9 Years of Shadows News

Hello everyone! We hope you're all doing well. It's been a month since our last update, where we shared that we have been working on some performance fixes and optimizing general assets throughout the game.

We thank you for your patience and empathy while we work on new fixes and ways to make the game feel better.

If you want to talk with our dev team, report an issue, or join the community, please join our Discord! We'd love to hear from you all!

[h2]Bug fixes:[/h2]
[h3]Game Balance Adjustments[/h3]

• A new visual aid for the light bar has been added when Europa is performing Lullaby or Radical Acceptance.
  
• Radical Acceptance "sweet spot" is now always positioned in the middle of the recovery bar.
  
• Radical Acceptance now recovers less light if it is used immediately consecutively.
  
• The shield recovery speed values have been adjusted for the final armor set.
  
• Health and damage values have been rebalanced and adjusted for all bosses, mid-bosses, and enemies.
  
• The Final Battle and Logon Duck boss fights have been rebalanced based on changes to health recovery mechanics.
  
• The Hekate's Illusion boss has a new attack.
  

[h3]Visual Updates[/h3]

• Painting portals have been updated.
  
• Incorrect elevator cinematic animations have been fixed.
  
• Fixes for some of the art assets in the Theater / Workshop.
  

[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]

• "Falling Stars" attack in the final battle has had a crash bug fixed.
  
• A crash bug related to particles spawning on heat currents has been fixed.
  
• A bug causing the shield recovery bar to appear while Europa has the final armor upgrade has been fixed.
  
• A fix has been applied to ensure the Tantalus Roach boss arena door opens consistently.
  
• A fix has been applied to prevent the Heart of Talos from spawning a shield effect during battle.
  
• The music looping bug in the painting area of Sector E has been fixed.
  
• The animation delay when saving the game has been corrected.
  

[h3]Performance Enhancements[/h3]

• Enemy sprite sheets had compression improvements.
  
• Object Pooling has been enhanced to reduce lag by pre-loading common objects (such as attack slashes).
  
• Reduced build size on disk by 6.2 GB thanks to optimizing files, sprite sheets, textures, and materials.
  

Hello everyone; we hope you’re all doing well! Summer is fast approaching, and with it, we want to address our focus to improve the game’s performance.

If you played 9 Years of Shadows recently, you’ve noticed we uploaded a localization patch, which includes French, German, Russian, Portuguese, Chinese, and Japanese as available languages.

We also uploaded several bug fixes across the different patches, most of which solved technical issues due to game optimization. We have been fixing another batch of various bugs and performance issues and are now in a testing phase to check that everything is in order.

However, we know that some of you have encountered crashes in certain areas, so we wanted to reassure you of our commitment to solving them and working on solutions to prevent future crashes from happening again.

We thank everyone who has taken the time to report their problems and continue supporting us as we work towards making the game smoother with each patch.

The following are the main improvements of the past few weeks that will be present in an upcoming patch:

• Fixed bug RAM issue that was causing some players to encounter problems due to memory leak
  
• Improved the loading system to be more efficient with big textures and assets
  
• Compressed the executable size of the game to reduce space
  
• Improved performance in intensive areas and battles in the game
  
• Improved texture sizes to reduce spike lags
  

Hello everyone! We hope you’re all doing well. It’s been a month since our release day, and we
could not feel more grateful for everyone’s support, patience, and feedback. We appreciate you
taking the time to report bugs, suggest new elements that could improve the experience, and
read your comments on what 9 Years of Shadows has been for you.

In fact, because we’ve seen many people in different countries willing to play a game that wasn’t
localized in their language, we wanted to get Europa’s story to as many people as possible.
That’s why we worked with a localization team for 9YoS to be accessible in German, French,
Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese, as well as making adjustments in Spanish and
English.

We hope this makes the journey more appealing for our community and that everyone can
travel alongside Apino.

Furthermore, we have been fixing many reported bugs that affected the overall gameplay. There
are other bugs we continue to work on, which will be solved in future updates so we keep on
improving everyone’s experience. Our newest patch covers the following fixes:

• Fix for crash due to main character entities memory leak
  
• Fix for elevator bug allowing to to jump or shoot in the background
  
• Fix for the jelly-fish type enemy for its collider
  
• Fix for the Horned God rays collider causing damage in the anticipation stage
  
• Fix for some buttons alignment in the Main Elevator menu
  
• Fix for the background movement for Elevator cinematics going the right way
  
• Fix for Hibino's answer when trying to upgrade the Grace of Auriel
  
• Fix for the Shadow of Demise additional collider to prevent the player getting locked on the left
  
• Fix for the Shadow of Demise hit SFX not triggering
  
• Fix for the map layout for special rooms
  
• Fix for the additional distortion effect when killing an enemy with strong attack
  
• Fix for Big Kitty and Fully Equipped achievements to be unlocked retroactively
  
• Fix for the missing cursor inside the gameplay when using KB+M
  

Hello everyone!
Support and feedback from all of you guys have been incredible! Thanks for being patient while we create fixes and solutions for the game. We've got a new patch today to continue our efforts of giving you all the best experience.

If you want to talk with our dev team, report an issue, or join the community, please join our Discord! We'd love to hear from you all!

[h3]Bug fixes:[/h3]

• Fixed additional memory leaks that were causing crashes
  
• Fixed a crash that could be triggered by transitioning into new areas
  
• Fixed a bug that caused a soft lock by fighting the Shadow of Hope
  
• Fixed a bug that caused a soft lock by fighting the Hekate's Illusion
  
• Fixed a bug that rendered incorrectly the rooms on Sector H
  
• Fixed a bug that froze the game when speaking to Michiru or Hibino after upgrading everything
  
• Fixed a bug that prevented “Trust Issues” achievement to be awarded
  
• Missing achievements now unlock retroactively by entering into your previous save log
  
• Varios typos were corrected
  

We are still working on a solution to retroactively fix the map rendering issue some people had with Sector H. Will be ready on the patch for next week.

Hello everyone!
Your support and patience throughout the release week have been outstanding! We've got a new patch today to continue our efforts of giving you all the best experience.

If you want to talk with our dev team, report an issue, or just join the community, please join our Discord! We'd love to hear from you all!

[h2]Bug fixes:[/h2]

• Fixed a memory leak that was causing crashes
  
• Fixed a media rendering bug that could occasionally cause crashes
  
• Fixed a crash bug that could be triggered when Europa dies
  
• Fixed a bug that made Apino occasionally move erratically
  
• Fixed a bug that made the Portrait of Hope boss respawn
  
• Fixed a bug that made the game stay in grayscale after defeating the Portrait of Demise boss
  
• Fixed a bug that froze the game when the player skipped the first part of the prologue cutscene
  
• Fixed a bug that allowed Europa to remain in Siren form outside of water
  
• Fixed a bug on the Elevator Menu "Cancel" input
  
• Fixed a bug that prevented some enemies from appearing in the Bestiary
  
• Fixed a bug that prevented some rooms from appearing on the map and certain room types from not
  
• Fixed numerous bugs that prevented Achievements from being awarded (mostly boss fights and upgrade related)
  
• Fixed a bug with for the Object Spawner (most noticeable on The Magma Ball spawners)
  
• Various typos were corrected
  
• Made Hibino stop overcharging his hard-working customers
  
• Improved support for more controller types
  
• Fixes and visual adjustments for some bosses and mid-bosses
  
• Various fixes and visual adjustments on environment art throughout the game
  
• Fixed a visual bug with the Phoenix Fire Explosion layers