Fan art is courtesy of Johannes.C from the discord channel![discord.gg]

This patch includes a bunch of bug fixes, a few gameplay tweaks and little quality of life improvements. As always, let me know if you run into any issues! Also make sure to join the Discord[discord.gg] for details on content releases, and to chat and hang out with the rest of the Bloodthief community!

Here are the details on this update:


- Some folks were experiencing crashing due to incompatibility with Vulkan. If you were experiencing a crash before: Try launching the game with the DirectX launch option and let me know if that fixes the crash


- Wall detection is slightly more forgiving in the scenario where you are slightly above a wall or slightly below a wall.
- Wall jumping now has a bit of input buffering
- Reduced bhop / ground jump input buffering
- You now will immediately start sliding if you get blood while crouching
- Bow knight attacks now get interrupted when you knock them up
- Added explanation in tutorial that if you hold the ground slam button you go straight down
- Reduced the “hold” time for quick restart.


- Fixed bug where perfect bhops or ground-slam jumps sometimes didn’t register
- Fixed exploit where you could keep some blood after restarting
- Fixed issue where main menu music didn’t loop
- Fixed issue where breakable stuff sometimes remained broken after restarting
- Fixed issue where you sometimes couldn’t attack when starting the game
- (I think) fixed issue where sometime the volume was at 0 when starting the game - this one is hard to verify so please let me know if you experience this!
- Fixed issue where you could get stuck under a moving door in Level 1
- Fixed issue where you could get stuck under overhangs
- Fixed bug where you would fly off the map if you ground slammed through lava with the unlimited blood powerup
- Fix some random cracks in certain parts of the map where you could see out of bounds
- Fixed bug where tomes get re-activate immediately after closing their text panel


- Added a little magnetism to the hole in Tutorial to make it easier to jump into
- Small SFX mixing and modulation changes
- Added ability to change the “tick rate” of the game. Higher tick rate is more performance intensive but will lead to more responsive input and will make some effects smoother

[Update: Just pushed Hotfix patch 0.2.7 which fixes a crouch bug caused by the latest build]

Hey folks! This patch just fixes an exploit where you could get a really good time by getting a key before hitting a checkpoint, and then restarting.

All leaderboard times that clearly used this exploit will be deleted.

Also, some other stuff:
- Tiny tweak to crouch-slide so it works slightly better on slopes
- Improved jitteryness of flying gibs
- fixed bug where your jump input would register after restarting sometimes.

- Fixed bug which was causing linux builds to not be able to start
- Fixed bug where some stats didn’t reset when starting a new level
- Fix bug where you could restart level right as you get an item and still get to keep that item
- Fixed bug where your powerup timer ticked down while the game was paused


- FOV setting now will round to the nearest integer
- Tomes will not show up if you have tutorial text disabled (so they wont get in the way if you’re optimizing your run)

This patch is just fixing a few bugs that were caused by yesterday's patch. Thank you to everyone who reported bugs! Here are the notes:

- fixed bug where if you restarted from the menu your player would freeze
- fixed bug where respawn didn't work in the practice map
- fixed camera not resetting to forward position upon resetting
- adjusted main menu not being centered properly
- fixed bug where keys became visible again after collecting them and restarting at checkpoint
- fixed issue where you could aggro knights through walls immediately upon restarting

Hey all, new update to the playtest coming your way! This one does not have any new content, but is quite large nonetheless. I reworked a few pretty expansive pieces of infrastructure, so I anticipate all these changes will cause at least *some* new bugs. So please let me know if you spot anything and as always I appreciate your feedback!

Here are the updates:


- Tweaked the 6 wall-jump max: Now if you wall jump 6 times without touching ground it will cost 1 blood per jump. If you have no blood you’ll just slide down the wall.
- Added “Tomes” to the Tutorial level which I’m hoping to a better job of making important tutorial text more obvious and less easy to miss.
- Timer doesn’t start until you start pressing a button or looking around
- If you jump while moving upward on a slope you’ll jump a bit higher now.
- Reduced the player’s fall speed while wall running
- Quick Restart (the R key on the keyboard) is now a “hold” action by default, so it should be harder to accidentally press. If you liked how it was before, you can change it back in the settings menu (called “Instant Restart”)
- Made parrying slightly easier
- Added some anti-cheat measures to leaderboards
- Improved crossbow accuracy at further distances. Still needs work though.
- Player now casts a small shadow directly below while in the air to make ground slamming a bit easier
- Ground slam will go “straight down” more immediately now if you hold the ground slam button
- Tutorial Medal times have been tweaked to be easier


- Fixed a bug where you had less air control if you were getting less than 90 fps
- Fixed some ledge climb unreliability issues
- Fixed some bugs that could occur if quitting with the Windows “X”
- Fixed bug where water submerge sound didn’t play sometimes
- Fixed bug where knight arrows sometimes weren’t facing the right direction


- New player model (with fingers!)
- Gibs now shoot out in front of you and splat against walls when you air dash an enemy
- More blood in general
- Tweaked enemy hit flash
- Air dash “not enough blood” indicator is now just a little blood icon instead of blood and a shield
- New potion model
- Air dash now expands your FOV a bit to make it look cooler. You can disable this in the settings if this isn’t your thing.


- Made restarting at checkpoint and restarting level like 10x faster. It should be pretty much instant for most people now.
- Tweaked shadow resolutions to be less resource intensive
- Optimized lighting to be less memory intensive
- Optimized lightmaps to require less storage
- Added ability to disable Glow which should help performance on low end machines
- Reduced the physics tick rate from 90 to 60. This helps performance at the cost of slightly less accurate physics calculations - please let me know if you notice a difference!

I’m hoping to have some additional updates with more bug fixes soon - I just wanted to get this one out the door since it’s getting so large.

Make sure you’re not in any beta branches (ie. playtest_build_0.2.0) otherwise you wont get the update!

Have fun and let me know your feedback!

Thanks to everyone who played the new level this weekend and gave feedback! I got a ton of great feedback, so I appreciate everyone who played and gave me some insight as to how to improve the game.

My biggest takeaway from this weekend: Level 2 definitely had too big of a difficulty spike from Level 1. That’s obvious from your feedback alone, but for anyone interested in the data, check out some of these numbers:

1. Median deaths to complete Level 2 was 75 deaths. This is is over 5x higher than Tutorial and Level 1. I do want the game to be challenging and require a lot of skill, but this was just too big of a leap from Level 1.
   
2. The “dropoff rate” of the level (i.e., players who started it but didn’t finish) is 60%, which is insanely high, especially given that you had to beat Tutorial and Level 1 to even get to this point. I attribute this to how punishing this level is.

I already announced this in the Discord, but this patch removes Level 2 from the main build. It needs some major improvements, so I’m taking it out of the main build for now so as to not give new players a bad first impression. I’ll leave 0.2.0 alive for a bit in a separate beta branch for those who want to keep playing Level 2. Details on that will be posted on the discord[discord.gg]. Stay tuned for new and improved content soon!

Hey everyone! Huge new update to the playtest today. As always, let me know your feedback in discord[discord.gg]. Here are the details:

New Content:

- 1 new level (unlocked by beating Tutorial and Level 1)
- 3 new enemy types
- New section in the Tutorial level
- Music (finally) in all three levels
- Medals (time-trial style, so you get a higher medal for a better time)
- New level select screen that will show you your best time and medal earned
- End level screen now shows you your “Global Rank” in the leaderboard
- New main menu

Changes:

- Revamped tutorial text system so it should be harder to miss stuff now
- Crouch is now its own bindable action if you want to use it separately from the slide button
- You’re now limited to 6 consecutive wall jumps. Touching ground or air dashing will reset the counter.
- The game tracks your progress now so you will need to unlock later levels by beating the prior level.
- Settings menu is broken out into sub-categories now
- Run timer is now displayed / recorded at millisecond precision. There are some nuances here though:
- In game speedrun timer is still only displayed at 10th second granularity. Updating the time display more frequent than this just looks glitchy / bad IMO.
- Existing leaderboards (Tutorial and Level 1) are still at second precision.
- Some doors are faster now

Fixes:

- Fixed issue where tutorial text didn’t update if you remapped the controls to different buttons
- Fix visual flashing and sound spam that could happen when swimming in water at the surface
- Fix issue where the air dash UI would show up for knights while they were hidden behind walls
- Fix bug where you could shoot arrows even if you had none in your inventory (and your arrow count would go negative)
- Fixed controller issue where you couldn’t do some actions on the controller

Come chat about strategies, runs, secrets and more in the Discord! Here's the link: https://discord.gg/aU5naj2fgY

Greetings Bloodfolk! Just pushed the latest patch - this one has some movement / controls changes that I think will make things a little tighter and more intuitive, as well as bring some critical mechanics a little more to the forefront.

Here are the notes:


- Buffed slide:

• - Now if you don’t have blood, instead of doing nothing, you will crouch. If you're moving, you'll slide in the same way that crouch/ctrl slide did originally
  
• - If you do have blood, slide still gives you that same speed boost. However, slide now has all of the momentum preserving properties that crouch slide had.
  
• - Vanilla “crouch” has been removed since slide above does everything crouch does and more.

- Default button mapping for ground-slam has been moved from Alt to Ctrl.
- Made it so you can “buffer” the air dash input while air dash is charging. As long as you are holding the input when air dash becomes fully charged, you will dash
- Increased jump coyote time from .1 to .2
- Tweaked explosion / rocket-jump tech to allow you to gain more speed with proper explosions
- Slightly increased the player controller’s pitch min and max values. Now you can look all the way up and down.


- The “bow” has been changed to something slightly different. Let me know what you think!
- Added arrows to the practice map
- Increased sword swing hitbox active time by .1 seconds
- Water is more transparent now


- Fixed issue where enemies would run in place if they couldn’t find a path to you
- Fixed bug where spikes didn’t smash you or enemies sometimes
- Fixed issue where player could escape the final battle sequence in Tutorial by climbing up the hole (The hole is blocked now)
- Fixed bug where change weapon buttons couldn’t be remapped
- Fixed bug where the sword slash flickered on screen for an instant sometimes right when your swing started
- Fixed bug where you couldn’t quick-restart while air dashing



If you've noticed that I skipped patch number 0.1.30, that's because this version was made publicly available via Bloodthief's FPS Fest Demo. Now both the Demo and the Playtest should be in sync.

I also just pushed patch 0.1.32 which just updates the tutorial to reflect the new ground pound changes.

Have a great week!

This build fixed some really tricky bugs that have been around since the very beginning!

Make sure to join the Discord[discord.gg] to get more frequent updates on development and just to chat and hang out :)


- Fixed bug that caused the level to load in a broken state, which would cause you to sometimes fall through the floor, go through walls, or miss checkpoints.
- Fixed bug that caused some textures to show up pink sometimes. I’ve been hunting this bug and the prior bug down for months and they should finally be fixed now - thank you to purple.r4t, rhogar_, mreowzers, p3ople, nyutie, and roblox_noob43 for the detailed bug reports that helped me figure these out! Please let me know in the discord if you’re still running into this bug or the one above.
- Fixed bug where you could ground-slam even if you don’t have enough blood in some scenarios.
- Fixed bug where crouching in the air cancels your ground slam.
- Fixed bug where if you interrupt a ground-slam with a ledge climb, the ground slam effects still play.


- Pre-compile shaders during level-loading. This should significantly improve stuttering that can occur in your first play session. NOTE: The first time any level is loaded, there will now be a one-time “compiling shaders” step which will take 15 seconds or so.


- Parry should feel much “tighter” now (increased hitbox size but reduced the timing window to better sync with the parry animation).
- More sound effects, including buttons sounds in the main menus.


- Disabled screen-space ambient occlusion for now. It is pretty expensive on low end machines and doesn’t seem to make a big difference aesthetically. Eventually I’ll make this a toggleable graphics setting but for now it is off.