THE ARCADE UPDATE

Hey. Darrell is coming along nicely. I spent a lot of time on features, mechanics, balance, and other things that are super important to the player but also for me like staring at a spreadsheet for hours on end until my nose bleeds.

Which brings me to this update. The fun update. The arcade update. The "dude I think you went overboard with the gore and nobody asked you to make the game look retro if someone flips a radio station" update. Well, it happened. And now you get to play with it. Let me know what you think. I won't go into details, that's what patch notes are for. Read on:

COMBAT GOT LOUD

• LEVEL UP now rips across the entire dungeon view in giant letters. You will not miss it.
• RAGE does the same when Darrell pops off. Land an opener and it says OPENER instead.
• Gore. Every punch sprays, and the blood goes where physics says it should. Right hook? Their head snaps left and so does the blood. Jabs angle it a little, hooks angle it a lot, uppercuts send it up, and a rage chain whips it back and forth. The killing blow empties them. Darrell bleeds too.
• Every creature bleeds its own way. Slimes bleed green. Skeletons shed bone dust. Golems drop rubble. Drowned things bleed blue. Body pillows lose their stuffing. You get the idea.
• Damage numbers got the arcade treatment. Color tells you what kind of hit it was (jabs white, hooks and uppercuts yellow, rage orange, crits gold), size tells you how big. They arc, they fan out in combos, crits slam in with a CRIT tag, killing blows get a KO. Darrell's incoming damage gets the same treatment, falling away instead of floating up.
• Rage punches shake the camera. A little. I'm not a monster.
• HP bars chunk off as they drop.
• Enemies no longer flop over when they die. They crossfade from alive to dead, like they should have all along. Their other poses crossfade too.
• The berserk box is now a rage bucket. Rage drips from the ceiling, slow at first, then faster as it fills, and pools in bright orange with foam on top. When berserk hits, it boils.
• Darrell and the enemy get little portraits in their HP boxes. Bosses get a crown.
• The enemy panel no longer just says [ NO TARGET ] when nothing's there. When something shows up, the panel fills in: the bar sweeps up, the HP counts in, and the name decodes. Every single time.
• DMs type out now instead of just appearing.

THE RADIO CHANGES THE DUNGEON

• Tune to AFTER DARK and the whole dungeon goes neon. Magenta, cyan, purple shadows. Darrell turns into an 80s album cover. And it rains glitter. I've never said I love glitter before in my life. I love the glitter.
• Tune to FULL CONTACT and everything catches fire. Orange and red, embers and sparks drifting up off the floor the whole time.
• DARRELL FM stays normal, for people with taste.

THE TOWN IS ALIVE

• The patch board now runs on bad electricity: icons drift into static and back, a tracking line rolls down the screen, patch names glitch, and empty slots blink at you.
• Buy a patch and its card powers on like an old CRT, then gets stamped INSTALLED.
• Equipped patches fly into their slot. Pull one and it drops back to its card.
• Patch points roll down like an odometer when you spend them.
• Loadout slots are much taller, so you can actually see the art on what you've got equipped. That IS your loadout.
• Loadout slots now show the patch name up top, with a DROP button instead of the world's tiniest X.
• The top bar is a proper BBS menu now, with little icons for Kennel, Mastery and Corruption. Corruption and the BBS stability meter are one thing now, because they always were.
• The run controls read left to right the way you'd think about them: autorun, skip to, send him down.
• SEND HIM DOWN is no longer a boring glowing box. It has hazard stripes now.
• When a new checkpoint unlocks, SKIP TO gets stripes too, so you notice it.

That's it for now. Darrell has been patched. You have been informed. The things were did. Also enjoy your weekends, whether that's in Darrell's company or not. I'll allow it (Darrell might not).

Darrell's Brother from an Analog Mother,
Fun Adjacent