PROGRESS

Our main focus over the past month has been improving quality of life and major bug fixes for the Beta Combat Arena.

We found and fixed the cause of corrupted save files, one of our highest priorities. Shrines were auto saving in the middle of reviving characters, resulting in broken save files. If you then closed the game or crashed and tried to reload that save file, it wouldn’t work. We also fixed a variety of issues that caused the game to crash.
We now show the character models when starting a new game so players can make a more informed decision about which Kinfolk they want at the start of the Beta Combat Arena.
We added a new multi save file system, giving players up to 5 save files at once. This allows the player to have backup saves in the same campaign from previous timestamps. The game also auto saves when going through dialogues, capturing Kinfolk, or starting Ether Run. This helps the player backup their saves automatically in case corruption occurs.
Melee abilities and dash attacks now use the character's forward direction instead of the camera direction to decide where the attack will go. They can also be re-aimed via move inputs. After some internal testing we think this is a really nice upgrade to game feel, specifically when playing with a controller. We're curious what you guys will think of this gameplay change!

We’ve made a ton of polish and balance changes to Ether Run, such as all currently playable Kinfolk having a chance to spawn at or before Wave 16 (excluding Kainite and Embear), giving the human character the ability to pick up power-ups, and fixing incorrectly-sized invisible walls that could block the player in odd locations.
For extra quality of life when assigning held items to loadout characters, we show the pool of all available items that the player owns. This means we show the player’s inventory AND all the held items of any characters in storage boxes. When equipping a loadout, we allow items to be automatically moved onto the newly equipped characters.
TONS of miscellaneous fixes and polish based on player feedback and bug reports. We're slowly but surely fixing up every existing feature in the Beta, and can soon turn our focus to releasing new features and continued EA work. For those with access, expect our progress board to update when we turn our focus to EA work!

Bug Fix highlights (Non-Exhaustive)

Fixed bandits not despawning when you load back into the camp. (This was previously causing bandits to duplicate each time you went from the valley to camp and back).
Fixed controller inputs potentially causing issues when loading a save from the main menu or entering character creation from the main menu.
Fixed a bug in stats UI not correctly resetting when closing it, allowing Kinfolk to have near unlimited EVs allocated to their stats.
Fixed a bug where characters would full heal if you allocated health EVs.
Fixed a bug where characters would full heal if you placed them in a storage box.
Fixed a bug where the stamina bar within the stats UI would shrink if you allocated stamina EVs.
Fixed phantom Kinfolk not showing as phantoms when you set them to follow you.
Fixed interactable popups not showing the correct keybind if you rebound the "Interact" key. This was happening for gatherable plants, rock salt, etc.
Fixed Kinfolk never trying to evolve again if you canceled evolution the first time.

In case you don't know, we also post weekly on Bluesky! Here's what we've posted over the last month:

Community

In case you haven’t seen yet, we're now running an advanced testing group! This is a group of volunteers who are given early access to potential Beta updates and test it for bugs before we do a public release. To join, all you have to do is make several high quality bug reports on our Discord server, and you will be approached. Note that the ATG group requires the signing of a non-disclosure-agreement.
We want to give another huge shoutout to our ATG and Beta players who have been giving us so much helpful information for finding and squashing bugs! Thank you all so much, your input has continued to be a huge help to us as we worked on the most important issues after launch.

The full lexicon can be found here.

Ether Run: The new wave survival mode included in the Combat Arena Beta.
Loadout: The selection of Kinfolk, their abilities, and held items for a particular game mode.
Networking: The process of sending data between machines so that people playing a multiplayer game together experience the same things at the same time.
Spawner: Code that spawns Kinfolk or NPC Summoners into the world. We can give them a multitude of settings to spawn based on time passed, or enemies defeated, etc.
UI: User Interface. The layout of information on the screen, including menus, health bars, etc.

Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on July 4.