Stability Patch #2 - Controller Support and Camera Fixes

Patch #1 was the first launch-stability pass. This one continue controller work and fixes a camera problem that a refund report put me onto. Thanks to whoever left that note, it described something real and I would not have found it as quickly otherwise.

Controller

• Full Controller Support now shows on the store page. Someone asked in the discussions why the written description said the game had controller support while the store page carried no controller tag. They were right, and the game was not the problem. I had completed Steam's controller wizard but never published the store page afterward, so the declaration sat saved but private. It is published now and the tag is live. The game itself has played fully on a pad for a while; the store page just was not saying so.

• You can type with a controller. Anywhere the game asks for text (party chat, naming a class in the Forge, naming or searching a level in the Editor), pressing the button on the field opens an on-screen keyboard you drive entirely with the pad: stick or d-pad to move, A to type, X to backspace, Y for capitals, RB for space, LB for symbols, Start when you are done. Before this, those fields simply did nothing without a keyboard plugged in. The Class Forge is fully navigable on a pad now too, and B backs you out. If you have a keyboard, nothing changes.

• The Level Editor plays on a controller. The whole editor works with a pad and nothing else. Left stick moves a cursor you use like a mouse: A selects, places, drags a gizmo handle, or holds to slide the view. Right stick swings the camera or scrolls whatever list you are pointing at. Triggers zoom. B backs out, X deletes, Y cycles move, rotate and scale, LB undoes (hold to add to a selection or drag a selection box), RB redoes, the d-pad nudges one grid step, Start saves. Press Back for a card listing all of it. Plug a mouse back in and it takes over the moment you move it.

Camera

• The pulled-back arcade view now tells you what it is doing. Scroll all the way out and the camera still swings to the steep overhead angle, and aiming still hands over to your mouse: the cursor is freed to range across the floor and your hero turns to face wherever you point. That is unchanged, and it is staying. The problem was that it happened silently. Nothing on screen said your controls had just changed, so anyone who scrolled out without meaning to saw a cursor stuck over the game, a camera that would not turn, and swings hitting nothing, and reasonably read the whole thing as a broken game. Now a ring marks the ground where you are aiming, and the first time you reach the mode a one-time note explains that the cursor is your crosshair and that scrolling back in returns you to the normal camera. If you would rather keep mouse-look at full zoom-out, there is a new Overhead Aim (max zoom-out) switch in Settings.

• Several heroes no longer slide sideways in the pulled-back view. Only a couple of classes have the side-step and back-step animations that top-down aiming needs. Everyone else (the Assassin, Berserker, Forest Huntress, Necromancer, Paladin, Warden, Dwarf Brawler and both Ravagers) was being forced to face the cursor while running in another direction, so they played a forward run while gliding sideways. Those heroes now turn to face the way they are actually moving, and only their aim follows the cursor.

Co-op

• Joining a run already in progress builds the level properly. A guest who joined mid-run could arrive in a dungeon whose generated geometry had never been built on their machine. The host now replays the party's current travel to a late joiner so the level assembles correctly on arrival.

• Custom classes from the Forge work in co-op. A class you built in the Forge was only playable by the person who made it. Those class recipes are now distributed to everyone in the session, so a friend can pick your creation.

Level Editor

• Saving can no longer overwrite a different level. A save could land on top of an unrelated level under the wrong name. The editor now refuses that save instead of destroying your other work.

• Older levels no longer load black. A level saved before a format change could open as an empty black scene. Those levels load correctly again.

Performance

• Quieter networked sessions. Multiplayer games were re-registering the same prefabs repeatedly and flooding the log with warnings. That is skipped now.

One note on the reviews on this page: they are all from 2022 and 2023. The combat system they describe is gone. I tore it out and rebuilt it from scratch this year, and since then every class has had its full kit built out and tuned one at a time: left click, right click, dodge, sprint, walk, and ultimate. If you played Cryptr a few years ago, it is not the same game.

That is also why I would rather hear from you than guess. I am one person building this around a full-time job, and most of what shipped this year exists because somebody said something. A surprising number of requests are quick for me once I know they matter to someone. The catch is that I cannot tell what matters from my side of the screen: I have well over a thousand hours in this game, which means I am the worst possible judge of how the first ten minutes feel to somebody new.

The mod tools and the level and class editors let you build your own content. But the game itself can move too, and it moves faster when I know which direction people actually want it to go. If something feels off, or there is something you want to see in it, say so in the Steam discussions or the Discord. I read all of it.