GMS2 engine Beta now available!

Zenohell now has an updated beta branch available to anyone interested enough to try it! I'd appreciate any feedback or help in finding bugs, regressions, and quality of life opportunities, so they can be addressed once and for all. Updates for the other games in our catalogue are planned but when time permits.

Making backups of your high score file is strongly advised if you want to keep your scores. You should be able to find the hiscore file at "%LOCALAPPDATA%\Zenohell".

To access the beta, you need to find your way to the beta settings for the game. Here's how:

Step 1

open the steam app, open the Zenohell page, and click the settings icon.

Step 2

in the dropdown menu, click ‘Properties’.

Step 3

click on the ‘betas’ tab and use the code “yesimadebackups”, which will reveal the beta version in the menu above.

Step 4

if the download for the game doesn't start automatically, verify game integrity.

The obvious elephant in the room takes the form of two questions: what's changed, and why now?

The big change is the engine migration to modern GameMaker, with some small changes for bullet and enemy visibility, and significant backend changes to reduce quirky behaviour with stuff like medals and shadows. The game should run better out of the box on modern computers, and hopefully be a bit less painful to look at.

It's been my grand master plan for some years now to update our games to fix long-standing technical issues and their respective codebases. With the team all focused on other things and having real life to deal with, unfortunately the time and energy just hasn't been there. In the years since 2015, the jury has spoken on the gameplay - Zenohell was the first, the oldest, and it shows. Fixing the gameplay is broader in scope and will probably take a whole new game/DLC, but I'm going to need a good foundation for that first.....

On that note, if you've read this far down and gotten the beta installed, hit keypad 1 in the main menu. Nothing huge, but I'm curious what people think of it.