Hey, everyone. Welcome to our third regular monthly update. We worked on new content but we also took care of the core game experience through lots of small improvements.

Update Notes

Content

- added tower location (work in progress) - added mountain path location (work in progress) - added new energy weapons - improved Aksa's dialogue - allow getting quest item for Aksa before starting her quest - added some stairs visuals throughout the game - updated a few sprites and added more art assets - small level design fixes and improvements throughout the game - new level up sound

Combat Improvements

- reduced angle for getting targets for melee attacks - updated melee attack visuals to better fit range and angle of melee attacks - added cursor visuals for a few combat related actions - added some blood effects to the ground after each hit - improved animation for unarmed combat - updated ranged weapon pointer of enemies so max range is clearer - drastically reduced critical hit damage influence on the game - fixed wrong calculation of critical hit damage bonus through items - make NPCs potentially cancel ranged shooting when target moves behind obstacle - exaggerated mutant melee attack for readability - hard difficulty: apply hitstun to player, same as NPCs (experimental) - added smaller movement pushback on getting hit even if resisting the hitstun - fixed spider throwing their web against walls - fixed NPCs being passive in combat when at the edge of the world - fixed some other minor issues with NPC behaviors - added range info to weapon descriptions

General Improvements

- enable showing holstered weapon for player character - disabled player character commenting on killing someone - added more cases of player raising attention of NPCs and enemies, including puking

Usability Improvements

- added slight camera movement when switching floors - updated camera lerp on death and other fade out actions - when consuming item from action selection screen, stop slow motion (improves using multiple consumables) - added user interface option for enforcing handheld mode (e.g. when game doesn't recognize it's being played on Steam Deck) - moved weapon scroll display to corner position - improved short travel marker UI - readded 'Next Ability' and 'Previous Ability' to keybindings - small feedback improvements for triggering abilities - added Playtest entry to debug console as a quickstart for some scenarios

Technical Improvements

- fixed some memory leaks - decreased memory usage of the application - various performance improvements - updated Unity Engine to 2020.3.32f - updated Controller plugins

Bug Fixes

- co-op: fixed some camera issues - improved collider around spikes - fixed a few potential errors happening on Fleshworms crawling from player corpse - fixed continuously melee attacking when holding attack override key and mouse button instead of only executing melee once - controller: fixed issues with item comparison functionality - fixed issue with standard input profile - fixed a case of overlapping damage numbers - fixed some issues with area exits - fixed errors with the boss fight in Flesh Crater - fixed a few rare crashes - fixed potential issue with sounds being interrupted - fixed not being able to deconstruct knife - additional small bug fixes and improvements

Thoughts

Creating new content is a slow process for us still, but our tools get better, our workflow gets improved and we're also gaining experience in building this game. (Thanks to everyone who gives us feedback on what we're building.) And while there are still lots of tasks ahead concerning the gameplay and quality of the existing content, the core game experience feels good enough and the game is also in a good technical state so that we have noticably more time to work on content. The new locations are still raw. The tower needs a lot of fixes still, and the mountain path is for now just a combat area to test the new energy weapons. I'm also personally working on updating the second encounter with the Oracle, but that was too raw still to include it now. Still, feels good to work on locations and gameplay now on a daily basis. The game will grow and blossom. I don't think the additions are worth yet to have another playthrough if you played the game already. But we added a convenient shortcut if you just want to take a quick look at different things: Open the in-game console with Shift+F10 and enter Playtest to get a list of jump points to the existing content. This won't interfere with your existing save games.

Next Update

The next monthly update will happen very soon, actually. We'll try to break the pattern of releasing the monthly updates at the very end of the month, so the next one will be released sometime at the beginning of May. That one will be a smaller one, of course. Sneak peak at some artwork for the next update:

Thank you for your continued interest in Death Trash. Have a nice week! - Stephan