Hi everyone!

The last couple of months have been really intense, but your support helped me get through it. Seriously, thank you!

Almost 4.000 players tried the demo, and over 500 of you sent feedback via Google Forms, Discord, or Steam. That's incredible! I've already fixed some things and continue working hard on new content for Early Access.

The full patch notes will be published on August 21st - and yes, that’s also the Early Access release date! 🎉

I’ll share more details on that day. Thanks again for playing and for all your support, it truly means a lot to me!

• Completely overhauled 'High-Rise'

  • First-pass at remaking this level, new screens, better layouts, has yet to have a proper art pass

• The SCARRED can now be purchased from the trunk loadout screen

• Added floor passthrough effects

• New systems for managing reactionary dialog from enemies

  • Enemies now have proper custom lines to reaction to playable characters with, and be a bit more creative with their lines

• Blunt weapons now visually stop swinging when they hit an enemy to better emphasize their single-target hits and feel snappier to use

• Particles now correctly enter their rest state to reduce gpu usage even when not rendered

• Blood now uses a sensible shader setup and no longer demands your gpu as sacrifice

• Rook's hostage grab now only targets enemies that are knocked down

• Adjusted the animation curve of the Prowler's tail stab so that it feels snappier (while the full animation is the same length, the actual throwing of the attack comes faster so it is more useable)

• Updated the Prowler's sprites to depict their black/brown suit in their portrait instead of their older white suit

• Increased the animation length of Prowler's execution bite (0.5s > 0.6s)

• One-handed melee weapons can be swung continuously by holding the fire button

• Melee projectiles remain live for a tenth of a second after firing now instead of only 1 frame

• Reduced motion blur overall

• Reduce the decal smearing created by getting soaked with blood

• Adjusted the animation for the cursor of two-handed weapons when the weapon is charged

• Added a slight delay to enemies with melee weapons when they release their charged swings

  • This should make melee feel more reliable/consistent as its easier to land hits without the enemy also hitting you.

• Adjusted the start spawn in 'NIGHT PROWLER'

• Added a barrier to the entrance in 'NIGHT PROWLER' to stop characters from entering/exiting the building during the fight

• Enemies now drop their weapons such that they are thrown away from their attacker

• Enemies throw their weapons with less force when being taken hostage/impaled

• Thrown items now have to be moving at high speed to deal damage/knock down enemies

• Reduced the blood earned from taking damage, returns 0.0L after the 3rd hit

• Updated dialog across the game

• Fixed footstep audio not being attached to their emitter correctly and resulting in odd stereo sound behavior

• Fixed cutting melee attacks being able to hit the same target multiple times per swing

• Fixed melee attacks creating multiple blood splatters for the same attack

• Fixed attempt information (score) not being initialized properly when restarting a level

• Fixed Prowler's tail behaving erratically when moving between floors

• Extended the colliders of walls vertically to avoid jumping over walls when falling between floors

• Fixed an issue where items would be flipped incorrectly if a character punched beforehand

• Added exterior region markers to the mall to keep enemies from wandering outside

• Fixed thrown items hitting obstacles near the player when thrown (items are now thrown from in front of the player to avoid unneeded collisions)

• Rook can no longer dive or execute while carrying a hostage

• Fixed being able to grab enemies and keep them in a dodge-rolling state

• Trunk items can no longer be taken out of the trunk in the diner

• Updated the particles created when swinging melee weapons

• Fixed a micro delay in damage from melee projectiles

• Fixed an issue where motion blur would not be applied properly, leading to excess blurring

• Shotguns can no longer be jammed by right-clicking

• Fixed the SCARRED not displaying it's ammo

• In the tutorial, disabled punching after the initial prompt to avoid skipping dialog/prompts

• Fixed the door/garage in the tutorial being considered unnavigable by ai

• Fixed the default color for blood sprays being white instead of red

• Fixed the enemy in the tutorial's first floor arcade room not having its ai enabled

• Fixed cassette for 'Killhouse' listing the wrong track

• Fixed cars not breaking doors correctly when driving into them

• Fixed melee weapons being unintentionally able to hit multiple targets/deal extra damage under unpredictable circumstances

• Fixed the Prowler's tail drawing above their torso

• Weapon loading animations for shotguns, hunting rifle are properly cancelled across respawns now

• Fixed shotgun reticles changing size when hovering over walls

Big thanks to FordGT90Concept on Discord for doing a ton of wonderfully detailed playtesting recently AND for programming a tool capable of reading the entire game, resulting in finding a few deeply hidden issues that are now fixed.

UI/functionality
-Added an Epilespy warning screen before the main menu
-When Real-time stream is turned OFF, brain-scan loading animation is disabled entirely
-To unlock stream meta-endings, players now must find a canon stream ending

Stream Content (SPOILERS!)
-Fixed a potential loop (may see the same command multiple times) during the briefing.
-Fixed an issue where, in certain scenarios, dragging a certain somebody's corpse to a security door would incorrectly indicate that Jenkins leaves his pack behind.
-Fixed some wonkiness in the text surrounding the path where you shoot Uchida in the head at the Computer Core.
-Fixed a potential (and rare) "Re2conn1ect" issue at the very end within the control room that may have appeared alongside your intended "Re2conn1ect" command.
-Fixed a bug in the control room. If you enter with Uchida, this could sometimes generate a scene that shouldn't be there along with your intended scene (they would display back to back).
-Fixed the "kick lancaster off the team" command to better reflect how the commands work in Jenkins' head, and also refined/cut this scene down.
Some clean-up to the grenade response scenes in the vent shaft.
-Further polish and cutting of the Break Room scenes. In particular, the post-grenade path.
-Big polish/cuts/logic fixing to the "Knock" command when going through the corridors directly.
-Fixed a small handful of lines/paragraphs situated directly before images that were being cut off by the system (in particular, the defector images).
-Fixed one of the ~20 potential endings in the control room that was unreachable due to a variable issue.
-Streamlined some Seeker command logic w/ the defectors in the corridor.
-Major polish to the "Fi2nd th1e h21eat exch2ange1rs" scene following the defectors.
-The opening Golden Man scene now references two particularly weird incidents that may have occurred at Hakuba because of Seeker commands.
-To fix a hidden ending bug without resetting the ending count, there is now a new scene during the briefing after you uncover the mysterious VR Deck that's underneath the white sheet.

Version 1.0.3.0
🐞 Bugfixes:
Fixed fleeing the boss event resulting in a soft lock of the game.
Fixed hidden success description (on Steam only).
Fixed Cornucopia counting automaton as crew members to feed.
Fixed enemy crew health bar color turning green before the end of the fight.
Fixed wood missing in an event about a barrel.
Fixed “deal with food problem” not available if the closest travel point was not visible.
Fixed custom key binding not working in a new game until you opened the key binding panel again.
Fixed crew not gaining experience when manning the engine.

Thank you all for playing the game, enjoying it and leaving your feedback!

I actually typed up these notes once before until my power went out right before sending it, so I'll be retyping these and hoping that the power doesn't troll me a second time. Sorry for the delay!

These changes primarily serve to address some potentially unfun and unfair "filtering" points in Hexane District, sooner, rather than later, due to it being the "second" area in the game.

• - Reduced hazard count across all Hexane District Acts.
  
• - Increased cooldown of missiles in Hexane Act 1's latter half.
  
• - Lowered total number of missiles fired during the "treadmill" section of Hexane Act 1 right before the train section.
  
• - Deflecting these missiles with attacks now spawns Nodes.
  
• - Reworked the enemy/hazard placement in the train section and added Boost Rings. This part was overly-disproportionately difficult compared to the rest of the level, moreso than I expected.
  
• - Added outlines to the bombs to better convey that they can be hit and aren't damaging attacks themselves (meaning that they don't trigger timestop when dodged; same with the missiles, which have similar outlines).
  
• - Removed all heat zones from Hexane Act 3, as well as the sign warning about them at the start of that level (was understandably easy to miss). They remain in Act 4, with the sign now showing what they are in a clearer area. Those heat zones were understandably less "skill issue" in Act 3 and more just plain annoying.
  
• - The rising lava in Hexane Act 3 rises faster to account for your ability to dash during the whole level now.
  
• - Increased time window for button-powered doors in Hexane Act 4, along with slowing down a couple moving cannons. This partially puts a band-aid on a potential softlock.
  
• - Addressed a fringe-case softlock involving checkpoints in the final battle.
  
• - Warp pads to/from the main hub now show an up arrow above them when usable, consistent with doors in the hub.

Once again, thank you all for playing and giving feedback, and I hope you enjoy your weekend!

Floodlight now has full controller support!

Now available in the game:

- Play the game from start to finish using only a controller

- Rebind controller buttons

- Choose between PlayStation/Xbox buttons displayed on screen in the Options menu > Controls > Gamepad > Gamepad Type

Note: If you encounter any issues with the camera stuttering, or the keyboard being detected when pressing a gamepad button, you can also switch on Force Gamepad Only which will turn off keyboard and mouse usage until the option is turned off again (or the controller is disconnected). This option is only available when there's a controller already connected.

And if you encounter any other issues, do post in the forums or let me know so I can get right on fixing it, and thank you so much for playing!

Hey guys! I just wanted to let y'all know, in case you weren't already aware, that The Pale Deep has a Discord server! I probably should've put a link to it in the game itself, and I will be adding one in the content update I'm working on, but for now, we have this news post! Wow!

I think the content of a Discord server is pretty self-explanatory, you can talk with other players, me, and it's the best place to ask questions or submit bug reports because I check it the most often!

Anyway, hope you'll check it out if you're interested!
(It has 46 members as of the time of posting this, in case you're nervous about joining a server and being the only one in there haha)

https://discord.gg/Bw5WP5q4mA

We're attending Open Sauce as part of Offbrand Games' Secret Sauce! Join us for a live demo of Adventure Forge, our no-code storytelling engine built for branching narratives, RPGs, and interactive adventures. We’ll walk through how the system works, show off powerful features like tags and triggers, and answer any of your burning questions live!

Come watch the devs play Rock Hoppers on twitch at https://twitch.tv/statelymc. Today we'll be continuing our single player survival world that we started last week. Don't miss it!

• new! added 208 new level sets with 6,500 new levels, for a total of 57,260 levels
  
• new! ability to search avatar catalog by animal
  
• new! added a clock to the playing screen that shows the current time
  
• updated avatar browser from page by page to scrollable and include animal name