Hollow Mine v.0.8 Demo Is Now Live!

Hello! The feedback from the February Steam Next Fest led to major changes and adjustments in version 0.8. Interacting with you on Discord, the Steam Community Hub, in reviews, and on other platforms gave me many insights that helped improve Hollow Mine. I want to keep the conversation going and would love to hear more of your suggestions.

If you would like to share your opinion, please join our Discord and share your ideas with me and the Hollow Mine community. This process keeps driving improvements for the game. It’s really satisfying to see how Hollow Mine has progressed so far, and to imagine what it could become in the future. It’s all possible because of the community we’re building together. Thank you!

What’s new? Version 0.8 makes the game much more readable, especially during heavy action and bullet hell fights. I wanted to reduce the number of steps needed for any task as much as possible. For example, when opening chests, you no longer need to click a button - just push it. Also, starting a conversation with an NPC that has only one menu option automatically skips the menu and goes straight to the dialogue. Or when using the Roll Item Box - just push it, no further action required. I believe these quality of life improvements will help players focus on the action and have a better overall experience.

The new room lighting system ties into these readability improvements, making it clearer where to direct your attention on the screen.

But improving readability and visibility is not all this update has to offer. The Mother of Bees is a new boss you can battle in the forest biome, featuring a new fighting style that surprises players and raises the challenge.

Check out the highlights and complete changelog below for a full rundown of the updates coming in version 0.8.

NEW Main Menu Illustration

NEW Mother of Bees Boss

Improved Lighting

Bouncy Projectiles Ability

Greater Fireball Magic Spell

Making Game More Challenging

Forest Biome New Floor Tiles Colors

Picking Abilities NEW UI Effect

Improved Screen Shake

Red Border Effect Indicating Player Receiving Hit

Under Player Stamina Bar Indicator

Blood Axe Weapon

Whole axe weapon set:

Dash Icon

Forbidden Cheese Item

Changelog:

• Add Forbidden Cheese item with poison and damage effects.
• Add new double wave attack to Dracula.
• Add Big Fire Ball projectile that can destroy walls and damage nearby enemies.
• Add Bouncy Projectiles unique ability.
• Add Big Angry Bee boss.
• Add Bloody Axe item.
• Add Gold Amulet item.
• Add piercing red projectile for angry bee and wizard.
• Make dash always evade, add full wave attacks, and balance ranged enemy cooldowns.
• Replace dash evasion ability with ore vein seeker.
• Add Greater Fire Ball scrolls, blueprints, and optimize attack.
• Add Greater Fire Ball and Blood Axe to the item pool.
• Add equip requirements to weapons.
• Add weapon requirements attribute colors.
• Destroy walls instantly on enemy piercing projectile hit.
• Enlarge boss rooms and tweak angry bee boss attacks.
• Adjust forest boss health and speed up angry big bee attacks.
• Make ore veins visible only within the player radius.
• Expand the mine camp room.
• Add room light for combat zones and adjust room sizes and forest tile visuals.
• Add a new background illustration to the main menu.
• Refine melee and ranged attack animations.
• Add a dash icon to the player panel.
• Add directional screen shake.
• Add a red screen border on hit.
• Add a stamina indicator under the player.
• Improve base movement speed of all characters.
• Refresh controls when selecting an ability in the inventory or ability pick menu.
• Fix the slashing projectile missing close-range targets.
• Add a heal tutorial with spike walkthrough info.
• Improve tutorial character stats and increase dummy XP drops.
• NPC shop now auto-opens and closes the dialog when only a single option exists.
• Prevent the game-over screen from overlapping the ability pick.
• Fix enemy respawn issues and improve tutorial text for dashing.
• Tweak mine ore drop counts.
• Reset enemy attacks on death.
• Reorder crafting and repair options in the menu.
• Prevent dropables from disappearing.
• Fix the find-key room’s descend proceed-on-hold issue.
• Fix the game-over screen not resetting the player properly.
• Add missing room descriptions.
• Make Tower, Black Goblin, and Explosive Goblin shoot piercing red bullets.
• Fix dialog control visibility and intelligence weapon requirements.
• Reset popup text colors for each message animation.
• Add a waypoint info board in the forest camp and improve NPC dialog UI.
• Fix tutorial board info, remove reward scroll spawn, and prevent duplicate players in tutorial rooms.
• Fix controller UI navigation.
• Fix player stats panel grid navigation.
• Add proceed-on-hold functionality in the tutorial.
• Prevent the swarm button from blocking the player when a wave is active.
• Make the item box drop immediately on roll.
• Prevent survival and swarm portals from activating after teleporting from camp.
• Use a popup dialog to display a resume game message after ability pick.
• Reduce the number of NPC guards and add enemies to the first forest room.
• Adjust NPC conversation dialog windows and flow.
• Reduce damage passives and fix the ability picker when leveling up at the room’s end.
• Block input buttons in the ability picker until the open animation finishes.
• Increase XP required to level up.
• Make inventory stack numbers more visible.
• Refine dialog UI by placing buttons at the bottom and making the window more static.
• Make chests open only via body touch rather than by pressing an action button.
• Show the level-up ability picker only when the player is actually leveled up.
• Move the hold-action icon to the player prefab and adjust character sprite pivot positions.
• Standardize all UI canvases to a 400x225 base resolution.
• Shorten player ghost animations.
• Block the player with NPC bodies (for collision purposes).
• Dim the background in the forest biome.
• Localize the bouncy projectile ability with translations.
• Add a highlight animation for abilities appearing in sequence.
• Fix mine hit detection and raise the XP requirement for the first level.
• Add a card highlight animation in the ability picker.

This is it! I hope you like all the new features, fixes and adjustment's.
Demo is now live with 0.8 version - feel free to play a demo! Cheers!

Michal Parysz