The game now opens in a crypt
A new game starts in an unlocked prison cell. Guards outside taunt you through the bars with subtitled lines, one carries the key to the iron gate, and a lever in a far chamber opens the big door at the end of the cell block. Behind it is the first boss, and beyond that a stair up to the Church, which is unchanged.
The map is generated from code like everything else. A shortcut tunnel loops back to the start, and it is one way: its door only opens from the tunnel side, so it cannot be used to skip the key gate.
Two level bugs caught by checks, not by eye
- The rock lumps along the walls were scaled so large they filled the narrow rooms and the walkable floor vanished.
- Every doorway frame was turned 90 degrees, so each one lay across its own passage.
A route check on the navigation mesh, run on the map as saved with the doors shut as they are in play, then found two wall pieces cutting the shortcut tunnel in half. Every route the design relies on is now checked whenever the map is built, and all of them pass.
The bot could not see the boss
The test bot plays the whole route from the cell to the Church. At first it never got past the boss, because it did not recognise him as an enemy at all. His AI picks its own target and never sets the "aware" flag the bot looks for, so the bot stood still and took 51 slams. Once that was fixed it was still too passive, because its boss rules had been written for the Serpent. In a god-mode run it now beats him through all three phases in 517 game seconds. Without god mode a level 4 Knight still dies to him, which is expected: he is level 8.
A boss that was one-shot territory
His heavy hits could take most of a starting character's health in one blow.
| attack | before | now |
|---|---|---|
| Quake damage | 322 of 375 health | about 230 |
| last-phase Reckoning motion value | 3.4 | 2.7, still unparryable |
More blood, more impact
At the owner's request, blood now has twice the fine spray, an arterial arc of bigger and faster drops, and flat marks thrown across the floor. A deep hit (18 percent of health or more) leaves a wound that keeps bleeding. It is authored at full strength and the particle budget thins it on Low to about a third. Three new sound layers sit on top of the contact sound: a blade through a body, the weight of a heavy blow, and the crunch of a deep wound. The owner has not heard them yet.
Frame times on Low
| area | frame time |
|---|---|
| lever chamber | 16.8 ms |
| ossuary hall | 18.0 ms |
| boss door | 19.5 ms |
| cave arena | 20.4 ms |
| Crypt block | 22.5 ms |
| Church nave, for comparison | 31.6 ms |
| opening cell view, four characters close | 33.9 ms |
The budget is 33 ms, so the opening view sits right on it. The first pass read 33.3 to 33.8 ms everywhere, which looked like a result and was not: the game was capped at 30 frames a second, so it was measuring the cap. These figures are uncapped. The gore and the new sounds add no per-frame cost.
A new crypt suite plays the real map and passes 6 of 6. The full suite is 140 passed, 0 failed, 6 skipped.