Bloodthief News

Hey Everyone!

The official Demo for Bloodthief is released! Go play it! Details are below.

[h3]How to play[/h3]
Just go to the Bloodthief store page on steam and hit the green download button. It's free!

[h3]Demo Trailer[/h3]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


[h3]Newest Devlog[/h3]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]



[h3]Where to follow the development of Bloodthief[/h3]

• My YouTube Channel : I post ~monthly devlogs here where I talk about the status of the game and give a behind the scenes look!
  
• Discord : This is where I mostly hang out, send, announcements, post updates, and all that stuff. Come say hi!
  
• Twitter: I'm just starting to ramp this account up, so go give it a follow and help me out with that twitter algorithm!
  

[h3]Where to report an issue or bug?[/h3]

1. Best way: Report it on the Discord Server.
   
2. Second best way: Email me at [email protected]
   
3. Third Best way: Steam community. I will see it but I don't check this as often as the above two!
   

Stay tuned for upcoming patches and events!

Cheers!
- Blargis

This patch is just fixing a few bugs that were caused by yesterday's patch. Thank you to everyone who reported bugs! Here are the notes:

- fixed bug where if you restarted from the menu your player would freeze
- fixed bug where respawn didn't work in the practice map
- fixed camera not resetting to forward position upon resetting
- adjusted main menu not being centered properly
- fixed bug where keys became visible again after collecting them and restarting at checkpoint
- fixed issue where you could aggro knights through walls immediately upon restarting

Hey all, new update to the playtest coming your way! This one does not have any new content, but is quite large nonetheless. I reworked a few pretty expansive pieces of infrastructure, so I anticipate all these changes will cause at least *some* new bugs. So please let me know if you spot anything and as always I appreciate your feedback!

Here are the updates:

[h2]Gameplay changes[/h2]

- Tweaked the 6 wall-jump max: Now if you wall jump 6 times without touching ground it will cost 1 blood per jump. If you have no blood you’ll just slide down the wall.
- Added “Tomes” to the Tutorial level which I’m hoping to a better job of making important tutorial text more obvious and less easy to miss.
- Timer doesn’t start until you start pressing a button or looking around
- If you jump while moving upward on a slope you’ll jump a bit higher now.
- Reduced the player’s fall speed while wall running
- Quick Restart (the R key on the keyboard) is now a “hold” action by default, so it should be harder to accidentally press. If you liked how it was before, you can change it back in the settings menu (called “Instant Restart”)
- Made parrying slightly easier
- Added some anti-cheat measures to leaderboards
- Improved crossbow accuracy at further distances. Still needs work though.
- Player now casts a small shadow directly below while in the air to make ground slamming a bit easier
- Ground slam will go “straight down” more immediately now if you hold the ground slam button
- Tutorial Medal times have been tweaked to be easier

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]

- Fixed a bug where you had less air control if you were getting less than 90 fps
- Fixed some ledge climb unreliability issues
- Fixed some bugs that could occur if quitting with the Windows “X”
- Fixed bug where water submerge sound didn’t play sometimes
- Fixed bug where knight arrows sometimes weren’t facing the right direction

[h2]Aesthetic Changes[/h2]

- New player model (with fingers!)
- Gibs now shoot out in front of you and splat against walls when you air dash an enemy
- More blood in general
- Tweaked enemy hit flash
- Air dash “not enough blood” indicator is now just a little blood icon instead of blood and a shield
- New potion model
- Air dash now expands your FOV a bit to make it look cooler. You can disable this in the settings if this isn’t your thing.

[h2]Optimizations[/h2]

- Made restarting at checkpoint and restarting level like 10x faster. It should be pretty much instant for most people now.
- Tweaked shadow resolutions to be less resource intensive
- Optimized lighting to be less memory intensive
- Optimized lightmaps to require less storage
- Added ability to disable Glow which should help performance on low end machines
- Reduced the physics tick rate from 90 to 60. This helps performance at the cost of slightly less accurate physics calculations - please let me know if you notice a difference!

I’m hoping to have some additional updates with more bug fixes soon - I just wanted to get this one out the door since it’s getting so large.

Make sure you’re not in any beta branches (ie. playtest_build_0.2.0) otherwise you wont get the update!

Have fun and let me know your feedback!

Greetings Bloodfolk!

FPS Fest is halfway over and I'm realizing that all game updates has thus far lived over in the Bloodthief Playtest Community, so folks coming here from the demo may be a little confused!

In any case, I'll start posting here now as well and will take this as an opportunity to post some details about the game, the community, and how you can get involved:

• The bulk of the Bloodthief community lives in my Official Blargis Discord Server. This is where I hang out every day and chat, take feedback, hash out bugs, etc. Come say hi! If Discord isn't your thing, feel free to post questions/comments here or on the Playtest Steam community as I'll be monitoring these spaces as well!
  
• This Demo is only going to be available for FPS Fest. Not to fear though! All the content from the Demo will be pushed to the ongoing Bloodthief Playtest, which is 100% free and open. You can join the playtest by clicking "Request Access" on the Bloodthief Steam Page
• Devlogs and promotional content for Bloodthief can be found on my YouTube Channel. Here's the latest devlog:
  [previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
  
• Bloodthief has a growing Speedrunning community! If you're a speedrunner, go check out the Bloodthief Speedrun.com page. Learn what the top runners are doing and submit some runs! Bloodthief also has a dedicated discord just for speedrunning, check it out here.
  

Moving forward: Expect further updates from me both here and on the Bloodthief Playtest Community (I'll probably just cross-post everything).

I'm working super hard to bring y'all new content to try out soon. Stay tuned!