Good day Degenheim Fam! ːsteamhappyː
First and foremost, we would like to thank all of you who followed Degenheim development on our Discord and Socials and now expressed interest in Degenheim Demo during Steam’s Next Fest - you guys rock! All the bug reports we have received helped us to understand where the pesky bugs are and see all the issues that went under the radar. We would never be able to investigate those without you.
To provide a little bit of context – we are fully aware that the Demo was far from smooth and bug-free experience. Unfortunately, many of the issues that appeared, never happened during the countless hours of internal testing by dozens of testers. Needless to say, if we were not confident about the state of the Demo, we would not have released it.
The Demo release helped us to identify some of the deep-rooted flaws in our Enemy AI and the way it communicates with the Server – as many of you already know – we have embarked on a long journey of adjusting the game’s code base to be server-authoritative, both to enable the Co-Op mode as well as allow for the endgame competitive mode we have planned to be cheaters-free.
This of course, besides the obvious extension of the development time, opened the floodgate to plenty new bugs and problems to solve. Demo launch also helped us to better understand how the Servers provided directly by Unity operate, and as there is not much available documentation, we had to figure out why the matchmaking and lobby systems did not work as intended (ie. Players from United States were connected to the Europe servers and thus had laggy and delayed input providing for janky and unsatisfying feeling).
We are now in the process of optimizing the game and eliminating all of these issues, but due to their complexity, it is going to take some time. For the time being, majority of the bugs can be bypassed by restarting the game, but we know having to restart the game 1 stage before the Boss Fight is frustrating as hell.
But the fixes are coming! Again, you have our deepest gratitude for sticking with us and especially for the patience and the effort you put into reporting the bugs. As soon as we get rid of them, we will republish the new, shiny, and hopefully much better Demo than the first one.
Until then, we invite you to Join our Discord – we welcome everyone to drop their ideas for the game, improvements, discussions, and you can also request Access to our Playtest version of the game. It is single-player only, but almost bug-free.
Sincerely – Team Degenheim ːsteamhappyː