0.2 Update - New Playable Character

Greetings Wildkeepers,

It's been a bit over a week since we launched in Early Access, and we couldn't be happier with how the game has been received.
Many of you have written to say you're enjoying the game, and many others have come forward with excellent ideas and suggestions. Please keep them coming!

Today, we're releasing our first update, and it's a big one.

[h2]Milo Ironjaw[/h2]
With this update we introduce our fourth Wildkeeper, Milo Ironjaw.
He'll become available after beating the second boss, and if you have done that already you should have seen his silhouette in the Village, and you'll be able to play with him immediately.

As you can tell from his image, Milo is a melee character with a big hammer for AoE damage. We designed him to be rewarding to play, every time that hammer crushes monsters!

Milo's presence also means you can complete the current set of 80 achievements - but we'll certainly add more in the future.

[h2]Feedback Implemented[/h2]
We pay very close attention to every piece of feedback that comes our way, be it from the Steam forums, our Discord, the feedback forms or even content creators uploading videos on YouTube.

It's not always possible to fix everything immediately, as we're just a small team of two. So these are the areas we've prioritized for this update:
[h3]Slime Horror boss fight[/h3]
We collect anonymous data from the game, and we knew that this fight was a bit too easy. Also, people were reaching the level cap quickly and running out of chests, and it wasn't as exciting as we had hoped. So we've decided to shorten it. For now on, it will be only 10 minutes long, but it's all compressed, so you get to fight the same waves, only they're ramping up more quickly.
[h3]Difficulty[/h3]
It's very hard (no pun intended) for us to figure out what to do with difficulty. Overall, we try to make the baseline difficulty fairly accessible, with options to ramp it up if desired, and we think that's working fairly well. That said, we've made a couple of adjustments to missions in the Sandsea, where our data was showing that there were too many attempts being failed, and hopefully that will smooth things out a bit.
[h3]Smack and Friends[/h3]

Ah, the health-poopers. Either you love them or you hate them, they don't leave anybody indifferent.
Again using our data we saw that in general they have low pick rates, and there were suggestions to combine them in a single choice, so we've done exactly that. Once you unlock Spark, Fleck and Tweak, they'll join Smack in the Guardian selection, and if you pick the group you'll then be able to choose which of them you want.
[h3]Murkle[/h3]

So a bit of background on this one.
One of our original design goals with the game was to make you have to think about the space around you, in part to push back a little against the auto-playness that bullet heavens tend to have. That's why we designed Murkle's super to shoot only to the left - in many runs having Murkle means that I always try to keep the enemy to my left, if possible, and that adds some spice to the gameplay.
However, many of you feel cheated that he can't use the super to shoot everywhere, and you have been vocal about it, so we changed it. Starting with this update Murkle's super can go in either direction - depending on where he's facing when you trigger it.

[h2]Others...[/h2]
Besides everything you've read so far, there are a few other smaller updates in this version:

Korin's Steady upgrade has been replaced with a simpler Attack Size upgrade, with no condition. This should help make him more powerful.
The Sigil/Guardian selection screen had an exploit where if you clicked quickly to either Reroll or another option you would get both. No more.
We implemented some fixes to the Simplified Chinese translations.
The anonymous analytics package has been updated, to fix some issues. This will allow us to get some extra data that we'll use to further balance the game.
The email checkbox in the Crash Handler is off by default now. Frankly, we saw someone complain about this but it's not even our doing - we're just using what comes with Unreal Engine, and we have no access to any email addresses, either through this or any other means.
The combo box in the Settings menu can now scroll, so you should be able to select a Fullscreen resolution properly.

[h2]What's Next?[/h2]
We're already hard at work on the next update. We do have some ambitious plans though, so that may take a while. In the meantime, we'll probably release an interim update with some more fixes and quality of life improvements.

And if you're enjoying the game, I would ask that you leave us a positive review here on Steam. It really helps us, this game is only possible because of your support.

Sergio.