Biweekly Update 08 - Improving the Levels

Hi parasites!

Time for a new update! This week we continue with fleshing out the Intestine level with a new environmental hazard, alongside improvements to map generation and a new type of loot chest to make your invasion and exploration of the human body more rewarding. Let us begin with this week’s dev blog!

Intestinal Villi

The Intestine now has its unique trap! The Intestinal Villi stem from the walls of the Intestine, their branches will latch onto your pathogen if it strays too close. This will significantly slow down your movement and make you sitting ducks in front of enemy attacks. Be sure not to get caught!

Core Chests

A new type of chest can now be found across all levels. The core chests don’t ask for your health, but instead take cores as payment for unlocks. Make sure to keep some spare change in case you need some extra loot!

Map Generation

Map generation in the game has undergone a series of improvements. Harder rooms, including the boss room, will be spawned further away from the starting position. Reward rooms are now more spread-out and dead ends now always contain a chest or an organelle reward to encourage exploration.

The aim is to make progression in every level feel more natural, and reward players for fully exploring the map without feeling their effort was wasted. We hope that this will make your runs more enjoyable with the more gradual difficulty scaling and more predictable rewards.

Lungs Work-In-Progress

Last time we showed a blurry teaser of new content in the works – and quite a few correct guesses showed up in the comments. Yep, Matt and Roberto are working on the Lungs level! This will be a new level for the full game and currently not planned to be in the demo. Here’s the clear version of the screenshot, with the colours changed up as we think this is closer to what we envision:

Still, with how quick and accurate these guesses were, you guys scare me, and that’s just from a blurry screenshot. We definitely need to increase the blurriness or crop out more stuff to up the difficulty next time.

Before we go into the patch notes, just want to give everyone a quick heads-up about future updates. With Pathogenic’s demo getting closer to feature completion, we will be slowing down demo updates as production is now shifting towards content of the full game, like the Lungs. That doesn’t mean there’ll be no new updates – more new content will be added to the demo as development continues, and we even have a new series of enemies scheduled to join the fight in April!

And of course, we’ll be sharing our development progress with you along the way as we would love to hear what you think about them. So please look forward to more news from Pathogenic, and be sure to follow us on our socials (YouTube, Twitter, TikTok)!

Full Patch Notes

Main changes

• Added intestinal villi, a new slowing trap in Intestine

• Added core chest, a new reward option that costs cores to open

• Daily runs now have a 50% chance to start with completely random weapons and attack modifiers

Other Improvements

• Improved map generation

  • Reward rooms are more spread out

  • Boss room is always placed the furthest from the start

  • Hard rooms are placed on the edges of the map

  • Dead ends always contain a chest or an organelle reward.

• Camera zoom is now more adaptive based on the room size

• Updated intestine track

• Updated intestine props

• Improved main menu screen and start animation

• Improved UI

• Many CPU optimizations

• Improved stability

• Improved Fast Physics setting is back which should help with CPU load and not compromise the physics accuracy as much

• Updated enemy AI of various worms

Balance changes

• Slightly buffed Multinucleated Giant Cell, slightly nerfed Blood Monocyte

• Slightly nerfed Bacteriophage multiplying

Fixes

• Fixed some unlock conditions not accumulating correctly

• Fixed exit halls sometimes letting the player go through