The new modelled bodies are in the game now, and the systems around them grew.
From files to the game
The nine characters were fitted onto the combat rig the game already used. Their skin weights and bind pose were adapted rather than replaced, so the existing animation, weapon and blood code still works. Procedural alternate outfits keep their old bodies until matching modelled ones exist, and the Knight's geometry is untouched. A numeric check confirmed that the Knight's vertex and index data are identical to before.
The ten bosses came with a harder problem. Several of them are not humanoid, so each got a weighted rig fitted to its own anatomy and wired into the game's existing attack timing. Six of them then received native animation clips (walk, run and an attack) that are time-warped to fit the combat stages, with the game's own poses covering the moves that have no clip. The four creature bodies got follow-through and limb animation of their own.
The largest hand error against the halberd grip on one boss fell from 1.351 m to 0.120 m once the arm reach was distributed along the arm. All ten boss rigs then passed a posed-vertex check that samples 15 motion ranges at 13 points across three look directions. That is a deformation check, not a claim that every phase of every fight has been seen.
Two bugs came from scale and weights. The native armature is authored in centimetres, so resetting its pose gave a boss 0.03 m tall where the loaded model measured 3 m. The fix was to keep the exported initial transforms and not reset them. Separately, one boss's central waist plates stretched with its hands, because they were weighted to the arms. Reassigning only those weights to the hips repaired it.
Bosses are bigger and a little softer
A player is 1.85 m. Mini bosses are now 4.0 to 5.5 times that depending on the chamber, and Mega Bosses 6.5 to 7.8 times. Mega Boss heights were 7.2, 9.5 and 11 m before. Guardian health was lowered from 2.0 to 1.8 times base, which makes bosses 10 percent easier.
Boss entrances were reworked. The name slams in letter by letter with a white flash and a shock ring, the screen pulses red, a hazard strip crosses the screen for a Mega Boss, the letterbox bars grow to 15.5 percent of the screen height, and the camera sways as if handheld.
Spending what you earn
Sigils earned in a Level can be turned in at the new Sigil Altar, reached from the Level tally, for eight permanent upgrades. In a short check, three sigils bought Vigour, which raised life from 1,200 to 1,240.
When you die after advancing, you now start at the Level map instead of starting over, and Watch AI Play picks the newest Level. The first probe found a bug here: the map's Return button restarted the old pick, because the session kept the previous start Level. It was cleared after the restart begins.
The end of each Level also has a ranking screen. Each Keeper is scored on kills, damage, guardians and Mega Bosses, the victor is crowned with confetti and the others applaud, and a solo run shows its own best.
Survival
Survival is one endless arena: the Cathedral hall as a single room. A mini boss arrives every 5 waves, a Mega Boss every 10, each with its normal entrance, and the wave you reach is your score. Between waves there is a 4 second break, and each boss wave ends with a relic draft. The numbers are drafts.
Its first bug is a good one. The wave controller counted living enemies before the frame's own spawns were added, so a wave whose whole quota arrived in a single frame was declared cleared at once. Wave 1 is 18 bodies against a budget of 24 per frame, so it ended the instant it began, with all 18 still alive. A frame that spawned something no longer ends the wave on its stale count. In a 3 minute Watch run, the AI reached wave 10 with no errors.
Controls
Extra controllers now take over Keepers 2, 3 and 4 in order, with analogue move, right-stick aim and the spells on the bumpers and triggers. Unplug one and the bot takes that Keeper back. Touch controls were added for phones: on-screen controls, fullscreen, a landscape lock, a zoomed HUD and a lower quality setting that also cuts the live enemy cap to 55 percent. They have not been tried on a real phone.
No dithering, and a log that hid its worst frames
Dithering was removed from the whole renderer. The camera cut-away stipple became a clean threshold smoothed by edge anti-aliasing, the fog march jitter and the ambient-occlusion kernel rotation were fixed to constants, the film grain was removed, and so was the dither in the normal bake.
The game also keeps a play log now: errors, frame times, deaths with the last five wounds, bosses and a sample every 5 seconds. Its first review found that frames of one second or longer were dropped from the frame-rate figures, so the worst hitches, a shader compile or a boss arriving, never showed. They count now. Only gaps of 5 seconds or more, such as a sleeping laptop, are skipped.