It's been a while, but we took the time to go through all your feedback submitted, and some of them were a few pages long. Thank you so much for that, it helped us steer the game in a better direction! <3
We added Tourist mode, and also an option to turn off the ammo system. There is also a Wardrobe. Lots of quality improvements. Enemy encyclopedia. And much more. Keep reading for the juicy details and all the changes below!
We also want to announce new Hall of Fame, huge congrats to top 10! ːsteamhappyː
Following this, the leaderboards are now new and fresh, and the battle for the next Hall of Fame is opened.
Let us know what you think about the changes, and we would really appreciate the feedback on balance and usability of serious weapons and perks! What are your favorite perks and weapons? Which ones are useless? Let us know!
We will take 2 weeks of rest now, and after we are back from our "summer" vacation, we will start working on the new content. New characters, costumes, perks, and a new area is coming. This will be our priority now, but we will also follow your feedback and implement suggestions.
Stay tuned! And now... The changes!
How To Kill Sam:
- Added How To Kill Sam category - this is a list of all enemies and hazards that can kill Sam
- For each enemy and hazard you can read interesting descriptions
- Enemies appear in Mindmap once they are encountered
- Hazards appear in Mindmap once you encounter them in the world
- For enemies, you can track how many you killed, and how many killed you
- For hazards, it’s possible to track how many times you got damaged or killed by them
Wardrobe
- Sam can now change faster than Superman! More costumes coming soon!
Mind Switches:
- Inside of HUB, you can now find little fella which will allow you to turn on and off various modifiers.
- Ammo system modifier - turn it on to activate primary ammo system, in return, you will get a 25% higher score than normal!
- Tourist mode - easier mode, scores, and quests are still available, but looping is disabled. That means it’s not possible to climb high on the leaderboards, and it’s not possible to finish all quests while playing in Tourist mode. On the other hand, it gives you a chance to test out your skills and environments.
Primary gun:
- Enemies drop rate of primary ammo is proportional to their health - this is especially noticeable in later areas and loops where you will receive more ammo than before
- Popcorn enemies ammo drop rate increased (eg Exotech Larva’s parts, Baby Hoppers)
- Boss battles - Bulls and Scorpion drop 1 primary ammo box for every 60 dmg received, if ammo is low, it will spawn faster
- Reduced number of ammo boxes and chance that primary ammo spawns from destroyed props and walls
- Added primary ammo multipliers. For example, heads of Snake Shields will no longer spawn tons of ammo
- If ammo is low, it will no longer happen that lots of ammo pickups are spawned at once, ammo pickups count available in the room is now calculated in the equation. If there is ammo pickup available, it will cause that the ammo drop frequency is lower.
- Mouse cursor will now visually change when your current weapon ammo is low
- From L2 and beyond, because enemies max health is affected by loop modifiers, ammo will “test drop chance” every time you damage the enemy by the amount equal to their original, unmodified max health. Eg. let’s say you are playing L5, you have 100 ammo, and the enemy has 500 HP, and it had 50 HP originally. Before, you wouldn’t have enough ammo to kill it. With these new changes, ammo drop chance will trigger for every 50 damage.
Melee:
- Click the middle mouse button to activate melee
- Melee weapon activates per press / click instead of while the button is held pressed
- Primary gun will not switch to melee anymore when out of ammo and melee will not anymore switch back to primary when ammo is collected
- Added Melee weapon to HUD next to other weapons
- Removed that it’s possible to switch between melee and primary with a specific button (eg F on keyboard)
- Increased reload time from 0.7s to 1s, adjusted animations of all melee weapons
- Changed keybinding descriptions
Game Over Screen:
- Game Over screen now shows perks you collected in the current run
- Game Over screen now shows a reminder of the main goal
- Game Over screen score now shows coin icon next to the text to make it more clear that the player needs to collect coins to increase score
- Animated Game Over screen
Vault:
- Vault keys are now called Mental keys!
- Changed Mental key model to look more similar to Mental chests instead of looking similar to normal keys
- Press interact button to start a conversation with Shopmonster and give him keys (this interaction is more consistent with rest of the game, and it tells you exactly what’s going to happen)
- Vault Keys are now given one by one which fixes the UI bug when there were too many rewards that didn’t fit the single screen. Also, it makes more sense visually because before it used to look like you gave only 1 key while you actually gave many
- Vault mini-game where you had to chase the key will now also give you Vault key and the first reward -> if you go to Vault right now, you will be able to give that extra key to Shopmonster and receive something special! <3
Enemies:
- Queen Hopper spawns frogs only if you are not too far from her, making sure you don't encounter tons of little frogs already spawned
- Reduced maximum number of baby frogs in the arena. While the limit is reached, Queen Hopper will not spawn additional baby frogs, this is especially noticeable when fighting against multiple Queen Hoppers.
- Reduced Elite Enemy Bull explosion radius from 8 to 6
- Exotech Larva will start moving away after you use melee or if you come too close
Weapon evolution perks:
- Explosive - it doesn’t check anymore do you have more than 50% of your ammo. Instead, the effect is just this: “+10% CHANCE TO EXPLODE ON ENEMY HIT”. Explosive bullets are now visibly bigger, and it’s possible that if you miss, you will not gain that extra explosion, making them more useful when you can shoot constantly at targets. When explosive bullet explodes it will also die no matter it had piercing or enemy ricochet (balance). Added explosion SFX. Costs 3 ammo when shot.
- Piercing Lvl1 - costs 1 additional ammo
- Piercing Lvl2 - now pierces through +1 more enemy instead of +2 as before, adjusted description.
- Fire Bullets - changed how fire deals damage, added visuals to fire dmg, costs 1 extra ammo when fired. description now says correctly that there is a 50% chance to shoot fire bullet
- Sniper - it now has 2% chance to deal critical - 100 dmg making it more useful even when not used for combos with other perks). 2x better accuracy (can counter imprecision of Machinegun or spread of Shotgun). Disabled Sniper L2. Added special SFX when Sniper deals critical.
- Homing - bullets will not seek underwater enemies + 20% slower bullets (better homing) (counters shotgun perk speed up nicely to make this combination more viable)
- Enemy Ricochet - 50% chance it ricochet towards closest enemy. It will ricochet to all other targets except the one directly behind the enemy you’re shooting at.
- Enemy Ricochet + Piercing - 100% chance to ricochet towards closest enemy. First, it will deplete piercing counter till it's empty, and it will ricochet to any closest enemy. After that, it will use standard enemy ricochet deflection. So if player has piercing = 2, and enemy ricochet = 3, the bullet will ricochet 5 times, with first 2 deflections deflecting in any direction towards the nearest enemy.
- Minigun renamed to Machinegun.
- Burst - L1 now shoots 4 shots at once, but also increases damage per second by 1.35x (since reload time is not proportionally reduced), it multiplies the ammo cost by 4 (so it costs the same as if you would shoot 4 bullets). L2 adds 2 more shots, ammo cost multiplier increases by 2, and damage per second increases by x1.25
- Shotgun L3 doesn’t reduce the range anymore by 25%
- Merged Knockback L1 and L2 into single perk
- Knockback now works properly on frozen enemies, making the combo with Ice Bullets much more viable
- Simplified descriptions
- Sniper perk and Shotgun perk are not compatible anymore, if you buy one, you will not be able to get the other one (it was too easy to completely cancel Shotgun range reduction)
- Wall Ricochet now increases the range by 6 tiles for every deflection instead of increasing the range by percentage, making it more viable when combined with low range Shotgun
- Reduced number of primary gun perks you can buy in shops to 2 Modified health system:
- Sam now has 300 HP, Bomb has 150 HP, Netricsa has 300 HP
- Most of the enemies deal 100 dmg, smallest enemies like Baby Toad deal 50 dmg, spikes and spiky chests deal 50 dmg, normal enemy bullets deal 100 dmg, small enemy bullets deal 50 dmg. Strong explosion deals 100 dmg, weak explosion deals 50 dmg
- Stronger explosions released by detonators which are placed around the room make it more rewarding when you managed to use them against enemies
- Heart drop will refill you by 25 HP, small heart drops by 1 HP, normal shield by 25, mini shield by 1
- When revived you will revive with 50 HP and when revived in co-op by collecting ankh pieces you will still revive with 50% of max HP
- Dark Trader items cost 50 and 100 HP
- When you take damage while having Bomb Shield, the damage text will be colored grey, and when you take damage while having shields, the damage reduced from shields will be colored in light blue color
- Improved reviving animation
Chests:
- Locked brown-yellow chests which used to give you 1 random stat perk, now will always give you damage increase perk. We wanted to make chests more reliable.
- Locked health chests will now give you +25 max HP increase instead of heart drops. We wanted to make all chests equally useful.
- Locked golden chests now give 50 coins if locked, and 25 coins if they are spiky, the amount of coins they give increases by 2x after first loop
- Locked weapon chests - increased number of locked weapon chests that appear during run. Which weapons you will find depends on the current loop, L2 Serious weapons can be found only in loop 2, and L3 Serious weapons can be only found in loop 3 and beyond. Even if you received some specific Serious weapon during loop 1, while playing loop 2, it will be outdated, and you will need to find another Serious weapon.
- Unlocked weapon chests - now always give you consumables like Serious Bombs and Boomerang.
Shops:
- All shops now have visual inventory! This should help a lot when thinking about combos.
- When shopkeeper is shot for the second time, the dialogue will not pause the game anymore
- When talking to shopkeeper, once a player buys something, the next time the shop will open faster without asking the player does he wants to buy something or not
- Reduced number of coins spawned from walls, props, and brutal kills
- Armory - instead of upgrading, you will now be buying Serious weapons. If you buy Flamethrower L2, you will still keep Flamethrower L1. As said above, during the first loop you can buy L1 Serious weapons, during the second loop you can buy L2 Serious weapons, and during the third loop and after you can buy L3 Serious weapons. If you already have a weapon of certain type eg Flamethrower, it’s more likely a stronger version of that weapon will appear in the shop! Once the Armory weapon pool is depleted, it will start selling consumable weapons.
- Dark Trader: once the items pool is depleted (after you buy everything possible), it will no longer happen that you can buy +25 HP perks. Instead, once it’s depleted, it will start selling exclusively damage perks.
- Challenge Rooms no longer reward you with perks. Instead, their reward is a key (80%) or a bomb (20%)
- Vending Machine items will now cost you keys instead of coins. This was done because it is easier to compare content in locked chests (which now always give stat perks) to items that are sold in Vending Machine. For 1 key you will be able to get - 100 shields, ankh, bomb shield, 50 coins, 2x ammo magazines, 3x boomerangs, or a serious bomb. Eg. do you want to increase permanently your max HP by 25, or you want to spend it on ankh which could save you from 200+ dmg once, or you want to use serious bomb instead to finish the enemies before they kill you?
- Adjusted Wheel of Misfortune rewards - for 50 coins you can get - 50-150 shields, 1-2 keys, 1 consumable weapon, or if you get really lucky (5% chance) - 200 coins, 3 keys, 2 ankhs, 1 upgrade, or 1 weapon chest. There is still a 10% chance that the damn thing will just blow up!
- In the shop, if you already have the same type of perk as the one you can buy, the shown perk’s name will have an additional level index in the title to represent the mastery of that perk type.
Serious Weapons:
- You will now find L2/L3 serious weapons only during the 2nd/3rd loop and beyond. They can now be found both in Armory and in locked weapon chests! This was done to stop pressuring the player to have enough keys when encountering Armory, to increase the number of Serious weapons you can find during run, and also to make sure that you get stronger version of Serious weapon at the right time (eg. L2 weapons are suitable for loop 2 where L1 becomes too weak compared to primary weapon). As the game will expand we might also add unique Serious weapons per area.
- All L2 and L3 Serious weapons got drastic damage improvement, around 2x-3x stronger than before.
- The ammo efficiency (ammo gain / damage ratio) of L2 and L3 weapons is now equal to L1 (we will tweak this more later a bit to make some stronger weapons just a bit less efficient or in more cases more efficient).
- Ghostgun - changed color of Ghostgun projectiles to red to make it more clear that they can damage the player
- Electric Shotgun - increased base damage that’s caused to a single enemy since electric conduction damage is now capped to 2. Changed name of Shotgun Electric to Electric Shotgun
- Changed Ammo Box text from “+ammo box” to “+ammo all” to make it more clear that it refills ammo of all weapons you currently own
- Bomber - shot bombs now have much higher velocity so you don’t have to run away from them. Bomber L2 and Bomber L3 release multiple bombs almost at once instead of one by one with delay, making them more efficient because bombs will explode in the targeted area instead of being deflected away after the first explosion. In the future, we will add Dynamite which will behave more like the original Bomber, but this new weapon will be easier to use because dynamite doesn’t move when hit by an explosion.
- Rocket L2 and L3 now increase the damage of projectile explosion, instead of increasing the explosion radius. The challenge of getting enemies into radius stays the same, while increasing the damage you inflict if successful. L1 deals 5 dmg, L2 10 dmg, and L3 15 dmg to all enemies in explosion radius.
- Homing Missiles L2 and L3 - reduced spread making them more precise and less dangerous, L1 shoots 2 missiles, L2 shoots 3 missiles, and L3 shoots 4 missiles
- Rapid Circler - L2 and L3 have slightly higher range and ammo gain
- Harpoongun - L1 is now also slightly homing making it easier to hit enemies, increased damage and ammo gain. When harpoon impales the enemy, the enemy that’s impaled will deal damage to other enemies. The bigger the enemy is, the bigger the area it will affect. Homing Harpoongun L2 and L3 got drastic damage increase, and have improved homing ability.
- Flamethrower - as explained before for fire effect, the burn is now stronger and more visible. L2 deals 2x higher damage, and L3 deals 4x higher damage. Both impact and delayed burn damage are affected.
- Cannonballs are bigger, affecting a bigger area. Cannonballs are more precise.
- Shotgun - 2x fire rate, 25% higher damage. Shotgun’s projectile emission spread is now fixed instead of being random, making it more accurate. But it also looks nicer! Also removed direction offset for L2 and L3 while using burst.
- Crossbow - 33% lower fire rate, 12% lower ammo gain, 10% lower damage per shot.
- Freezegun now deals 3x more damage than before, 7.5 dmg per shot.
- Disc L1 have now 50% bigger size making it easier to hit enemies. While cutting enemies, disc’s speed falls down to 10%, making it stay much longer in contact, especially if the enemy is not moving. Lowered base damage by 15%.
- Machinegun - ammo gain reduced by 20%.
- Rocket - reload time reduced by 50%.
- Base damage of Flamethrower projectiles increased by 400%
Perks:
- Damage Stat now increases damage by 10% instead of by 25 %, it also increases damage by 0.1 instead of multiplying it by 1.1 for every perk collected (note: base damage is 1)
- Die Hard - now increases max HP by 100 instead of by 50
- Sam’s passive ability is now - “runs faster”. So, those muscles are not only for the show after all!
- Float - player is no longer shocked by Electric Bombs in Sea area, disabled flapping sound effect, speed while flying is now 10% higher than normal, enabling faster dodge roll, movement, and also enabling you to jump farther with Sam. Additionally, Sam will stay 35% longer in the air while jumping.
- Serious Scalpel - it now checks the % of enemy health, and the enemy type when deciding the possible amount of health you can gain from damaging enemy. Enemies in L2 and beyond will not give you more health, which makes this perk more balanced when comparing with “Treasure hunting” perk. It gives you slightly more hp drops compared to “Treasure hunting” perk because it requires you to approach the enemies often to collect the drops.
- Double Medicine - increases all HP recovery by 2x, but only when HP is lower than 150. Every additional upgrade will increase the HP requirement by 50. Renamed to Emergency Kit.
- Atomic Skin - reduces damage taken from explosions by 25. Added visual effect that shows how much damage was reduced when hit by explosion.
- Magnet - stronger attraction speed and range for L1, weaker attraction increase for later levels
- Bombarder - spawns 1 extra bomb per level instead of 2, possible 100 extra dmg, but requires specific weapons and builds to be powerful.
- Charged up - damage rebalance, it deals 40 dmg per second.
- Lockbombing - reduced chance from 25% to 10%. Lockbombing now works properly on Golden chests. Golden chests will spawn a normal amount of coins when successfully lockbombed.
- Deadball - hammer deflects bullets. Deflected bullets deal 25% damage of their base damage.
- The Hammer - increases damage of melee by 100%.
- Last Stand - ammo will drop 25% more often when a player is under 150 HP instead of under 50 HP.
- Brutality - brutally kill enemies sooner. Usually, an enemy can be brutally killed when its health is under 25% of max HP, Brutality increases that pct by 7% for every stack -> 32%, 39%, 46%.
- Doomsday - when player brutally kills enemy, chance to spawn Serious ammo is 20% instead of 66%.
- Evil Thoughts - more enemies are spawned in every room.
- Caps changes: Treasure Hunting 3->5, Serious Scalpel 1->5, Die Hard 1->9, Atomic Skin 1->5, Magnet 1->5, BOOM 3->5, Pew Pew 3->2, Bombardier 3->5, Charged Up 3->5, Lockbombing 4->5, Bomb Magnet 3->1.
- Buddy Turret - damage rebalance, it deals 25 dmg per second. Buddies now spawn next to you when switching areas.
- Frozen Heart - it no longer enables you to deal damage to frozen enemies with a roll.
- Disabled Buddy Decoy and Buddy Coin Collector. Buddy Decoy doesn’t work properly anymore, and we need to fix many things to make him work again. It will be fixed in future updates. Buddy Coin Collector will be changed to something else because right now it’s not useful enough compared to Magnet.
- Disabled various perks because they are not scalable and useful enough in general. We need to figure out how to make them better or find another place where we can give them as rewards.
- Adjusted Vault rewards following the mentioned changes above.
- Buddy Almighty will now appear when you have 3 buddies of any type (temporary fix). Other buddies now stay alive when Buddy Almighty appears. He doesn’t have any abilities except shooting, and his shooting speed is 2x higher compared to Buddy Turret's.
Various changes:
- Added item activation visual effect to make it more clear when items like Ankh, Bomb Shield, Ammo Box, or Key are activated
- Bomb Shield item explosion does not longer damage other players and it should always set your invincibility to 2 seconds after activation
- Reduced radius of explosions created by Serious Bomb to make it easier to avoid being hit by them
- Orange part of the explosion now spreads all the way to the edges, so it should be more clear now when you get damaged by explosion what happened
- Both Sam and Mental Mate got a facelift and also a new haircut!
- Time freezes when a player is hurt or killed to make it more clear what damaged/killed you
- Reduced primary and melee reload time after using serious weapons from 0.5s to 0.2s
- Added new explosion type - strong explosion - it deals 100 dmg and it’s released by Serious Bomb, Detonators, and most of the enemies. Bombs activated in levels are more useful now, while the damage player receives from explosions is lower in general
- Bombs dropped from enemies by character Bomb ability now deal different damage depending on their size. Smallest ones deal 25 dmg (dropped by small enemies), medium ones 50 dmg (dropped by normal enemies), and big ones 100 dmg (dropped by big enemies)
- Adjusted colors of weapon and ability backgrounds
- Changed placements of characters in HUB, now they will all be facing towards you, and Sam will not stand in the way when some other character is selected (eh, Sam)
- Turned off automatic language setting to system language because the game is not fully translated yet
- Primary gun reload bar now updates properly after the reload is delayed by using a Serious weapon
- Scorpion boss's weight increased so he cannot be pushed around easily with knockback
- Disabled triumph sequence in hallway rooms, while in hallway room, coins will not automatically attract to you, but you need to pick them up
- A Secret
- Added Critical damage which deals 100 dmg on success
- Fire now deals equal damage to all enemies no matter what their max HP is, damage dealt is 1 every 0.5 seconds, or 2 per second
- Added new damage text style for damage caused by burning
- The enemy that is hit by electric bullet will receive normal damage, while others affected through electric conduction will receive damage equal to 1 / number of enemies affected, eg. if bullet damage is 1 and there is 2 enemies affected total, first enemy will receive 1 dmg, while the other one will receive 1 / 2 = 0.5 dmg, or if there is 10 enemies affected, first enemy will receive 1 dmg, while other 9 will receive 0.1 damage each. Altogether, this means that the total damage will never be bigger than 2x.
- Reduced enemy deflection from walls while the enemy is frozen
- Disabled teleports till we add external areas
- Added explosion SFX for when the bullets release explosions from hitting wall, enemy, or when destroyed
- You can now change keybinding for “Next Serious Weapon” and “Previous Serious Weapon” actions. The defaults for keyboard are X and C, and for gamepad are LEFT arrow and RIGHT arrow. Let us know how does it work on gamepad because we had some problems while testing it, it started working after we keybind it manually through settings.
- Changed default key for Weapon Wheel on keyboard from R to Q.
- Weapon Wheel pauses the game again, after playtesting it more, we noticed it causes some frustrating moments, and we didn’t manage to get advantage by constantly pausing/resuming the game - let us know if you have a way to gain advantage by using it
- After switching Serious Weapon, you will now see the name of that Serious Weapon displayed in the HUD
Loops:
- During loop 2, enemies now have 2x more HP than normal. From loop 3 and beyond, health multiplier increases 0.5x per loop.
- Damage multiplier now increases 0.5x per loop.
Major bugs:
- Fixed bug “If you manage to get an odd number of health, then die and resurrect, you come back with a whole number and a half of health (in my case, I died with 75 max, and came back with 37.5). That's not the bug though. The bug is if that happens, you become effectively invulnerable -- no matter how many times you get hit, the game never takes the last 0.5 health away from you.”
- Fixed possible Softlock: “Nightmare Caves’ "Defeat all Enemies" challenge room may sometimes spawn The Ghost enemies. Due to the game's recent update, the bombs will no longer infinitely respawn. A player with particularly bad luck (No explosive weapons, Bombs didn't kill/destroy enough of the wall to reveal Vortex monsters) may get trapped in this room.” -> bombs in this room will never stop spawning
- Fixed “glitch: running away from a "Trap Room" (hallway with an item at the end, that spawns enemies if you pick it up) without killing all the enemies will result in the enemies in the next room instantly dying, including bosses.” - if you run away now, nothing will happen
- Fixed softlock that could happen in the Turret room. If Turret was sucked into the void, it wasn’t possible to progress. Since Turrets are supposed to be fixed on the ground, they are not any more affected by the Vortex/void.
Minor bugs:
- Buddies will no longer try to collect coin which triggers Timed challenge so this interaction shouldn’t anymore make the Timed challenge impossible
- Fixed “Previous Serious Weapon” action, it no longer skips weapons
- All boss rooms are now not destructible anymore till we fix their generation properly to avoid various major bugs
- Fixed bug where cursed eyeball NPC would attract coins from another room
- Fixed bug which caused that player revives with fraction of health, which was causing some other major bugs
- Fixed bug where melee would inflict damage multiple times to single target in the same frame
- Fixed bug where turret’s rockets wouldn’t collide with player
- Fixed bug where Cannon L3 would burn all enemies in the room as soon as it touched one enemy (even though it wasn’t colliding with other enemies)
- Fixed some bugs connected to Vault’s Shopkeeper
- Fixed bug in tutorial, shields will properly reset now after you finish the tutorial
- Fixed bug that prevented activating ammo box when out of ammo
And, for the end, recommending new keyboard layout!
Thank you for reading, and we hope you will have lots of fun with the new version! See you soon with another update! <3