V1.5 - The Armory

As always, thank you for playing and sending your feedback through various channels. As a thank-you, I wanted to create a free content update to expand the replayability of the game. Big, big thank you again. While the game didn’t reach as many people as I hoped, I’m grateful that people still play it and seem to enjoy it.

The Armory update gives you new ways to replay the content, hopefully creating more fun. Big points are:

• 6 new weapons

• New weapon drop game mode

• 3 new difficulty modes

• Expanded Score Attack mode with offline leaderboards

• Russian, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese localization

Weapons

I’ve added new weapons to spice up your runthroughs. You can access these guns from the new Armory menu by enabling "random weapon drops". This feature gives enemies a random chance to drop a weapon from the pool of available guns.

Since these new weapons can break the flow of the game, they only work in levels you’ve already beaten, and they disable time trials. Mostly because some of these new guns are really overpowered, which leads me to...

Hard Modes

In the Armory menu, you can enable up to 4 different difficulty modes.

• Normal: Your regular experience as you’re used to.

• Hard: Doubles enemies’ HP and armor values. This has actually become my favorite way to play, and part of me wishes it was the default at launch. It forces you to hack enemies and use the environment. If you’ve been playing without linking enemies for multi-kills or breaking armor, you’re in for a rough time.

• Overclck: Enemies double their values again, and everyone has armor now. You’ll need to use hacking abilities and powerups to gain the upper hand.

• G1itch: The hardest mode doubles HP and armor values, gives everyone armor, and doubles their damage. Boost mode and slow-mo in hack mode will be your best friends here.

Each difficulty also awards a new badge in the level select, depending on what difficulty you’ve beaten the level on. It forces you to play Deadwire the way it’s meant to be played and ties directly into the enhanced score mode.

Score Mode

With all the new weapons and difficulty modes, I’ve also expanded Score Mode. If you didn’t notice before, you can toggle it on in the level select. Eliminating enemies now gives you score, and performing different actions or hacks gives even more. Combos and accuracy increase your multiplier, and with the new update, you can get even higher multipliers depending on the selected difficulty.

Each level now has an offline leaderboard that keeps track of your top 3 scores across all difficulties.

Languages

This update adds localization for Simplified Chinese, Russian, and Japanese. Enjoy!

Changelog

Quality of Life and System

• Pause menu now shows control keys

• Fixed bug where score bonus had to be 1 or scores broke

• Language now saves and loads correctly on close and reopen

• Fonts now change for specific languages

Gameplay and Balance

• Hard mode now includes HP, armor, and score modifiers

• New weapons

• Difficulty HUD icon now displays and saves correctly

• Level 22 “Boost Me” side objective made more consistent

• Level 24: "Don't blow the barrels" side objective was triggered too early

• Time Trial now blocked if weapon drops are enabled

• Swords now correctly get stuck on panic walls

• Edited enemy placements and amount in various initial levels for smoother onboarding

Other tweaks:

• Smaller bullet trails for weaker weapons

• New SFX for new guns and bike explosion

• New vfx for crashes, explosions and deaths

• Enemy HP bar gets destroyed on bike explosions

• Corpse angle correctly sets angle on explosion deaths

UI and Menus

• Armory menu updated for new weapons and difficulty options

• Changed “L/R” to “Left/Right” for easier onboarding

• Overlay sprites now render correctly above 3D effects

• Gamepad hack UI correctly hide when not overlapping objects

Gamepad

• Deadzone enlarged for smoother movement

• Crosshair lerps its speed and moves slower overall for smoother aiming

• New icons for D-pad and sticks

• Back button changed to B instead of Y (expected standard)

As always, thank you so much for playing! If you like DeadWire please feel free to leave a review, that really helps us solo-developers.

Until next time!