After more than a year, we’re excited to bring you the biggest update yet to Sweet Surrender. We’ve carefully gone over the whole game to take greater advantage of the hardware capabilities of modern VR headsets and PCs. We’ve also extensively improved the overall player experience based on your feedback.
Update 10 improvements include:
✨ Bloom and HDR
💯 100s of New Visual Effects
🔫 Horizontal Weapon Recoil
🐂 Final Boss Revamp
⚡ No more insta-death on Void Glitch
🥞 Unstuck Button
🐞 Improved Bug Reporting tool 😂
💪 Dozens of bug fixes and performance improvements
This update includes a full-fledged visual overhaul (with incredible results), long-requested improvements to the early game, a reworked weapon recoil system and a whole bunch of quality of life bug fixes.
Before we dive in, check out the trailer to it all in action!
Visual Revamp - Bloom and HDR
We’ve unlocked incredible visual improvements thanks to the addition of bloom and HDR tone mapping.
These new visuals are available on PC, Quest 3 and even Quest 2! (and actually, even on Quest 1 in experimental mode, don’t ask us how we pulled this off). We’ve re-tuned pretty much the whole game so that it works well both with and without these new visual effects. We hope you enjoy them!
100s of New Visual Effects
We’ve gone over the game’s visuals top to bottom to make sure we’re using these new effects to the best of our ability. In particular, we’ve touched up almost all the particle effects and material animations used in the game and added quite a few more. You will see improvements in the bullets, shot reactions, smoke effects, explosions, sparks, and in many more subtle places.
Honestly, you should just go try it. We think it’s such a huge leap forward, we’ve left the old visual mode in for comparison purposes.
Graphics Settings
In the new Graphics Settings menu, you can pick between visual profiles and adjust the intensity of various effects. Depending on the platform’s capabilities, we offer other additional options.
For PC users, we’ve added quite a few options that we wish we had included years ago. We think the game looks even more amazing the higher you go in render scale. But it will still run on a potato if needed cough cough Steam Deckard cough cough.
Horizontal Recoil
We’ve done a full pass on the recoil system of the weapons to implement a better feeling positional recoil. We’ve then re-tuned every weapon to make them feel extra juicy. Finally, we’ve done some slight adjustments to the recoil behavior of certain weapons to bring them better into balance with other weapon choices.
Jump into the improved tutorial to try some of the old/new recoils side-by-side.
Final Boss Revamp
For the first time in 3 years, the boss has received a bit of love and attention. We’ve gone over all the visuals, improving and adding effects, enhancing the color balance to give the player better feedback.
We also fixed various broken attack behaviors and cooldowns. Normal attacks are now easier to read against the background and the player has a better chance of evasion
Overall the boss should feel a lot more balanced and hopefully more challenging. We’re still considering further improvements and we are always happy to hear your feedback.
No more Insta-death on Void Glitch
We’ve addressed one of the most frustrating user complaints: accidentally falling through the ground of the level into a glitch zone that kills you. While these didn’t happen often for most players, unfair deaths are extra frustrating in roguelike game.
While we can’t prevent glitching in all cases, we’ve gone through the whole game to make sure the player will auto-reset in case this happens.
We’re continuing to improve on this behavior to handle all edge cases. Expect further improvements.
Unstuck Button
Tied with the previous improvement, we’ve also added an “Unstuck” button to help you for those occasions where you glitched out or got stuck in an object and couldn’t move out.
This should hopefully address a second source of frustration: getting physically stuck and being forced to end a run.
Improved Bug Reporting Tool
We’ve improved our in-game bug reporting system, to make it easier for you to let us know about specific issues like framerate drops, broken AI, lost weapons, etc. This sends us a log of your run (stripped of any identifiable data). Please reach out to us on Discord so we can look further into specific issues and understand the context of your experience.
Dozens of Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements
We’ve made dozens of other smaller improvements and bug fixes, with an aim of adding a layer of polish and quality that should improve the overall experience.
We were also able to optimize many assets with zero impact on visual quality (what we call “free wins”, they are so tasty). This cleared even more room for these extra visual post-processing effects and particles.
We also spent some time tuning and balancing the new visual effects on various platforms, to try to give a solid (comfortable) experience by default.
So to summarize, this release is more beautiful, more performant (smoother framerate) and more stable. Without a doubt there are still issues to address and/or to improve but we hope in the meantime you’ll enjoy this update.
These details are listed in the full release notes below.
End of Early Access
For the dev team, this release represents our “spiritual” graduation from early access to the 1.0 release state. We’ll continue to make improvements, but we feel we finally reached the visual aspiration we originally had when we first prototyped and pitched this game.
Not many people know this, but the original development of Sweet Surrender was done from start to initial release in 14 months, with 6 weeks on the initial prototype. Update 10 represents the visual quality and polish level we wish we could have included at the original launch. But one has to ship…
What’s incredible with the new visuals is how it comes close to matching some of our initial renders in our original pitch deck.
We’re incredibly proud of the reception to the game and to all our fans who have stuck around as we’ve evolved the game. Thank you for your love and support.
Give Us Feedback!
Do you love it? Please tell your friends.
Did you find some issues? Let us know! The most helpful way to give us feedback is in our Discord https://discord.gg/salmigames
What’s Next?
We’re continuing to iterate on improvements to the game while listening to player feedback.
Would you like to see more updates? Please share the game with your VR friends.
Thank you,
The Salmi Games team
Full Release Notes
New Features and Improvements:
- New Graphic Options supporting Post-Processing Effects and increased render scale
- Custom graphic settings on PC
- New Bloom Intensity and Effects Intensity sliders. Bloom Intensity controls the baseline "static" bloom strength. Effects Intensity adjusts the visual 'strength' of explosions and any other animated or dynamic effects.
- Reworked visual assets to support bloom glow effects
- Improved texture quality
- Improved look of sewers area
- Improved visuals of Lunatic end sequence and win screen (space flight scene with credits)
- Polished particle and material animation assets (bullets, shot reactions, smoke effects, explosions, sparks and numerous other details)
- Added material animations to all explosions
- New bullets and hit/impact particles for player and most enemies
- New enemy particles (Bulky Melee Bot, Security Bots, Final Boss)
- New muzzle flashes for shotguns, revolver and grenade launchers
- Improved performance for all particle effects (should result in more particle systems being shown at the same time on Quest 1/2)
- Lowered polycount on all enemies and weapons without loss in visual quality (should result in better performance)
- Reworked part of the industrial tileset and props (lower polycount, cleaner geometry/outlines, added more glow elements)
- Fixed texture bleed on endless walls and lowered their polycount
- Lowered polycount of skyscrapers and fixed some wrong materials on them
- Added glow elements to room connectors and lowered their polycount
- Added horizontal weapon recoil and balanced all weapons
- Players are now reset if they fall out of the map. This should hopefully fix a large source of frustrations.
- New "Unstuck" button in pause menu, which will reset you to the start of the level
- Improved chip and weapon tooltips in homebase
- Extra visual indicator for undiscovered chips
- Increased Render Scale to 1.35 on default settings for Quest 2
- Boss fight improved by fixing broken attack phases, balancing cooldowns, improving visuals contrast and various smaller visual improvements.
- Boss fight rocket attacks are easier to read now (rockets were extremely small before)
- New Holster Settings Menu, unifying previously disparate options. Minor cleanups of other smaller inconsistencies. Does anyone use the horizontal offset setting?
- Improved pump shotgun to prevent pumping when fully loaded, but still allow pumping if the secondary hand trigger is held.
- Improved the description of various weapons
- Adjusted blaster chip explosions (less harsh now)
- Adjusted revolver muzzle flash to avoid blocking sight lines
- Improved readability of holo map with bloom active
- Toned down glow of class hands
- Balanced bloom on several environment assets
- Performance improvements of certain rooms
- Adjusted menu text outlines
- Improved logging and bug reporting system
- Improved and updated Credit screens with new team members
- Improved Lunatic end sequence
- Improved and fixed some decoration assets
Bug Fixes
- Fixed list of chips in home base
- Security bots no longer run out of ammo with certain weapons after one magazine (Grenade Launcher, Burst Handgun, Heavy Submachine Gun)
- Fixed error when destroying an EMP'd turret
- Fixed some chips (Speed Boost II/III, Overload, Overheating) not spawning in levels and unlocking properly when picked up
- Fixed interaction of Blaster Chip with other chips that change bullet types (Firepower, Heavy Ammo, Acid, Mobile Malware)
- Fixed already defeated (and exploded) turrets "respawning" inactive when revisiting a room
- Fixed missing particles when shooting decoration assets (prefab link was missing)
- Fixed inconsistent player bullet impact behavior (handgun bullets had 30 times the force than shotgun/sniper/other bullets)
- Fixed wrong materials on drones
- Fixed weak points on scanner bot, bulky melee bot and all drone variants
- Fixed weak points (explosive tank on back) not being removed after being hit for all guardian and drill bot variants
- Fixed damage multiplicators on gunner bot and spider bot soldiers
- Fixed wrong weapon on improved grenade launcher bot (spawned with Shotgun)
- Fixed wrong weapon on improved burst shotgun bot (spawned with Precision Shotgun)
- Fixed healing ray of drones (had high impact force that could potentially bounce around other enemies when hit
- still has problems with aiming though)
- Fixed door animation (some door types would still stick out of walls on one side after opening)
- Fixed a number of null reference exception errors that had adverse side effects
- Fixed various typos and text layout issues
- Fixed crash on startup due to bluetooth permission changes in latest Android version
- Fixed some edge cases when glitching out of the map
- Fixed issue with burst shotgun bot
- Boss fight: fixed drone mouth attack (drones often were immediately killed after being spawned)
- Boss fight: removed overseer laser attack (was completely broken)
- Boss fight: fixed collider for mouth (was gigantic
- is now sized to fit the mouth weapon)