Hello everyone! Welcome to the ninth development update for Haunted: Attack of the Dead Men. This update will be longer than usual as I have quite a lot to cover - first there is the new boss fight, and second is some news about the demo which will get a bit technical. Without further ado, lets begin!

Map 09 - Necromancer's Temple

So, the boss fight. I've been mentioning this for the past few months so now its time to reveal who I've chosen for you to fight. We have a bit of a problem though - the man I've chosen for the job will make no sense to anyone without first revealing who he works for - that is, I need to spoil the final boss as well. If you don't like spoilers, don't worry - you can still enjoy this month's preview video (a longer one too!) without too many spoilers, but you will probably have no idea who I'm fighting in the video. Anyway, with that out of the way, who is our main man? Who is behind all these resurrections? Well, there could only really be one man who fits the bill... [spoiler]Grigori Rasputin.[/spoiler] [spoiler]Did you manage to guess him? I probably left too large a clue on the store page, but it was too perfect a fit to pass up. Who better to serve as the mastermind behind a bunch of Russians coming back from the dead than the man who wouldn't die?[/spoiler] So now we know who the main antagonist is. But he is not the subject of today's update. Knowing who the final boss was, I needed to find a right-hand-man for him, a protege of sorts. This was very likely to be [spoiler]a member of the Russian royal family[/spoiler], given the close relationship they had with him. After doing some digging, I (again) found the perfect fit: [spoiler]Grand Duke Peter Nikolaevich of Russia.[/spoiler]
Here's a picture of him, which I used as a reference to make his sprites. Unfortunately spoiler tags don't work well with images. [spoiler]So who is this random Russian prince? What a strange choice right? Well, if you decide to read his Wikipedia page (which I linked above), you'll easily spot why. Turns out he was part of a cult called "The Black Peril", who introduced Rasputin to Tsar Nicholas II and was very likely close friends with the guy, seeing as the two were making plots to gain influence and the like. Oh, and his house was even described as "the central point of the powers of evil". What's not to like?[/spoiler] So we have an occultist, known for being evil, and he was best mates with the main villain of the game. What's he actually like to fight? Well, here's a video for you. [previewyoutube=nRq4Twl_XGA;full][/previewyoutube] Wait, what's going on here? There are undead Germans, in a game that's supposed to be about undead Russians? What's this madness all about!? These guys are actually the last two (non-boss) enemies you will encounter, which I teased a while back in Development Update #7. Expect to see them pop up in the last five levels as well. Anyway, you can see from the video that this fight was quite difficult. I died twice before I finally managed to beat him, and this was on medium difficulty! Granted, I did make the game harder for myself by enabling the "pistol start" option (so I couldn't carry over weapons, ammo, health and armour from the previous level), and I didn't want to spoil the secrets either. That second point is why I played on medium difficulty - I intentionally made it very difficult, to almost impossible, to beat the fight on the harder difficulties without at least finding a few of the secrets. If you want some more advice on how to beat it, pay close attention to the guys throwing grenades at you. They are usually what killed me during testing. Oh, and if you can, try to hit the German enemies from behind. They are both carrying highly explosive items on their backs and you can blow them up this way!

Demo Progress Report

Well, that was the boss fight, now for the technical part of this update. If you're not so interested in the details, the TL:DR is that I was planning a big 1.3 update but this could take weeks or months before it is ready, so enjoy a 1.2.1 bugfix update in a few days instead. So, I have some important news regarding the demo - over the past few weeks I have been working hard to upgrade the engine from Godot 3.5 to Godot 4.1. This is a major change that has broken a lot of things, but it was always my intention to do this as the benefits far outweighed the risks. However, while most things are working again, it has unfortunately not gone totally smoothly and there is one significant issue which will delay my planned 1.3 update. What is that issue? Well, it's a pretty major one, it's the physics engine. With the upgrade to Godot 4.1, the engine has switched from using the Bullet physics engine to the in-house GodotPhysics engine. This, unfortunately, is not working very well in 3D currently, and I don't seem to be the only one having issues with it. You may have noticed some of these issues in the video of the boss fight - I recorded the video using the Godot 4 build of the game, and you can see both myself and enemies sometimes getting stuck on bits of the terrain which is far from ideal. A more alarming issue I've had is that collisions with ceilings don't seem to be working properly, so you can just jump straight through them. Obviously, the 1.3 update cannot be released when the physics are in this state, so I will hold off on it for now. The good news is that there may be a solution to it, but I have to be a bit patient - there is a third-party plugin providing the Jolt physics engine, which has been well-received as far as I can tell so I would like to try it. It doesn't work with Godot 4.1 just yet, but it is still in active development so hopefully that will come soon. Regardless, it could take weeks, or (worst case) even months for the 1.3 update to become stable, so I will be releasing a 1.2.1 update in a few days time containing some bug fixes and other small improvements that I had intended to include in 1.3. So, you might be wondering, if everything is horribly broken with Godot 4, why do I still say the benefits outweighed the risks? Well, I have a few more screenshots of the Godot 4 build of the game to satisfy your curiosity.
I've waited a long time for these decal blood effects...






As you can see, there are some interesting new visual effects coming up. First, there is the fancy new volumetric fog, which I think makes it look much more like chlorine gas just rolled over Osowiec (like it should do). Second, I am working on making the blood effects more gory with decals, which are another new feature in Godot 4. Outside of the new eye-candy, there are several other reasons. Performance is much improved with the new Vulkan renderer, and it has provided a good opportunity to clean up old code and make use of new systems to optimise the game a bit better. Plus, Godot 4 will continue to be supported much longer than Godot 3, which will help with stability and performance as well in future. Anyway, that was another long update. Next month will be even more technical, as I will go into a bit more detail about the upgrade process to Godot 4 and the various systems that have been tweaked and reworked. Until then, stay tuned, and thanks for reading!