Brace yourselves, cultists, the Hellfire update is upon us. As mentioned in the last patch notes, we've been reworking much of the core gameplay for the past two weeks and we're finally ready to share our plans with the rest of you. Given the time-bound nature of our project, we had to make some tough decisions. We concluded that it would be better if we readjusted our scope and honed in on the aspects of the game that you've liked rather than let ambition get the best of us. For a full list of changes, please read the full patch notes below:

What's New:

• Haven level now has a new functional tutorial. 
  • This is the first pass of our tutorial. We intend to monitor how well the on-boarding goes with this update. Through your feedback, we intend to improve on this section of the game to make sure we can quickly get you up to speed on how to play the game and what you're supposed to do.
• Hellfire now rains from the sky once you've made the first sacrifice, setting villagers and the environment on fire. 
  • Use your Water Stream ability to extinguish fires. Just remember, the Dark Lord likes them crispy, but never burnt!
• Settings menu now has functional sliders for Music and SFX volume.

  
  

  • A slider for Music Pitch was added as well. Don't ask why. We don't either when Master DNIO wants something...
• Gust of Wind can now be charged. Holding down the ability key lets you charge up and fire a much stronger wind blast upon release.
• Game HUD now has a timer to display how much time you have left before the Dark Lord's wrath. Counters for villagers left in a level, villagers sacrificed and the number of sacrifices needed to appease the Dark Lord are part of the HUD now as well.
• A pause menu has been added.
• Levels have received a major visual overhaul. New houses, new props, more foliage and lots of new textures have been added to the game.
• Villagers have received their own new models.

General Changes:

• Updated the main menu. Layered menu options should now make the screen less cluttered.
• REMOVED: Fireball and Lightning abilities have been removed from the game. Given the new changes to the core game loop, we felt that these abilities were out of place and did not make much sense.
• NEW - Hellfire: Fireballs now rain from the sky at varying intervals.
  • These have been balanced individually for each level, however, we need more playtesting data to get this right.
• Gust of Wind has been tweaked based on the addition of a charge-up mechanic.
  • A more thorough re-balancing for the ability should soon follow once we've gathered a bit more data on how it feels to use this new mechanic.
• Water Stream has received a massive buff.
  • You can cast it for longer and it applies a much stronger force. The ability should now be much more useful for pushing villagers around. Ahh...brings back memories of those backyard water fights with the gardening hose, doesn't it?
• The suction effect on the pit has been significantly reduced. While it's still present, it's not as substantial as before.
  • We're no longer tossing people into a massive vacuum cleaner. This is a tentative change aimed at getting more player feedback to see what works better for our game.
• Villagers will no longer attempt to escape the level.
  • While in line with our original vision, there are already a fair number of fail-states for the player to deal with in our revised gameplay. It no longer made sense to make the player keep track of villagers and stop them from escaping the level.
• Levels have been redesigned to remove all exit points. As a result, some levels now have brand new areas for you to check out.
• All levels have been re-balanced:
  • There are several new spawn points for villagers.
  • Time, total number of villagers and sacrifices needed for each level have been adjusted on an individual basis.
  • The pit now opens up after a countdown in all levels except the Haven on-boarding level.
• Landscape in each level around the pit has been redone to resolve collision problems and the issue that made the player fall through. Known bugs from before related to this are now considered fixed.
  • No more trampolines...no more flying. Did we even need to fix this?

Known Issues: To be addressed in future patches.

• We are aware of performance issues being amplified in the current build. We're hard at work looking into ways we can optimize our game. Expect some fixes in the very near future.
• HUD remains on-screen even when moving to the end-of-level statistics after playing through a level.
• The Dark Lord is simply accepting all sacrifices, even dead ones. The counters for villagers left, sacrifices made and end-of-level statistics can be a bit iffy as a result. We're currently looking into what might be causing this.
  • The Dark Lord can be merciful and benevolent too, and he's sometimes not as picky about his food...
• The occlusion masking effect from the previous build that let you see your character when even behind buildings is no longer functional. This issue is due to some back-end changes and how we had the effect implemented. This should become functional again in a future patch.
• Villagers will occasionally get up after being knocked down in some way and change their character model.
  • People are free to be whoever they want to be in our game. Don't call this a bug!
• Movement AI for villagers can get bugged, making them stand idly by. If this happens at a spawn point, it results in a chain effect where newly spawned villagers remain idle and grouped up at the spawn point.

As always, your feedback is invaluable to us and helps us move our game forwards in the right direction. Please let us know what you think of the changes in this patch.

Oh, and did we mention a secret level? Well, now we did!