[Blosharper] Early Access v0.9 Update Notes: New House Rules

Blosharper Early Access v0.9 Update Announcement

Hello, Sharpers!
The v0.9 update for Blosharper is an update devoted to the table itself.

The back-alley bank changes its rules, seven new skills hit the table, one sleight-of-hand finds its own color, and your best records now open up to show what's behind them. We've corrected long-standing scoring errors, and re-read every one of the seven languages from the source text up.

New House Rules — The Storage Fee

• The Age of Interest Is Over: The bank no longer pays interest on your deposits. Come to think of it, a back-alley bank was never going to offer deposit protection. Be grateful they keep it safe at all.
• The Storage Fee: Instead, every time a run begins, the bank skims a storage fee proportional to what you've entrusted to it. The old entry fee is replaced by this — the bigger your fortune, the bigger the cut the house demands.
• Down to the Last Coin: Fixed small leftover debt being impossible to pay off. Dragging the amount slider all the way now fills in the exact total, down to the last uneven coin.

Palming, Reworked

• Quantity and Skill, Split Apart: Palming and Tan both opened the same candidate picker, so the two blurred together. Now Tan is the technique of quantity — you pick from several candidates yourself — while Palming is the technique of skill: one card, swapped on the spot, aimed for you.
• Sharpen It: Leveling it up raises both the uses per round and the odds of landing the card you were after — and those odds are shown to you, not hidden.
• See the Swap Happen: Fixed the highlight on the card you snagged and the send-off of the card you traded away both failing to show. The moment of the switch is now yours to watch.

Seven New Skills

• Three That Push the Score: Seven new skills join the pool. Offbeat stacks a multiplier the more you switch up the rhythm of your plays, Hot Hands builds one for every consecutive hand backed by a technique, and Jack of All Trades turns your accumulated technique training itself into points — three new axes to build around.
• Four That Keep You Standing: Moxie adds nerve to your dice rolls, Thick Skin softens the beatings, Healing Hands patches you up with each cleared round, and Quick Study steals extra experience from every hand — survival and growth, four ways.

Behind the Record

• The Table as It Stood: The stats screen now keeps the table as it stood the moment each high score was set.
• Anatomy of a Score: See exactly which score components and which multipliers assembled that number, item by item — along with a verification that the recorded breakdown reproduces the score exactly. The skills you carried at that moment are kept on record too.
• Inside a Round: Round records now itemize the interest that stacked with each 'Go' call and every side income, so you can read exactly why the total became that number.
• Records, Preserved: Fixed the record detail vanishing entirely on the most spectacular runs, and fixed some all-time best hands showing up blank in older save files.
• Finishing Touches on Records: Fixed record-detail entries showing untranslated internal labels, restored every remaining best-hand name from even the oldest save files, and fixed the earnings record keeping a previous round's breakdown when you barely cleared a round and then fell.

Balance — Scores That Tell the Truth

• Double-Multiplication Surgery: Fixed calculation errors where certain skills multiplied a score twice, producing astronomical records. From now on, a big number is entirely your own design.
• The Skill That Ran Backwards: One skill was actually cutting your score the more you upgraded it. Now it works as intended — the more combinations you stack, the higher the multiplier climbs.
• Sleeping Effects: Woke up a skill whose growth effect had never actually applied, and audited every skill so that what the description promises is what the table delivers.
• Hwatu Deck Tuning: Re-measured and slightly adjusted the late-round scaling of the three Hwatu decks.
• New Math for Gold, Silver, Bronze: Gold/silver/bronze cards used to add a flat bonus to a card's score, which let low-value cards balloon out of all proportion. They now multiply the card's score instead (gold ×10 / silver ×5 / bronze ×3, summed when stacked) — every card gains the same fair ratio, and the multiplier printed on the card finally matches the actual math.

Seven Languages, Re-read

• From the Source: Audited the entire Korean source text against the game's real behavior, correcting effect descriptions and terminology that had drifted.
• Six Translations, Line by Line: Every translation was checked against the source sentence by sentence. Entries that described a completely different effect in some languages are now accurate.
• Voices in Character: Character speech was re-tailored per language. A figure who should carry his years now speaks like a seasoned veteran in each language's own way.
• A Ladder That Climbs: Card rarity names now read unmistakably higher the higher you go.

Slimmer Save Files

• Saves That Don't Gain Weight: Fixed save files growing without bound the longer a run went on. Sizes now hold steady, and saving and loading are lighter for it.

A Smoother Table

• Silky at 4K: Fixed severe frame drops in 4K fullscreen. On Mac's high-resolution displays especially, the pixel-art texture stays true to its intent while the perceived framerate climbs dramatically.
• No More Mid-Storm Freezes: Fixed the screen briefly freezing at the busiest moments of a settlement. Heavy preparation work is now finished ahead of time, before the table heats up.
• Sweeping Out Hidden Waste: Cleaned up decorations that kept drawing in the background while not even visible, and trimmed a redundant step from the screen effect — easing the load on your machine throughout the run.
• Animation Tempo, Restored: Fixed character motion slowing to half speed while the game conserves drawing during quiet moments.

UI Improvements

• Awakening, on Your Terms: Consecutive awakening attempts can now be stopped at any time with the Stop button — and the success-rate bonus you've built up stays yours.
• Undo Button Tidiness: While cards are selected, the undo button steps aside so it can't be pressed by mistake.
• Fanfare Only for New Bests: The dramatic effect when a long streak breaks no longer repeats every time — it now plays only when your longest streak of the run comes to an end. The rueful one-liner stays.
• See What You Received: Some skills used to slip random cards into your deck without a word — the game now shows you exactly which cards you received before moving on.
• Balance, Right Away: Right after a shop transaction, your balance now updates immediately instead of waiting for the dialogue to finish.
• Stacked Alerts, One Line: Fixed notifications piling up past the top of the screen when many effects fire at once — they now collapse into one clean line summed per category.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Story Backgrounds, Restored: Fixed story-scene background art rendering black in recent versions.
• The Signature on the Contract: Fixed nicknames containing special characters vanishing from the contract's signature line, and fixed backing out without signing leaving the game stuck. Gallery recollections now show your real nickname too.
• ESC Closes Only the Top Window: Overhauled ESC (pad B) behavior that could close several windows at once or warp you to the wrong screen. It now always closes exactly the topmost open window.
• Story Scenes on Gamepad: Fixed the gamepad confirm button skipping an entire scene instead of advancing a line — or going unresponsive entirely.
• The Moment of Settlement: Fixed the run failing to conclude properly — or the wrong settlement cutting in — at the moment you pay off the debt in full and end the journey.
• No Card Left Behind: Fixed cards that couldn't enter your hand disappearing from the game entirely — they now return safely to the deck.
• Apothecary Dialogs: Fixed dialogs opened at the apothecary being buried behind the screen.
• The Pouch Up Front: Fixed the Skill Pouch opening buried behind the screen when you pressed the Bag button while picking a new skill after a round. The pouch now always spreads open right in front.
• The Offer, Returned: Fixed a certain back-alley offer, once refused, coming back around and then passing by without a word. It now properly asks again.
• Cards in Flight: Fixed reward cards rendering smaller than the original — or not appearing at all — as they fly to your deck in fullscreen.
• The Hammer Falls Once: Fixed hammer damage landing twice when you stood up to a boss's challenge and lost — and the screen shaking out of nowhere even when you won.
• Portrait Mix-Up: Fixed character portraits briefly rendering as the wrong figure when sweeping quickly through shop items.
• Intel Mac Support: The macOS build now ships as a universal binary, fixing the case where only an Apple Silicon slice was included and Intel Macs could not launch the game at all.

As always, thank you for your incredible support for Blosharper.
On an honest table, may the luck of a sharp fingertip be with you!