Playtest Patch 0.2.2: Improved player model, bug fixes, and optimizations!

Hey all, new update to the playtest coming your way! This one does not have any new content, but is quite large nonetheless. I reworked a few pretty expansive pieces of infrastructure, so I anticipate all these changes will cause at least some new bugs. So please let me know if you spot anything and as always I appreciate your feedback!

Here are the updates:

Gameplay changes

• Tweaked the 6 wall-jump max: Now if you wall jump 6 times without touching ground it will cost 1 blood per jump. If you have no blood you’ll just slide down the wall.
• Added “Tomes” to the Tutorial level which I’m hoping to a better job of making important tutorial text more obvious and less easy to miss.
• Timer doesn’t start until you start pressing a button or looking around
• If you jump while moving upward on a slope you’ll jump a bit higher now.
• Reduced the player’s fall speed while wall running
• Quick Restart (the R key on the keyboard) is now a “hold” action by default, so it should be harder to accidentally press. If you liked how it was before, you can change it back in the settings menu (called “Instant Restart”)
• Made parrying slightly easier
• Added some anti-cheat measures to leaderboards
• Improved crossbow accuracy at further distances. Still needs work though.
• Player now casts a small shadow directly below while in the air to make ground slamming a bit easier
• Ground slam will go “straight down” more immediately now if you hold the ground slam button
• Tutorial Medal times have been tweaked to be easier

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where you had less air control if you were getting less than 90 fps
• Fixed some ledge climb unreliability issues
• Fixed some bugs that could occur if quitting with the Windows “X”
• Fixed bug where water submerge sound didn’t play sometimes
• Fixed bug where knight arrows sometimes weren’t facing the right direction

Aesthetic Changes

• New player model (with fingers!)
• Gibs now shoot out in front of you and splat against walls when you air dash an enemy
• More blood in general
• Tweaked enemy hit flash
• Air dash “not enough blood” indicator is now just a little blood icon instead of blood and a shield
• New potion model
• Air dash now expands your FOV a bit to make it look cooler. You can disable this in the settings if this isn’t your thing.

Optimizations

• Made restarting at checkpoint and restarting level like 10x faster. It should be pretty much instant for most people now.
• Tweaked shadow resolutions to be less resource intensive
• Optimized lighting to be less memory intensive
• Optimized lightmaps to require less storage
• Added ability to disable Glow which should help performance on low end machines
• Reduced the physics tick rate from 90 to 60. This helps performance at the cost of slightly less accurate physics calculations - please let me know if you notice a difference!

I’m hoping to have some additional updates with more bug fixes soon - I just wanted to get this one out the door since it’s getting so large.

Make sure you’re not in any beta branches (ie. playtest_build_0.2.0) otherwise you wont get the update!

Have fun and let me know your feedback!