Hello everyone, another beta patch in preparation for the release (in January, a proper announcement coming soon). I said the last patch would ideally be the last 'major' patch before release - but this patch is quite substantial.
There is now another mission to bridge the Town and Tunnel scenarios - Field. This one uses the silhouette effect and the time of day gradually changes as you progress. Scenario Mode now has co-op support too, though this will likely need some tweaking before release.
There have been some essential AI improvements to make higher-level enemies more unpredictable, especially the final boss, and there's a new behaviour that is used to make the Field mission unique.
Besides that, there's been a number of visual improvements including shiny blood splatter, raindrop effects, a lot of new stages and stage variations, and a ton of small fixes in various places.
You can read a proper list of everything new in the patch notes below.
I had hoped to include some new and remastered music in this patch (later scenarios still lack music tracks) but there is still mastering to be done on all the tracks for punch and level consistency, so that will have to wait for another day.
As always, thanks to everyone who has supported me on Patreon, past and present, and let me know if I broke anything.
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Beta: 0.3
Gameplay Improvements & Changes:
Players can no longer be blinded when bumping into bleeding bodies (too hard to avoid, it felt unfair). They can still be blinded by blood flung from a sword.
Adjusted AI, fixed the AI always attacking when cancelling a dodge. Fixed the AI cancelling its shove input before actually shoving. Fixed the AI always trying to counter when blocking, even when the player is out of range.
Adjusted Charger style to be more aggressive.
Made fire slightly less lethal - you can put yourself out by dodging or turning again.
Adjusted difficulty modes slightly. Everything below European Yabai will cap enemies at Duelist difficulty unless they are already set to Master. The enemies who spawn endlessly in European Yabai are now slightly easier.
Added a small amount of hitstop to some dismembering attacks to make them feel heavier.
Turning can now be queued while shoving.
Zombie speed now scales properly with the difficulty mode.
Adjusted the blinding system to be less reliable when used repeatedly on normal mode and above. All enemies on screen now have their blindness tolerance reduced when they see it happen, and newly spawning enemies will be impossible to blind until a certain amount have spawned, based on the difficulty mode.
Player-controlled zombies can now dodge.
Pressing down while side-dodging will now only make you duck if you're holding the dodge input.
Additional Content & Visual Changes:
Added Battlefield scenario.
Added 'Last Man Standing' mode (this was snuck into a previous hotfix).
Adjusted Last Man Standing mode to center the players. Lowered the maximum enemy count slightly.
Added co-op support to Scenario Mode.
Added stone lanterns to the castle area in Town.
Tweaked default blood to be closer to the original game. Added additional parameters to the custom blood settings.
Removed bright-coloured splotches from the blood stains - replaced them with a subtle dynamic shine effect affected by the camera position, like a normal-map.
Added a shiny parallax effect to some surfaces, and a dripping effect for rainy and wet scenes.
Rewrote the Arcade scoreboard system to reflect the recent changes to those modes.
Added leg movement during certain actions - charged attacks, shoves, etc - when not in the run state.
Adjusted the bloody water effect.
Dojo blinds once again shade blood stains, like they did in the original game.
Indoors stage now has rain visible on the blinds in some variants, like in the original game.
Added rain variants to the Shack stage.
Adjusted 'Shrine' backgrounds, removed the cliff from the left side.
Added day and sunset variants to the Bridge stage.
Added night and rain variants to the Canal stage.
Added another variant to the Castle stage.
Added Lake stage.
Added Ringout versions of: Mountain, Bridge, Cliff, Lake, Cave.
Added Streets stage.
Added Garden stage.
Added Tall Grass stage.
Added Pathway stage.
Added Inferno stage.
Adjusted Ringout mode animations and collisions.
Background water now uses surfaces so that it behaves consistently regardless of 'Internal Rendering' resolution. Before, higher settings resulted in the water becoming increasingly wavy in a way that clashed with the art style.
Added N-Nani?! achievement.
Bugfixes & UI Improvements:
The walking animation now starts on a non-stupid frame that makes sense for the idle stance.
Fixed issues with the player controller when restarting.
Fixed enemies spawning out of bounds.
Fixed blood vanishing briefly when hitting the ground.
Fixed blood disappearing from the bottom of the playfield on certain stages.
Adjusted areas in which blood can land on the ground.
Removed stray pixels from helmet death animation.
Adjusted player selection screen to prevent clipping and improve layout.
Fixed characters splashing in water. They now create splashes when dodging, shoving, etc.
Fixed falling enemies creating splashes when spawning.
Fixed enemies lacking shadows in some stages where they should have shadows.
Fixed the 'Whoops' achievement activating incorrectly.
Fixed a memory leak when going back and forth between the game and the menu.
The 'Random' stage option will no longer pick the same stage twice in a row.
Stages will no longer pick the same variation twice in a row.
Fixed various UI features. Combo UI now flashes properly with each kill. Skipping the end-match fanfare will now display the winner.
Uploaded Steam leaderboards for every mission and difficulty, and every variation of arcade mode.
Fixed gloves disappearing during death or other animations when 'sleeves and gloves' option is select.
Arcade stage selection now uses layered images to more accurately represent the stage.
Mission progress is now saved per-difficulty. Scenarios are now unlocked per-difficulty (ie: to play Nightfall on hard, you must beat Bamboo on hard). (Still disabled for the beta version)
Added Vertex Buffer Method to the graphics options, to help in case of incompatibility.
Added additional parameters to the custom blood settings.