While playing Yaga, you may have noticed some inconsistency between which hand is actually the one that Ivan the Blacksmith lost when running away from Likho. This was initially a technical decision, to reduce the number of animations that our artists have to create. Lots of games mirror the character animations, but often this is not noticed because their characters are symetrical, unlike Ivan, where the flipping is much more obvious. For a while, we rationalized it by blaming the "unreliable narrator" of the game. In oral storytelling, details like this sometimes get mixed, so we thougt it was a fun explanation for it.
However, the feedback we got from the community gave us a hand in prioritizing this for an update. We always want to believe the great feedback from our community is in good hands, so after discussing it shortly, we had a show of hands and decided to get our hands dirty and fix it. Our animator took matters in his own hands and decided to give it a shot and see how fast he can create the set of animations needed.
We would have implemented this sooner if we didn't have our hands full with bugfixes, balancing and additional content. Good thing we fixed this issue before it got out of hand.
Hands down, this is NOT our most significant update, but we believe it will come in handy for all of our players. On the other hand, we also added a few additional tweaks and improvements:
- You can now find pre-crafted hammers with interesting enhancements combinations on them during levels, (inside treasure chests). This allows you to experiment with them, give you ideas for crafting, and also is a new source for ores and ehnancements.
- Added more anvils inside levels, to make sure you have the opportunity to forge new hammers during levels.
- Tweaked timings for various Ivan animations (Charged Melee, Bearpaw Attack, Melee Combos, and others), to make him more responsive
- Stun enemies when touching them while moving underground with the shovel.
- Make some enemies "turn" more slowly, so they give you more opportunity to attack from behind
- Added some cinematic slow-motion when encountering boss fights.
We now hand over this update to you, hoping that the hand-switching issues it not that obvious anymore.
Fingers crossed!
