Hail and well met friends. Today is a good day, for it is patch day! I hope you are all doing well and are prepared for some nice looty goodness

There are no announcements to make, the game is progressing swimmingly  and I am still aiming for a late 2023 or early 2024 release. You never know what the future holds and how many bugs lay dormant, but I'm optimistic. Now, onto the patch!

This one is a large gameplay focused patch, boasting many fixes and additions. I was working under a deadline of 5/5/2023 (DD50), so not all things I wanted to finish made it in. Regardless, there's a lot to unpack here! We'll start off with the new things first:

-3 New Levels, 2 of which are combat focused and one of which is a story-focused level. The demo still ends at the end of the Halls of Pain, so these levels are only playable by testers or DD participants
-3 New enemy types, 2 of which have brand new abilities
-2 New spells that are still in WIP. They are thus subject to drastic changes, and lack basic sounds/icons to them-New Combat Arts for Two-Handed weapons: You can now throw your large weapon like a boomerang, and it'll slice and dice everything in it's path!
-Several new 'lategame' items
-Secret new encounter. No spoilers, you'll have to discover it yourself! It has a small chance of occurring in the Lower Dungeons 2
-Added trapped chests/shrines. Some items have a chance to spawn a fireball on interacting with them. Watch out, they hurt!
-Balance changes. Some spells (Thunderdisk, Poison Circle, Combustion, etc.) have had their damage lowered. Most enemies have had their movement speed slightly increased, their attack speed increased when they detect they are being kited, and some enemies have had new abilities added to them. They might get reverted if the difficulty is too high, so I'll abstain from writing them all out
-New NPCs encounters
-Bow/Wand balance changes. Should be slightly harder to beat the game using these weapons alone. This is a step-by-step process, and it will surely require more fine tuning as time goes on.

-Some named Enemy types (Troll/Mauler/Bugman/Phasmids) can no longer get stunlocked by the player
-Several new rooms across all levels
-UI changes, new backgrounds new Item and Combat Art icons
-Improved shadows. Some objects (barrels + pillars) now cast shadows properly
-Many minor visual changes, including more props, Door reskins, CaveWall visual improvements, enemy visuals, and so on.
-Improved performance in the mid to late game, mostly dealing with a large reduction of mesh sizes
-Fixed microstutters when several items dropped at once. Items in general shouldn't cause any more issues
-Fixed saves in all regards. I went through and fixed all saving bugs I knew of. If something breaks when saving/loading, let me know! If you restart from the Menu, you should be fine. There is a small stutter when viewing Save files, which I didn't have time to resolve for this patch. I am aware what the issue is, I'll fix it for next time around.
-Pressing shift while moving now stops movement
-Items picked up when using back-slot items will autoequip in those slots if they are empty. This only happens if you are currently using those slots.

-140 bug fixes. I'm not writing all those out, but the general ides is:
>Crossbows no longer prevent multiple CombatArts from being used back to back
>Fixed all issues with +Stat weapons/offhands causing incorrect stat changes when swapping to back slot
>Fixed some Skeleton Pit map weirdness with regard to the Bookshelf-room
>You can now safely go back down the stairs for all levels,  effectively allowing you to backtrack from the last level down to the first
>Bloodguard was easily abuseable with a bow/slow. He is now much tougher
>Fixed some enemies with casting or other special behaviors getting stuck if their target died as they were doing their special action.
>Fixed a bunch of Wand issues, like incorrect actions when clicking at an enemy behind a door, incorrect Combat Arts when swapping to a wand, etc.

There are of course many smaller change, but this post is already long enough! Things are now slowly shaping up into an actual fun experience.
I hope you have fun with this patch, and as always be sure to report any issues, concerns, ideas, or feedback of any kind either here, on Twitter, on Steam, or on Discord.
See you next time!