Final Demo Update

I wanted to go extremely thorough with this so the update went beyond what was initially promised, so let's get to it, shall we?

New content or content changes:

• A much more fleshed-out final stretch to the fungal level.

• Levels had their pacing tweaked to flow better.

• Mini boss, the Water Dweller. It is harmless unless provoked. I feel sad for killing it during my playtests.

• New enemy, the Dukes. They show up twice, once as a mandatory encounter and again as an optional encounter. This ties into the next few points.

• Replaced the village chiefs with a village chief and a Duke.

• New exit in the second level to make things interconnect even better.

• Maurice has been added to the game.

• Tutorial zone now has a more robust tutorial for strafe jumping. It has a hologram video showing an example and a very to-the-point but polite explanation on how Auto B-Hop works. It is also a bit more spacious to practice jumping around.

• New bio augment, Blood Speed. As a token of appreciation, I added a new augment in the shop. You prolly guessed it but it will allow you to recalibrate your blood into your legs for a temporary speed buff.

• 2 lore terminals near the warden got changed. They no longer reflected what I want from the game now, which is to keep things self-contained while hinting at some bigger things happening in the Neon Rain universe.

• The golden gate before the climax fight before the mecha boss got its price reduced.

• Balance changes again. The post-Next Fest balance update made things too easy according to players, so I did a deep dive on it and the gist is I went ahead and made some enemies more aggressive and get stun-locked less without inflating their HP pools to egregious degrees. I even nerfed some enemy HP.

Enemy balance changes:

• Dog enemies went from 150 HP to 120 HP with their tracking tuned up.

• Camera Heads went from 95 HP to 85 HP.

• Grunts move faster.

• Poison Cloud Critters went from 50 HP to 65 HP and their speed got slightly increased but not to the extent of their un-nerfed days. Still squishy but can overwhelm you if you're careless.

• Turret projectiles are faster.

• Tripods HP went from 125 HP to 150 HP and got their speed slightly buffed up.

• Slug Mushroom got reworked. The roam-around movement function is pretty buggy, I must admit, so I made them strafe around the player but still give the feeling that they just try to get around you and get cheap shots in.

• Mecha Mushrooms went from 150 HP to 200 HP and have a longer attack state range and move around quicker.

• Jellyfish Mushrooms no longer stand still during combat. They also attack faster.

• Mushroom Knights move slightly faster.

• Mushroom Gunners are slightly faster and get stunned less. They also spray and pray more.

• Frilled Salamanders move faster.

Since the guns packed a bigger punch in the post-Next Fest balance change, some bosses heavily suffered.

Boss changes:

• The tutorial boss has a bigger HP pool. It is meant to teach you how to navigate the arena and how to "dance around" in combat so being able to gun it down in around 100 bullets from the Machine Gun was counterintuitive. However, it now takes 2X crit damage to the head and its acid ray blast accuracy can be disrupted if you shoot its head.

• The Warden has been made more resilient and deadlier but will now take 2X crit damage to the head. Big day for the free-aim-only players.

• The Strange Cocoon boss has its green homing projectile move faster.

• Be aware that enemy aggression, damage you take, and enemy projectile speed will be things you'll be able to tweak in the released version of the game.

Oh yeah, thought the player wouldn't get some more love? Think again.

Player changes (all buffs):

• Regular Shotgun got its speed buffed and accuracy buffed.

• Player jump acceleration got tuned up to feel snappier without sacrificing exploration.

• Auto B-Hop speed cap got increased from 45 to 50.

• Iris now acknowledges if you've been a nice guy or not in the fungal grove.

• In the back of my head I always had echoes of a criticism that I have way too many tanky enemies and yeah, pretty valid. I've toned it down a smidge across the board and added a few squishy and trashy enemies here and there to maybe satisfy your blood lust. I've also reduced the amount of enemies in certain combat-heavy sections.

Bug fixes:

• A very bizarre bottleneck in performance has been slain. The game would have terrible performance sometimes until you quickloaded the game. I fixed that at the cost of a slightly bigger load time but that SSD of yours prolly loads that real fast anyway.

• Phantom lock-on has been vanquished. That means you will never ever lock onto an enemy corpse by accident.

• Fixed an issue where certain attacks from the player still had hitmarkers even if the option was off.

• Optimized the fungal grove path mesh to have fewer NPC navigation bugs.

• Fixed wonky triggers in the fungal grove.

• Bio scum pools now properly slime the floor.

• Enemy code has been cleaned up to be a bit more responsive (still fuckin dumb but 2.5% less dumb).

• Some grammar fixes.

• Pause menu now hides boss HP bars.

• Made some enemy pain sounds more audible.

Yeah, wanted to end the demo days with a bang and I think I managed to do that very well. It really made me reflect on a lot of things but regardless, gotta move forward.

I shall see you shortly with the next monthly blog post this weekend and go over my plans to ship the Early Access and etc...

See ya.

Oh yeah you can now play at 120 FPS at your own risk!