Heartless & Dreadful : Return by 72 Hours · build 24905446 · published
(i've been recompiling these two days because of minor things i notice and then fix, help.)
Been a while since I released something stable. Sorry about that. Life's been busy.
That being said, this is likely it for a long while, I'm still keeping my eye on some things, but there's a lot of other things that require my attention, unfortunately. Both game making related, and not so game making related.
Still, the next few updates will likely be focused on improving the steam deck compatibility, as I am going to resubmit the game to be checked, and if there's something real bad, they'll let me know.
Don't worry, as I've said before, I am still 100% here for fixing any bugs that still pop up, so if there's anything that's screwed, lemme know. I still have a few things left in my mind, but... I might actually end up prototyping something else if I get the time to it.
Still, I don't want to leave the game with some glaring issues, so if there's something broken, as per usual, let me know.
That being said, here's whats new.
The demo has been updated with the latest version's changes.
That means you can try out other characters in the demo build, and mess around with co-op in the demo, too.
And all other fancy changes that came from version 1.25. ...It's now bigger by 1.5GB than before. Not sure if to be proud of it, or sad. After all, something something, pixel slop shouldn't take this much space, eh?
Now most of the buttons should respond to appropriate bindings, and show what to press.
That means if you change the binding somewhere, like from X to Y, it should be reflected in those hints. Same goes for keyboard and mouse bindings.
These changes are in the tutorial, hints, buttons in the movelist, and some other minor things like in dialogue windows for example. Having some visuals should make the game a bit easier to understand
...That likely improves the compatibility with the Steam Deck by quite a bit as well. We'll see.
Shamir's Preservation is now included in the base kit: running/boosting outside of combat no longer uses CT energy by default, instead of needing to buy an upgrade for it. Boost still costs CT **in combat** however.
Because of that, CT no longer regenerates automatically outside of combat. Gotta still have use for those collectibles and items somehow. Thus, most of the CT orbs have been moved into combat arenas as a compromise, so if you struggle a bit and need more chaos energy, you know where to find it.
That change required some minor reworks here and there on the levels, in order to keep it a bit more balanced.
That being said, it saves a lot of time, and should make navigation a bit less frustrating overall.
Someone (me) learned that vertex painting is actually still kinda cool, neat, and not an outdated piece of technology.
So some objects have slightly better shadowing, that, and since I got to redesign a few missions, they now look better than before. At least I think they do.
No more getting lost for 30 minutes.
I've taken a look at the game's most tedious missions, and reworked them, and added some polish to those that already existed. More or less.
Most of the changes are described in the beta patch notes, but I am also mirroring them here.
Minor visual changes.
No more backtracking, now featuring boost pads for quicker movement without having to utilize the janky vehicle. (Bye bye-ke.)
Removed the bike from the mission. A lot of players found it to control poorly and preferred to use the boost/sprint instead. (The vehicle is still available to mess around with in the practice mode though.)
Boost pads were added into the mission to compromise for the bike's removal.
Added a shortcut door at the end of the cave that leads back to the city's gates to remove the backtracking from the mission and to make the game flow a bit better.
Dead Trees now cast shadows, as they were supposed to.
Updated dialogue background images to reflect the shortcut better.
Updated time score.
Mission 5 is now shorter, despite still looking relatively the same in terms of scale. Thanks to the addition of boost pads and shorter distances between sections, the level's playtime has been reduced drastically, and the layout has been streamlined.
Visual changes, now a bit more lively.
Level layout has been streamlined to reduce backtracking and slow platforming. Things have been shifted around, and combat encounters are a lot closer to each other. The sense of scale remains the same. You are still small in the grand scheme of things. However the mission has been shortened and new shortcuts are possible now if you had already mastered the movement. (You know who you are.)
Removed the fixed camera angles.
Mission time overall is now around 10-13 minutes. Because of that, the requirements to get specific rank for play time has been changed.
Mission 6's second part was a bit tedious, so it got reworked and redesigned to look nicer and maybe a bit more thematically better. Overall, it has also been streamlined to make it easier to go through, and maybe prettier to look at.
Second part of Mission 6 is now more visually polished, and its layout has been streamlined.
Enemies and the arena triggers were re-positioned to flow better.
Made it more obvious which areas can not be walked on.
Improved culling and visibility.
(Did you know you should probably disable the Occlusion settings of big interiors in order for it to not glitch out? Because I sure didn't while I messed with the culling for about 5 hours wondering why did my models keep disappearing even though they looked perfectly fine outside.)
Fixed Seth's incorrect shading post-fight. (I forgot about this a long time ago it seems, and no one noticed.)
Improved one specific dynamic light because it was causing the scene to have too many shadow casters negatively affecting performance.
Updated location previews in the dialogue scenes.
Mission time overall is now around 10-12 minutes. Because of that, the requirements to get specific rank for play time has been changed.
Fixed an overlay not scaling correctly on some resolutions.
Mission 8 got a total rework. While the layout is similar to the original, it now features a lot of verticality, making it easier to understand where to go: which path is main, and which is optional. No more using switches to unlock the second part of the Mission, and no more invisible walls. Because that was a terrible solution to a problem that wouldn't have existed had I been a bit better with designing levels in the first place. The more we live, the more we learn. Etc. etc.
Reworked the layout to remove backtracking.
Many areas are now optional. The mission itself is now also a bit more vertically structured.
Entirely different visuals, I believe it looks a lot more polished.
Many dialogues are now optional, the game will tell you when they can be activated. (I might port that over into a few other Missions, as it does make the game flow smoother on secondary playthroughs.)
Invisible walls have been removed. (...with the exception of mission boundaries.)
Mission time is now around 10-13 minutes. Because of that, the requirements to get specific rank for play time has been changed.
Updated some pictures to reflect the visual graphical changes. It's kind of been long time coming with the graphical updates I've done with other updates.
Mission 9 specifically - adjusted the combat arena triggers to be closer to the enemies when the fight starts.
Mission 10 specifically - fixed missing player shadow. Whoops.
Now, I know some of you did like the original layouts, thus don't worry, they are preserved and are available to be played through still... Just in the extras menu.
Do note, that to save on the disc space, they might look a bit worse than they used to be. Compression magic.
Now, there were quite a few of bugs still plaguing the game. I'm taking care of it.
Most of these changes are just reformatted from the beta articles.
So if you have already read them, it might sound a bit familiar. But, looking at the statistics, most people don't seem to check the minor update notes, maybe because Steam doesn't notify you or something.
So... Assuming most of you haven't seen those yet, it might look fresh.
A few areas got lighting improvements, plus minor visual improvements here and there.
A music track variation has been added to a certain mission to reflect the mood a bit better.
Added a check to set the text to be bigger when launching the game for the first time on the Steam Deck.
Added boost pads: sprinting into them will increase your running speed even further until you stop. (If you played any games with a certain Blue Hedgehog, this should feel familiar.) There's an in-game hint video explaining them, in the tutorial or on first encounter. (These hint videos only appear when the game was not beaten, so you might not see them.)
Added controller icons to the tutorial, and reformatted the way the tutorial tells you stuff to reflect that. Text now switches in realtime if you switch to gamepad or from gamepad to keyboard.
Added the proper gamepad/spacebar icons for the loading screen, that change based on input type also.
Added visual buttons of Attack/Fire/Style Action/Lock-on in the upgrades menu to make it easier to understand the movelist. (Still not as good as showing icons for the actions, but unfortunately that's a bit too late for that with how little time I get to exist.)
Added visual collect effects for crystallized blood and the other common collectibles.
Adjusted breakable objects shading.
Adjusted enemy blob shadows so they don't clip through the ground / go invisible in some areas.
Adjusted the preview buttons in the tutorial.
Camera shake should no longer depend on the framerate.
Can't get on rails in combat anymore to prevent some issues.
Checkpoint text is now bigger to be more noticeable from the distance.
Compression, most textures have been compressed to reduce storage on disk and to possibly improve VRAM usage.
Corrected occlusion in the tutorial after the recent changes.
Cutscenes (...like two of them.) are now showing the correct skip buttons if you are using a gamepad.
Dialogues now show the correct keybinding to continue the dialogue instead of it being vague, and the skip button now shows the correct icons whether you use a controller or mouse & keyboard.
Fixed Player 2 not being moved correctly in co-op after the end of the tram ride, due to strange physics calculation issues.
Fixed a flash of Enerith's second UI when switching to him via the character switcher for the first time.
Fixed an issue where the weapon material switch (to highlight the attack) didn't work on a specific enemy.
Fixed brain message name scaling. Apparently, I forgot that I hardcoded some scales in there. Added a second check to disable that. Wow, I have stupid after all.
Fixed buttons not refocusing in the mission start menu if you pressed anywhere else. (It kind of tried to focus on the invisible pause menu. Funny.)
Fixed game over screen not working properly on the gamepad.
Fixed gamepad not picking the correct option when pressing disappear because... yeah? Somehow it overrode the info from the prefab in the scene? How? I don't remember, maybe I pointed it to something else a long time ago.
Fixed incorrect icons for quick switching of the tabs in the upgrades menu.
Fixed incorrect scaling of the combat end effect on specific resolutions. (Red screen overlay with the character being visible.)
Fixed jump pads in co-op mode.
Fixed Kair's ultimate move not working. (Sorry.)
Fixed an issue where characters that could double jump would trigger the second jump as the normal one when jumping off a rail.
Fixed minor loading screen issues on the Steam Deck's aspect ratio.
Fixed not being able to move gamepad selection from "Reset positions" to change location in practice mode.
Fixed an issue where sometimes after defeating a boss, normal battle track would play for a few seconds.
Fixed shadows not showing up on some decals.
Fixed some previews in the main menu not showing correctly when using the gamepad.
Fixed the coop toggle in the menu's missing selection color, previously it was invisible and felt slightly off.
Fixed the last button not being selectable/pressable in the tower of blood. (For real this time.)
Fixed weird legs when entering a teleporter. No more stanky legs.
Fixed a small freeze on Mission start, that was related to pooled effects.
Graphics resolution settings have been changed to make it easier to change on the gamepad, and should grab your current refresh rate now.
Hints now properly reflect your currently mapped controls, and will switch from mouse & keyboard to gamepad dynamically depending on what was last used.
Hints to talk to Lovely and to do Upgrades no longer disappear on second playthroughs.
Huntress (CAG) no longer utilizes CT energy for flight, instead she uses a similar circular meter for it, similar to Enerith's.
Ice now looks... cool... nICE even... whats with the cold stare..? Chill.
Increased max text size to make it easier to read on the Deck.
Increased pulley pull speed, plus minor improvements to pulley behavior: more consistent, feel nicer, and automatically fling you off.
Interactable buttons now switch color when interacted with, to make it more obvious that they were in fact pressed. (That was present in the rework levels, but it was added to others too.)
Jump pads are now a bit more consistent when they are placed off ground.
Kair's earth platforms no longer collide with moving platforms.
Minor CPU performance improvements in some areas.
Optimized gate cameras to use less VRAM. Better performance in some areas basically, as they no longer render anything when you are too far away from the monitors.
Pulleys, rails, and jump pads got visual adjustments to be more noticeable.
Reech (self-exploding demon fellas) no longer instantly explodes on reaching the player; instead they get a countdown before explosion upon nearing the player. They also get colored bright red when they are about to explode, cause I was going to do that but forgot.
Renamed Shoot to Fire to be more consistent.
Replaced the interact prompt (the thing that shows ? for interaction) with a proper keybinding.
Rotated the buttons in the upgrades menu to fit more screens, and updated text color of the buttons as well to make them more visible.
Teleporters now correctly change the camera rotation in the tutorial.
The mod tool (the level editor SDK) package is now using Cecil from the package manager instead of their own DLL.
The mouse cursor now properly hides on gamepad use, the gamepad cursor also shows which button to press, and if the gamepad is plugged in, its icons are prioritized.
The red screen after combat no longer flashes if you toggle the "Reduce flashing lights" option.
The unusable buttons have been disabled in the tutorial, so they should no longer be there.
Training area no longer flickers when Shamir dodges. (Ambient Occlusion moment. Somehow.)
Triplanar mapping on moveable objects is now static. Means it shouldn't have weird texture wobbling when pushing some props around.
Updated Steamworks to make working with Steam Deck specific stuff better.
Updated dialogue window to reduce stretching of background imagery.
Updated level previews in the main menu.
Upgrade menu related button prompts are now correctly assigned based on whether you use the gamepad or not, and you can now use Q and E to flip upgrades pages just like RB and LB on the gamepad.
Wow, that has been quite a bit, huh. Not as a big as an addition of co-op or character switcher from the last time, but this still took quite a while.
I'd love to work more on games and all, but well. Unfortunately, some dumbass (ME) didn't do any marketing, therefore I still have to deal with my usual job.
Anyways, I should stop wallowing in self pity here.
I hope you enjoy the changes.
If there's still something broken, please let me know.
You can get in touch via email, discord, twitter(x) to shoot me a DM. To the folks that played the beta builds, and the ones who report issues to me...
You are the ones that make the game better day by day. Now, I really need to chill out for a while. Stress of everything has been making my brain act up. I'll see you soon.