Hey everyone.

First of all, we'd like to thank all the players who tried the demo during Next Fest. Your feedback has been invaluable in improving the game, and now that we're finally starting to wrap up I'd like to talk about some of the changes resulting from it.

We've increased the fire rate across the board for most weapons. This also includes adding on-screen bullet limiting, allowing higher damage when attacking enemies up close with certain weapons. Player move speed has also been increased. The game should feel much more fluid and
responsive as a result. While some of these changes were planned as upgrades, it became clear that making the early game feel clunky was a poor choice.

The start of many areas now include weapons that you can optionally pick up. If you haven't crafted them yet, they'll still show up but you won't be able to equip them. This allows for a much smoother game flow where you can comfortably try new areas without having to rush back to town, or as a warning that you may not be ready yet. Player creativity is still encouraged, since not every ideal weapon is included and skilled players can often clear areas without any optimal weapons.

We've created a whole new, more straightforward stage 1 that encourages players to jump directly into the action while more gradually pulling them into the crafting and exploration side of things. We've also added some new puzzles to nudge players out of difficult areas, and placed more direct hints about how to use new weapons to unlock areas in the early parts of the game. If you enjoyed hunting down the secrets in the original demo, don't worry, there's still plenty to find. We're just trying to show new players how the game is structured before removing the guard rails.

There are also plenty of other major and minor changes, such as looping weapon cycling, but for now I think this is a decent overview of the biggest changes. If you want to see more new weapons and stages, we post video clips of how the game is developing over on our Bluesky[bsky.app] and Twitter[x.com] as well.

Thanks for following us, see you next time.