Barnburners DEMO demo-RC-1.0.0
This is the release candidate. Barring something you find, these are the bits that ship as the Steam demo. It is also the first build with the commentary in it, so turn your sound on.
Same demo scope as before: four clubs, exhibition, couch, online, and the practice rink.
That is me in the booth
This is the first build with play-by-play in it, and the voice is mine. I wrote it, and recorded it.
It is completely fine if you hate it. I would much rather hear that from you now than work it out from a stranger's review in August. SETTINGS then AUDIO has a BOOTH VOICE switch that turns it off outright, and a separate COMMENTARY volume slider if you only want it quieter behind the crowd. Neither one touches anything else in the mix. If switching it off is the honest answer, switch it off and tell me. I promise I will not be weird about it.
- It calls the game in front of it, not a script. Roughly 1,270 clips across 200-odd situations: out-of-plays, snapped sticks, draws in your own end, pressure in the offensive zone, scoreboard glances, robbery saves, answer goals, second fights between the same two guys, rivalry openers, and a recap of the game's story at the final horn.
- Goals get called by jersey number, and it knows the difference between a soft one, an empty-netter, and a bar-down.
- It talks through intermissions and over replays, and signs off at the end. Skip either one and it now stops instead of carrying on over the faceoff, which it did not do until this afternoon.
This is the part I want to hear about! Lines that repeat too often, calls that are flat wrong, talking over something it should not, or going quiet when something obvious just happened. Hot takes welcome. All of it is fixable and this is the window.
Two things to know before you launch
- Your settings will reset. That is on purpose. The demo now treats everyone as a first-time player, because half of you have been on this branch since June and none of you have seen what a stranger sees. Video settings, control rebinds, and your demo record book all start fresh. Your FULL-game saves and achievements are untouched, those live separately now.
- Online only matches other demo-RC-1.0.0 builds. If you want to play together, everyone updates. An older demo build will not see this one in the lobby.
First launch
- It opens fullscreen now instead of a small window.
- The graphics tune themselves in both directions. They already eased off on a struggling machine. Now a card with room to spare gets stepped UP instead, measured off a real match and applied when you get back to the menu. If you see a "graphics stepped up" note, that is it.
- The first-run welcome card sits in the middle of the screen, where it always should have been. Almost nobody has ever seen this screen, which is exactly how it stayed broken.
The replay looks like a camera now
- Real depth of field. Proper focus falloff, foreground that bleeds over what is behind it, and bokeh that squashes toward the corners the way a lens does. The old version read like a flat slab of blur.
- Motion blur rebuilt from scratch. It was a straight smear along one direction, which is why pans dissolved into mush. Streaks now leave the object they belong to and the shutter is roughly one frame instead of nearly three.
- Focus is measured properly across the frame, so a subject off to one side stays sharp. Most visible on the celebration mob and on fights, where both guys sit wide.
Fixes worth knowing
- A rare puck glitch could take the whole game down with it, black screen and all. The puck now catches it and drops back to centre ice instead.
- The cinema lens no longer leaks out of the replay theatre into live play.
This is the last stop before the demo goes public. If something feels off, now is the moment. Settings, controls, and the first two minutes matter more than usual this time, because that is all most Next Fest players will ever see.