Hey there!

We still have a few updates and interesting news coming along in the near future regarding Cathedral. We'll release more info about these once we're closer to release! In the meantime, you can now pick up the official soundtrack to Cathedral!

A few people have asked us about purchasing the soundtrack, and we've wanted to add something a little extra to it - so with that in mind, we added 9 songs that were replaced and never made it into the final game!

You can purchase the soundtrack here

The next update is here!
This time around, we've tried to focus on improving the overall experience of the game. This is what we're introducing in version 1.2:

[h2]For the completionist[/h2]
We've added a counter, showing how much of an area you have explored - hidden rooms are included in the calculations too, so you'll know if you have left anything out! This is what it looks like from the map - notice the percentage in the area name header:



Note that the percentage is also shown in areas where maps are missing, such as The Desolate Mines:



And in general, if you want to get an overview over how much of the entire world you've discovered (and a breakdown for each area), check the inventory, and spin left/right until you encounter the following screen:



[h2]A new portal in lower shade forest[/h2]
Getting all the way down to Clive just to realize you're missing a key element can be frustrating! To alleviate this, we've now added a new portal in close proximity. We might have also hidden some gold somewhere around here :)



(If you already have the achievement for all portals, you still got it!)

[h2]A new cutscene after reading the big book in Ivystone![/h2]
The electricity that prohibits you from entering Poison Pavilion disappears when reading the big book in Ivystone - we've realized that this is something we did not make very clear. We've tried to make this a bit more explicit by simply adding a cutscene at this point, showing the electricity disappearing!



[h2]It's now impossible to leave Soul behind[/h2]
After watching a few streams and getting feedback from players, we've realized that being able to leave Soul behind in the beginning of the game is only frustrating! We've fixed that - you're going to get pestered until you go fetch Soul!



[h2]... And many more tweaks![/h2]

• Various level tweaks (for instance, a certain timed block area in lower Shade Forest has been tweaked to what can be seen in the above screenshot)
  
• All gargoyle's have had their hitboxes tweaked and enlarged. It's now possible to hit them further out on the wings too (while it's still the same area for the player to get damaged as before)
  
• Talking to Amanda in Ivystone now gives you the Sword quest immediately, instead of having to interact with her twice
  
• Numbers in the bank randomly flashed when transacting gold. This has been fixed.
  
• Various enemies have been moved - especially enemies that we felt were placed in bad positions, such as a reaper in Shade Forest that tended to fly right into the player, or a bone thrower in Cathedral that hid behind the minimap.
  
• Archers in Shade Forest now do much lower damage - both their projectiles as well as running into the archers themselves.
  
• A small bug with the opacity on the last-point-of-death skull on the minimap has been fixed.
  
• A few of the green wizards in lower Shade Forest (on the way to Clive) has been switched out for their red-robed (slightly less overpowered) counterparts.
  

The next round of updates have arrived! This time, it's mostly small adjustments and bugfixes. The complete list is:

• Bugfix: Using the compass and then a health or ammo statue while awaiting to warp back, you could sometimes trigger unusual situations where the compass wouldn't always disappear (or sometimes reappear, depending on circumstances).
  
• Bugfix: You could sometimes get trapped by the doors in Blue Haven, forever re-entering houses (until using the compass or restarting the game).
  
• Bugfix: Sometimes, the game crashed randomly when loading audio files. This is fixed.
  
• Bugfix: Under very specific circumstances, the game sometimes replaced the save with a blank template for a short amount of time (containing no name and no data). If the game happened to crash or were shut down during this, the actual save was lost forever. This has been fixed.
  
• Bugfix: The ghost enemies in Ardur's Domain during the last rush crashed the game if killed while not being 100% materialized.
  
• Bugfix: If you died at the exact same time (literally, the same frame!) as you entered a portal in Ardur's Domain, you would respawn on the other side of the portal, being invisible and have 0 health.
  
• New feature: An extra charm shrine has been added to Ivystone. You'll find it in the house with the portal!
  
• New feature: When respawning at checkpoints, you'll have a few seconds of invincibility, just as you currently have whenever you warped back using the compass.
  

The next patch is here! This patch mostly consists of minor bugfixes. The complete list is:

• The menu, when used from the inventory, wouldn't do anything if you selected "resume game". Instead, you had to press pause to close the menu. Now, you can select "resume game" as well.
  
• Rebinding keys/buttons wasn't possible if you entered the keyboard/gamepad settings from the inventory menu wheel. This is now fixed.
  
• The skull icon (showing you where you last died in the world), always showed up on top of the map, regardless of which layer you actually died in. This could lead to the skull being placed in some very confusing places. It now only shows up in the layer of the map where you actually died.
  
• The compass (that we added in v 1.1.0) opens you up for attacks when you respawn at checkpoints. Even worse, these attacks could usually stack up in a way that you'd die instantly. We've now added invincibility frames whenever you respawn at checkpoints using the compass.
  
• When the compass is active, it renders the countdown on top of the player. This was drawn on top of other elements such as dialog boxes, the map, inventory etc. too before though. This is fixed.
  
• There was an invisible spike in the Necromancer's Den! Basically, if you had the misfortune of finding it, you'd get hurt in the same was as stepping on a spike, except you wouldn't be able to see it. We removed this one!
  

Cathedral was built during several years as a passion project by a very small team with a tiny budget - it still IS a passion project in many ways, and we're still trying to improve the game whenever we can. Of course, we don't want to change the fundamental experience, but we still consider our game to be a "living" product, and sometimes things need to evolve a bit.

Most of the things this update address is based on community feedback, and we hope it'll only improve the gameplay experience!

We'll walk through the list, one item at a time, but in short, this is the list of updates you'll receive, starting from version 1.1.0, a few of them tiny, a few of them large:

• User marks (exclamation point icons) added to map legend
  
• A fix to avoid truncating save files
  
• Soul possession charm text fixed
  
• Stop NPC interactions while moving
  
• Make it possible to disable green flame shooters in the graveyard
  
• Add the options menu to the inventory "carousel"
  
• Fast travel portal added to Icepeak Castle
  
• Added a new shop item - the compass
  
• That graveyard and that backtracking!
  

We just updated the game to version 1.0.30.

This is a small patch that fixes an issue where the game read from memory it wasn't supposed to read from during the last boss fight. This sometimes lead to a crash (and depending on circumstances and platform, in some case almost every single time!) - it affects all platforms, but seems to have been more prone to crashes on OSX and Linux.

This patch fixes the memory bug, and the crash should not happen anymore.

We have a few smaller changes that we just went live with. The next version (1.0.29) contains the following changes:

• Bugfix: Sometimes button hints would get stuck in xbox mode, even if using the keyboard. This has been fixed.
  
• Bugfix: Fighting Bram the firstborn could soft-lock the game under certain conditions. This has been fixed.
  
• The Shade forest quest is slightly reworded to make it less likely to miss the first damage upgrade.
  
• Several key items (such as main quest items in Poison Pavilion, Necromancer's Den and Brightwind etc.) now show up on the map in the same way as items in general (as a dot).
  

We've had the issue of some players not being able to start the game without running it in admin mode.

Sadly, it's been few enough to make this a hard bug for us to track down. It turns out that we had an issue where if your Windows username contained special characters, it would read those characters wrong, and instead of saving to your user profile folder, it would create a new folder with the "wrong" characters in C:\Users.

The last fix handles this by simply handling Unicode/UTF-16 on Windows correctly (and Windows is the only affected platform).

Are there any side-effects to this patch?
For most players - no. If you've never had any issues with this before, it should be business as usual.

If you're one of the people who have had this issue, then yes - if you just start up the game, you might notice that your saves are gone (don't worry - they're not!). This is an unfortunate side effect of us starting to look for saves in the correct place.

I had this issue, and now my saves aren't visible. How do I get them back?
To fix it - make sure the game starts up (you can exit out right away. It just needs to start to create the necessary folders). After that, go to C:\Users. You will most likely see a folder that doesn't belong (which would be something close to your name, but with any special character replaced by something semi-unreadable). Inside this folder, there's a folder structure Appdata\Roaming\DBornInteractive\Cathedral, which contains all settings and saves. Copy these to your ACTUAL user profile folder, into the same folder structure (so, into C:\Users\[your actual username]\Appdata\Roaming\DBornInteractive\Cathedral).

We realize this isn't optimal, and we're very sorry for the inconvenience. If you're having issues, feel free to contact us on info@decemberborn.com, and we'll help you get it fixed.

Over the course of the last few weeks, we've gotten a lot of comments, feedback and ideas. It's been crazy seeing something that we kept so close to our vests for so long be out there in the real world!

We're in the final week before officially releasing the game, and thought we'd share our latest set of updates that should be live at the time of writing (in Cathedral version 1.0.21 - you can see the version number in the lower left corner of the main menu)

Based on the feedback we've gathered (plus various bugs that have been discovered). Let's go through them, one by one:

Icon toggling
Pressing the left thumbstick (by default on Xbox controllers) now toggles all icons on/off, except user-placed marks.

A few checkpoints moved or realigned
We had a few checkpoints that we had placed in such a way that you had to take them when reaching the end of a certain route, forcing you to backtrack. A couple of these checkpoints have been removed completely, and a few of them has been moved out of the way, so that you can enable them if you want to (and simply leave them alone if not)

New icons for the map
We've updated the map with a new set of icons to make them more coherent! We've also changed the checkpoint from a dot to a "C" (the dot has been reserved for something else. More on that soon!)



The map now has a legend!
Wondering what all the icons in the map mean? Pressing the right thumbstick will bring up the legend:



Improved item collection experience
This is the larger piece of the update, which in turn spawned the other ones. If you look at the map legend, you might see a few icons that you haven't seen before. The feedback we've seen is that finding all items is simply too much work since we've left very little clues about where they can be found.

We've wanted to balance this out to not make it impossible, but still have it be a challenge to find everything in the game. You might have already seen the "Book of books" which we snuck in with another patch a while back. It can be found in the library:



This book allows you to see how many books you have collected in each area of the world.

Moreover though, collectible items such as hearts, ammo upgrades, armor augmentations and bottles are represented by a dot on the map. You still have to visit the room to see the dot, but if there is something hidden in a room, you will see it on the map. After collecting the items, the dot disappears.

We also gave maps a special symbol (a capital "M"), showing if a room contains a map when you enter it:



Note that finding absolutely everything will still be a challenge (as we think it should be!), especially since some items are placed in areas where there simply isn't any map!

This has still moved the item collection from "close to impossible" and pushed it into "challenging" instead! :)

Other fixes
There's been a few minor fixes. The most notable ones are:

* The portal achievement did not unlock for all users even if they unlocked all portals. If you should have gotten the achievement, it will be given to you retroactively when you start the game with that profile the next time

* The map in the jungle didn't disappear after picking it up, but kept respawning.

* We added a new achievement that unlocks when finding all augmentations in the game.

In conclusion
We've kept this update to ourselves for the last week or so and decided to play through the entire game ourselves to give it a try, and see if we wanted to tweak anything or if we felt that we took anything away from the experience by providing item hints on the map. Our personal feeling is that the game only feels better this way. We had more fun exploring than before, and felt that the challenge was still present. We hope you'll find the update to be for the better of the game!

Thank you to everyone so far who have played the game and given us feedback!