with the grapple ability. Sorting through the feedback we’ve identified the problem that players did not understand that they need to “hold” the direction of the grapple point and instead were “tapping” the direction resulting in unintended trajectories.
The fix: Rather than trying to enforce the “holding” of the direction, we made a change so that now you can just tap the direction. The grapple "field of view" that finds a grapple object, now keeps its most recent direction if a movement input is no longer made. For example, if you want to lock onto a grapple object that is above you, you can now point the movement input in the direction of that grapple object and let go of the movement input. Our hopes are that players, who were already engaging with the mechanic as intended, should feel no difference and players, who were having trouble previously, will now more intuitively grasp the nuances of the ability.
Shine Dash Tech QoL Improvement
The problem: Players were perceiving a dropped “jump” input when dashing off of a ledge and trying to shine dash once in the air.
The fix: While this inability to jump was an intended consequence of not being “grounded” at the time of a jump input, we ultimately realized that it felt somewhat unintuitive to many players. So we have now made it so that if you are grounded when you initiate a dash you will always be able to shine dash even if you are not grounded when you input a “jump”. It is important to note that you will still not be able to shine dash with an air dash unless you have a stored jump reset. This certainly won’t allow for any cool sequence breaks………..right?
Air Attack Combo Cooldown Reset QoL Improvement
The problem: Players were perceiving “air attack combo” cooldowns as dropped attack inputs.
The fix: This problem is something we are keeping an eye on and it is still somewhat unclear as to whether inputs are actually being dropped or if it's the cooldown that is causing a perception of dropped inputs. This is something that we will be paying attention to very closely moving forward.
In the meantime, we made a change where a dash will completely reset the cooldown on the horizontal air attack. Our hopes are that this change will allow players to gain a better intuition of when they should be able to attack in the air and reduce the perceived feeling of a dropped attack input.
UI and UX Improvements
- Added an in game timer that is displayed on the top right of the screen. This is optional and the option to enable or disable the timer has been put in the Gameplay settings menu.
- Removed the "Loading..." text from loading screens for a more immersive experience.
- Made all Omamori slots in the Omamori menu selectable, even if an Omamori hasn't been obtained yet. This will smooth out the omamori navigation experience drastically.
- Fixed an issue where Pyro-kun's description displayed the incorrect text in shops and in the Daruma Menu.
- When fast travel is locked, its text in the map legend is switched to Vermillion Tongue, until the quest is completed to unlock fast travel.
- Removed 2 erroneous map chunks from the map that were indicating that there were areas to explore on the third floor of the Imperial Castle that did not exist.
- For stat achievements only, when the player loads their save file internal checks are made to see if the player has already met the conditions for the achievement, then triggers achievement completed if it hasn't been registered to Steam yet.
Combat and Damage Feedback
- Increased Bo’s invincibility-frame duration after taking damage from 1.75s to 2.25s and from 2.25 seconds to 2.75 seconds if only 1 health pip is left. Our hopes are that this will provide players more time to recover and reposition safely.
- Fixed the Sakura Shogun's hit material to give better visual feedback on when he is receiving damage during the boss fight.
Progression and Stability
- Fixed a bug in the Megumi Mountain targets minigame that prevented it from restarting correctly from a saved file, blocking progression.
- Fixed issues where NPC and quest values would occasionally reset between game sessions, potentially causing game-breaking bugs.
- Fixed the Dragon NPC, Daichi, not triggering dialogue occasionally, which locked players out of unlocking the Library Floor 2 project.
- Fixed an exploit that allowed players to skip the Jorogumo boss fight entirely.
- Fixed the “game completion percentage” being inaccurately increased when defeating Sakura Shogun more than once on the same save file.
Achievements
- Made stat achievements more accurately reflect the player's inventory, reducing errors and making it easier to track progress. Players who have previously expressed stat achievements not activating should see these achievements active on their next initiation of a save file
Gameplay and Mechanics
Bosses
- The NPC “Minori'' now appears next to the entrance of Kitsura's boss room after the player dies once while fighting Kitsura. Minori will hint that players might want to upgrade their stats before retrying. The player is still able to attempt the optional boss at their leisure in spite of this. Please note that the non-English localization of this dialogue may be a bit rough before we get the official translations in.
- Decreased Sakura Shogun's laser rotation speed in the phase 3 arena by 25% to give players more agency in Tsuki dashing through them. Developer Note: We are still in the process of collecting feedback about this fight as it seems to be fairly controversial, especially with the pacing and variance in attacks. Our goal is not to make this fight easier, it is to make it more dynamic. We are keeping a close eye on feedback and will continue to improve it over time.
- Fixed Jorogumo's head hurtbox not deactivating after her Flamethrower attacks if her Flamethrower animations have been interrupted.
Level Design
Ice Caverns
- Added 1 and removed 1 "tengu wall dash staff" in the Eastern Tengu Trials to achieve better flow in Bo's movement throughout the level.
- A black shroud that previously covered a hidden checkpoint in the Eastern Column of the Tengu Trials has been removed. This shroud covered a very convenient checkpoint that a lot of players were just completely missing. Players who would go out of their way to discover this shrine checkpoint wouldn't actually need it as much as the players who completely miss it. So we have made its discovery more obvious.
- Slowed down a rotating hazard in the Western Column in Ice Caverns in the first skull target section to make it feel fairer and allow for better player mobility.
Midori Forest
- Repositioned some tsurubebi (blue flame rope) enemies in Midori Forest that were previously placed in a clunky way causing players to take awkward damage.
- Certain elements of the seed puzzle before the bride escort have been added or rearranged to create better angles for batting the seed. The camera was also zoomed out to give a better field of view for elements that were previously off-screen in some cases.
Kitsune Burrows
- Repositioned a grapple lantern and removed unnecessary spikes in the Bug Nest area in Kitsune Burrows to improve player flow.
Sencho Bridge
- We changed one lantern set up in the Hashime wave chase sequence that we identified as awkward. An early set of 3 vertical orange bump lanterns was replaced with a single yellow vertical trolley lantern. Additionally, a small section of solid ground was added to the section immediately to the right of the aforementioned setup. This solid ground should provide a brief respite for certain players that had difficulty with the small window for a pogo, while also not taking away the opportunity to pull off higher-skilled tech for others. These changes were made to mitigate the frustration and difficulty in the first third of the chase while the last two thirds of the chase remained untouched.
- Boats were somewhat increased in size in the first part of Sencho Bridge. This was done to give players more agency in maneuvering the boat while enemies were swarming them.
- Applied a new animation to Sencho Bridge candles when they are hit.
Imperial Castle
- Removed a destructible crate on the third floor of the Imperial Castle that hid a saving shrine. Players were often missing this shrine and then having to reset to their progress too far. In this particular instance it felt really bad to obscure its location from the player. Especially when many of the saving shrine locations are already obscured in the castle.
Daruma Dolls
- Increased the damage collider for Chomper's secondary action command to chomp, making it easier to hit. Players were having difficulty landing Chomper's secondary action command to chomp in its current position during Chomper's dash. We have increased the damage collider for Chomper's chomp so players can hit the chomp more reliably.
General Bug Fixes/Improvements
- Fixed a memory leak with one of the controllers for SFX that could also have affected dialogue system interactions. This should increase performance throughout the game and greatly reduce game crashes where previously present.
- Fixed a game breaking issue for certain autosave moments in the game where the game would be in an infinite loading screen and corrupt a player's save file when returning to that same save file from the main menu.
- Fixed a minor memory leak regarding rebinding operations.
- Dialogue for giving the Kitsune Kifuda to Daitengu is triggered automatically after beating Daitengu if the Kitsune Kifuda is currently in your inventory.
- Globally increased the hitbox for all bump lanterns slightly to reduce platforming frustrations and enhance the players flow state.
- Extended a scene change trigger in the Imperial Castle Entrance to prevent players from bypassing it by pogoing off a statue.
- Fixed a minor memory leak regarding input rebinding operations