Bonk & Blaze Update - Wall Bonks, Fire Tail Fireballs & Combat Control

Walls now hit back with considerably more personality, while Fire Tail has evolved into a fully fledged ranged weapon.

This update introduces a complete boundary-bonk recovery system, automatic Fire Tail fireballs, improved combat contact animations, clearer direction buffering, major controller and UI improvements, balance adjustments, and a substantial performance and stability pass.

Wall Bonks Have Been Rebuilt

Boundary collisions now use a dedicated bonk sequence instead of immediately continuing normal movement.

• Surviving a boundary collision now starts a short recovery period.
• A standard recovery lasts 0.70 seconds and can extend to 0.80 seconds when Snake is moving quickly.
• Boundary bonks remain damaging and can still be lethal. The base collision deals 1 damage before other defensive or build-specific rules are applied.
• During recovery, you can select either direction perpendicular to the wall.
• Your selected escape direction is displayed with a cyan direction indicator.
• When recovery ends, Snake immediately moves in the selected direction.
• If no escape direction is selected, Snake attempts to continue forward, potentially causing another bonk.
• Successful movement resets the consecutive-bonk counter.

The presentation has also been completely redesigned:

• Snake's head and nearby body segments now compress against the wall before recoiling.
• Consecutive bonks escalate through three visual tiers.
• Repeated impacts produce stronger squash, recoil, dizzy stars and impact feedback.
• The first, repeated and third consecutive bonks have different sound profiles.
• Dizzy-star audio now arrives after the initial impact instead of competing with it.
• Patch can react to repeated and third consecutive wall bonks with new voiced story events.
• Reduced Motion uses a much smaller displacement while retaining readable feedback.
• High Contrast mode provides clearer stars, outlines and direction indicators.

More Control During Combat Contacts

The bonk recovery concept now also applies to several enemy-contact situations.

• Guarded enemies, armored enemies and Gatekeeper shields now use dedicated contact recovery states.
• Hunter attacks and successful Hunter devours now use their own post-contact recovery timing.
• Guard, armored and boss-shield contacts provide a 0.66-second decision window after the impact presentation.
• Hunter damage contacts provide 0.26 seconds of post-contact recovery.
• Hunter devours provide 0.30 seconds of post-contact recovery.
• A valid perpendicular direction can be entered or held during these sequences.
• Buffered directions are retained instead of being discarded when contact begins.
• A visible direction indicator confirms which turn will be executed.
• Snake now keeps facing the contacted target until the moment of impact.
• After contact, the head turns toward the selected or automatic exit direction.
• The final facing direction is held until movement resumes, removing abrupt visual snapping.

Gatekeeper Improvements

Several Gatekeeper combat and presentation problems have been corrected.

• Gatekeeper shield-breaking effects now remain attached to the correct boss position.
• Shield relay effects are removed when the boss moves instead of being left behind on the previous cell.
• Temporary shield plates created during teleport presentations now expire if the normal impact sequence cannot resolve them.
• Fireballs and direct attacks correctly identify individual protected shield sides.
• The Gatekeeper defeat sequence now accepts a legal movement direction while the cinematic is still playing.
• The buffered direction is shown with the same direction indicator used by combat recovery.
• The selected direction becomes Snake's first movement after the cinematic.
• If no direction was selected, Snake waits for fresh input instead of drifting forward automatically.
• Gatekeeper and other boss objectives now display the portrait of the actual targeted boss rather than a generic objective icon.

Fire Tail Now Launches Fireballs

Fire Tail has received a major offensive expansion.

While Fire Tail is active, it now automatically charges and launches a fireball in Snake's current movement direction.

Fireball rules

• Fire Tail I launches every 3.0 seconds.
• Fire Tail II launches every 2.5 seconds.
• Fire Tail III launches every 2.0 seconds.
• Each fireball deals 1 damage.
• Projectile speed is at least 8 cells per second.
• When Snake is moving faster, projectile speed becomes 2.25 times Snake's current movement speed.
• Fireballs begin slightly in front of the head to make the launch readable.
• Projectile size increases with each Fire Tail stack.
• Fireballs check every crossed grid cell, preventing fast projectiles from passing through targets.
• A projectile stops when it hits an enemy, wall, obstacle or board boundary.

Enemy and shield interactions

• Hitting an unprotected enemy deals normal Fire Tail damage.
• Fireball kills are credited as tail-effect kills.
• Enemies killed by a fireball can use a dedicated burned or charred death presentation.
• Hitting the protected side of a directional guard removes that guard side.
• Hitting a protected boss side breaks that side of the boss shield.
• A fireball consumed by a shield does not also damage the protected enemy.
• Shield breaks use their own impact presentation and update the enemy immediately.

New Fire Tail presentation

• A visible fuse now travels along Snake's body while the next shot charges.
• The anticipation packet stops before reaching the face, keeping the head readable.
• The old persistent ring over Snake's head has been removed.
• When firing, the actual rendered head grows and recoils instead of being covered by a generic marker.
• Launches include a brief muzzle flash and recoil accent.
• Fireballs use animated sprite frames, layered afterimages and stack-dependent sizing.
• Enemy, shield and wall impacts use different visual profiles.
• Launch, enemy impact, wall impact and shield impact now use distinct audio treatment.
• Fireball impact captions are available through the existing accessibility caption system.
• Reduced Motion and High Contrast variants are supported.

Fire Tail Reliability and Performance

• Active projectile state is now validated when a saved run is restored.
• Invalid or out-of-bounds projectile data is discarded safely.
• Fire Tail charge geometry is rebuilt only when Snake's body geometry changes.
• The same cached charge path is reused by all Fire Tail drawing operations.
• SnakeView can read active projectile state without creating a deep copy every frame.
• Public snapshot APIs still return isolated copies where ownership protection is required.
• Transient projectile rendering no longer modifies authoritative gameplay state.

Queued Direction Indicators

The direction indicator is no longer limited to regular wall collisions.

It can now appear when:

• recovering from a boundary bonk;
• turning away from a guarded or armored enemy;
• recovering after a Hunter attack or devour;
• choosing a direction after a Gatekeeper shield contact;
• buffering the first movement after the Gatekeeper defeat sequence;
• waiting for fresh movement input after another gameplay pause.

The indicator follows Snake's rendered head position while animations are active and disappears after the queued movement is consumed.

Crown of Spikes Fixes

Crown of Spikes now follows its promised combat rules more consistently.

• Head hits deal 2 damage to normal enemies.
• Head hits now also deal the promised 2 damage to bosses.
• Killing a normal enemy allows Snake to move through the defeated target.
• Hunter contacts are routed through Hunter-specific combat handling.
• Boss contacts are routed through boss-specific combat handling.
• Devour rewards and special attack presentations are preserved.
• Directional guards and boss shields continue to block attacks from protected sides.
• The additional unshielded crash-damage drawback remains active.

Doomed Feast Clarification and Fixes

• Every 5 foods still grants 1 maximum HP.
• The curse can grant a maximum of 3 additional maximum HP during a run.
• Each health threshold adds 3 hazards at least 3 cells away from Snake's head.
• The feedback message now distinguishes the current +1 HP gain from the cumulative curse total.
• For example, the second activation reports “+1 max HP” and a curse total of +2 instead of implying that it granted 2 HP at once.
• Health progression and food counters are preserved correctly through save and restore.
• The maximum-HP reward is still granted when the board is too full to place all promised hazards.

Class Mastery Costs Reduced

Class Mastery upgrades are now more affordable, with the largest reduction applied to the first tier.

• Balanced: 80 / 234 / 324 coins.
• Tank: 90 / 252 / 342 coins.
• Speed: 90 / 252 / 342 coins.
• Greedy: 100 / 270 / 378 coins.
• Ghost: 100 / 270 / 378 coins.

Controller and Steam Input Improvements

• Steam Input action handling now respects the currently active gameplay or menu context more reliably.
• Controller input is less likely to leak into gameplay while a menu or transition owns focus.
• Controller glyph selection and fallback glyphs have been made more consistent.
• Action hints update more reliably when the active input method changes.
• Reward selection screens can now be scrolled using the right analog stick.
• Direction input entered during contact recovery is buffered instead of being lost.
• Queued directions now update the visible contact animation and final head orientation.
• Menu focus handling has been strengthened around dynamically rebuilt controls.

Risk Chamber Transition Controls

• Manual Risk Chamber transitions now clearly wait for player input instead of silently gaining an automatic timeout.
• The Level Auto Start setting continues to use a timed transition.
• Regular keyboard keys can continue a manual transition.
• Escape and F9 remain reserved for their existing global actions.
• Mouse clicks do not accidentally dismiss press-any-key transitions.
• Directional input entered during the brief transition lock is buffered.
• The buffered direction is consumed once the lock ends.
• Transition input now takes priority over a focused UI control.
• Leaving a Risk Chamber cancels stale entry-audio preparation.
• Risk Chamber exits wait for pending reward presentations before releasing gameplay.

Shop and Interface Readability

• Run Shop cards now use clearer colors for upgrades, powerups, healing, shields and generic offers.
• Rarity is communicated through restrained borders and shadows without overpowering the card contents.
• Stack progress, purchase information and current-build context are presented more consistently.
• Shop layouts scale between compact, large and extra-large card densities.
• Descriptions now use semantic colors authored for their actual meaning instead of guessing colors from translated words.
• Gains, rewards, costs, risks, health, shields, enemies, coins, score, time and percentages can receive distinct semantic treatment.
• The semantic system is supported across all ten currently supported languages.
• Codex descriptions for classes, upgrades and Gridbreak effects now retain their intended colors.
• Detailed run-upgrade Codex entries received explicit rich-text localization variants.

Inline Hazard Help

• Hazard-related words in selected shop descriptions are now visibly underlined.
• Hovering the term opens the shared in-game tooltip system.
• The tooltip includes a localized explanation and a representative hazard icon.
• The system works with localized hazard terms rather than only the English word “hazard”.
• Semantic colors and inline glossary links can now coexist inside the same description.

Additional UI Improvements

• Automatic language detection now displays the detected language and its flag instead of showing a vague “Auto” option.
• Automatic detection remains active internally until the player explicitly selects another language.
• Boss objectives use the portrait of their specific target.
• The Game Over screen can use its full wide layout at 1366×768 and larger output resolutions.
• Smaller outputs, including 1365×768 and 1366×767, continue to use the compact layout.
• Data Fermentation descriptions now explain every maturation step and the time required for each transition.
• Several upgrade, curse and Codex descriptions have been rewritten for clearer mechanical meaning.
• Semantic colors have been restored in class, Gridbreak, Soul Anchor and detailed upgrade descriptions.

Demo Exit Survey and Feedback

A new optional compact survey can appear after completing the demo or attempting to quit from the main menu.

• The survey asks why you stopped playing.
• It asks whether you would like to continue playing.
• When relevant, it asks which area most needs improvement.
• An optional comment of up to 500 characters can be included.
• The survey can be skipped.
• Survey navigation supports keyboard and controller focus.
• Steam Deck text input is supported for the optional comment.
• Survey reports are queued locally before upload.
• If the online submission fails, the report can remain stored for a later retry.
• The compact survey does not attach screenshots, recent logs, gameplay event logs or run snapshots.
• The regular in-game feedback tool can now submit through the public feedback endpoint without requiring a secret embedded in the game build.
• Local fallback and retry behaviour remain available.

Movement and Animation Improvements

• Normal movement remains smooth after crossing a wall with Phase.
• The initial multi-cell Phase jump still snaps immediately as intended.
• Following one-cell movements interpolate normally while the gap travels through Snake's body.
• Real discontinuous board transfers continue to snap instead of incorrectly interpolating.
• Front-attack tween frames now use the cached movement renderer.
• Wall-bonk animation frames now use the same optimized motion path.
• The optimized path preserves full-render fallback behaviour when cached state is unavailable.

Performance Improvements

• Successful wall-phase and breach movement no longer performs unnecessary boundary-component scans.
• Direct edge contacts use a faster boundary check.
• Connected wall-component results are cached for repeated contacts.
• The cache remains valid during ordinary Snake movement and unrelated interaction updates.
• Boundary classifications are invalidated only when solid terrain or phase-blocking connectivity actually changes.
• Repeated bonks against the same connected structure no longer rescan the entire structure every time.
• Fire Tail charge geometry is cached and reused.
• Redundant Fire Tail position and projectile-state copies have been removed from frame-critical paths.
• Wall-bonk and front-attack animations reuse cached Snake colors and visual state.
• These changes reduce CPU work and allocation pressure during Fire Tail use, repeated collisions, Phase movement and animated combat contacts.

Other Fixes

• Gatekeeper shield relay effects no longer remain at obsolete positions.
• Unresolved Gatekeeper teleport plates clean themselves up.
• Front attacks now finish facing the direction that will actually be used for the next movement.
• Buffered movement after boss cinematics is no longer lost.
• Snake no longer resumes movement automatically when a fresh direction is required.
• Fire Tail uses separate enemy and wall impact sounds.
• Fire Tail launch feedback no longer covers Snake's face with a persistent ring.
• Localized numerical values are no longer recolored incorrectly when they already belong to a higher-priority semantic section.
• Malformed semantic markup falls back safely instead of exposing formatting markers.
• Codex and shop descriptions retain authored colors when they already contain links or explicit formatting.

Thank you for playing Snake: Gridbreaker and for continuing to send feedback. The new survey and feedback systems will help guide the next rounds of balance, readability and combat improvements.