Before we start with a patchnote,
We've got a new artwork for our Steam header!
Huge gratitude to our publisher The Bueno Interactive for that.
Also, we made a new trailer and screenshots to showcase what we've been working on.
Now, onto the changelog.
Major changes:
Lobby added: now you start your runs from the lobby, where you can see the demo completion progress, start your run, or go to the tutorial. In the full game, it will also feature a shop that you could visit between the arenas, and some secrets to uncover.
Tutorial updated: the surroundings in the tutorial are now much more detailed, and it now has a few secrets to find.
Four new artifacts: Magnet, Deadly Zone Generator, The Hive, and Blizzard have been added as unlockable artifacts. New achievements have also been added for their unlocks.
UI reworked: the main menu has been changed to fit with the lobby, the gameplay UI has been fully reworked to be more compact and non-intrusive, although less detailed, and the rest of the UI has been recolored.
Exploding barrels added: red barrels now spawn at the beginning of each wave, and you can pick them up by holding E and throw them with LMB. They explode upon being shot by both you and the enemies, and, unlike the grenades, they can also damage the player.
Difficulty reworked: since we've made quite some changes to enemy code while developing the full game, some of the stuff on the first arena also changed, so we've also rebalanced a lot of things (I'll elaborate upon that in a later section).
Crates added: crates may now spawn on the arena, and you can open them and get a random item using gems that occasionally drop from enemies and that you get by completing tasks. In the full game, you could use gems to buy items from the shop, or to upgrade the shop, but in the demo, the crates are the only thing to spend the gems on.
Sandspire Coliseum updated: there have been some minor changes and optimization reworks regarding the first arena. Also, it now has a secret which unlocks a new artifact and drops a random legendary item.
Stamina system reworked: sliding now consumes stamina, and stamina isn't divided into sections anymore.
Axel enemy attack animation changed, as it now has a newly made shockwave.
Eclipse-14 shooting animation changed.
Minor changes:
Initial Demo Update (30.08.25, 20:04 UTC, Steam Build ID 19798917)
All of the above changes.
Motion blur disabled.
Camera tilt slider added in settings (the default value is 0, since some players had motion sickness issues)
Old "Disassembly" achievement removed (a new "Disassembly" achievement added, since the old achievement requirement was to defeat the first boss, and now one of the artifacts, unlocking which grants an achievement, is also unlocked by defeating the first boss).
Hotfix 1 (30.08.25, 23:21 UTC, Steam Build ID 19799821)
Difficulty rebalance (the difficulty was too low as it didn't concern the changes from the full game, and with this hotfix it became extremely high).
The welcome letter Ukrainian translation fixed (part of the letter was in Russian for some reason).
Multiple translation issues in Russian fixed (some of the text in the tutorial was incorrectly displayed).
The welcome letter now correctly displays the player's Steam name.
Hotfix 2 (31.08.25, 10:32 UTC, Steam Build ID 19802350)
Difficulty rebalance (the difficulty was adjusted appropriately, although we did keep some of the changes for the highest difficulty for a bigger challenge for extremely experienced players).
Blizzard artifact and a respective achievement fully added (it was unavailable in the previous versions).
Translation fixes for the pickup text of The Hive, Magnet, and Deadly Zone Generator (in Ukrainian and Russian, that text was still in English).
Motion blur disabled in the tutorial.
Chili Pepper artifact now works as intended (previously, it didn't deal the damage that we meant it to deal)
There was also Hotfix 3 (31.08.25, 12:03 UTC, Steam Build ID 19802698), but I honestly can't find what we did there. I suppose that it was a translation fix, since in the previous version, Blizzard had the same issue as the other artifacts, but I just can't prove it since the time of the hotfix doesn't match with any of the commits on our GitHub.
And also, a few days ago I translated achievements into Ukrainian and Russian, since I somehow didn't figure out how to do that previously, but now it's also translated.
Now, only a couple of months remain before the full release. We're glad to put out some of the things we've been working on for people to enjoy already, and we'll keep on working to finish and polish the game. We've also seen some things that we need to tweak, so maybe we'll also make another minor patch for the demo someday, but for now, we'll keep working on the full game and all the stuff that we want to do for it.