A day of gore, weapon coatings and a second camera. The version number went onto the screen today too, glowing red: 6.66.1.
The slash decides where a body is cut
The first carnage pass gave enemies leg stumps and made thrown bodies fly, land, slam into walls and bowl into each other. A probe put 68 bodies in the air at once, peaking around 2.4 m, with every sever type firing and no errors.
That was judged not far enough, so cutting became a mechanic. The direction and height of the slash now decide where a body is cut, and bigger enemies are cut in half along it. In ten seconds of the AI player fighting, the counts were 73 waist-cut kills and 106 enemies sliced in half.
Two dials went up after that. Thrown bodies fly 50% more often and 50% farther, and 25% of them now burst into pieces. Overall gore went up by a factor of six.
Blood in the world, not on the lens
A lens-blood overlay was built first, then toned way down, then removed. Blood splattered across the screen is a cheap trick, and the better version is blood you can watch travel. In its place the blood is liquid in the air: thick jets, stretched gobs and curling ropes that land on the floor.
A black screen that hid its error
The 3D view went completely black.
The cause was a shader uniform array. The puff palette had been widened, and the arrays being uploaded were shorter than the size the shader declared. The error appeared only in the game's own error log.
The arrays are padded now. More usefully, the test probes now print the game's own errors, because a rendering failure that only shows up in a place nobody is looking can pass for a clean run.
Weapon coatings
Enemies drop vials that coat your weapon in an element. There are five coatings, among them rot, venom stacks, frost and shock. A coating changes more than the hit:
- The blade's fuller glows in the element's colour, and a coin on the HUD shows the element with a draining timer ring.
- Each element adds rites that reshape your spells.
- Drop chance is 0.008 for ordinary enemies and 0.06 for heavy ones.
Third person, and a blur that was not post-processing
A chase camera was added, toggled with L3 or V. In it, everything looked blurred. Frames were captured with the post effects toggled, and the culprit was elsewhere: the world's dithered occlusion dissolve. It is off in third person now.
Performance
| mode | horde frame rate |
|---|---|
| full quality | about 29 fps |
| Lower Graphics | about 41 fps |
Lower Graphics is a new option that drops render resolution, effect detail, corpse caps and some UI. Earlier in the day, gore ran at 29 fps and the horde at 28.
Also in
- Runs are seeded and carry random omens, so no two are the same. Field bosses arrive every fifth wave and major bosses every tenth. The horde grows only after the player has been comfortable for a sustained stretch.
- Chests open with an animation for both the player and the chest, and a pillar of gold light rises into the sky.
- After every round the Knight kneels where he stands, face in his hands, and rises with health and powers restored.
- Level 1 became a chain of five chambers. A fog gate opens when each guardian falls, and the last chamber holds the Mega Boss and a portal.
- The character select now has four player slots, and each class can be picked once. The Witch got the first real class kit.