[Vampire+ Release] Version 0.25.3

Hello everyone, Corintio here!

This past month has been challenging but immensely productive. We've done extensive backend work to identify and fix the issues causing game crashes, and we've significantly reduced the game's memory usage. You should experience a much more stable and smoother game with this patch. However, if you encounter any problems, please let us know.

You'll notice some new and familiar faces in the Garden of Earthly Delights. Although we had to pivot to focus on fixing the crash, we hope you enjoy the direction we're taking. We're excited to introduce the voices of Heather and Catherine, marking the debut of the talented French voice actress Marylou Carcolh in our project. I was particularly impressed with the gravitas she brought to Heather's dialogue.

Ideally, this patch represents what we aimed to deliver last month, but the crash prevented you from fully appreciating the new features. In retrospect, the performance improvements have even surpassed some of our expectations.

As we complete the implementation of the new characters in the Garden of Earthly Delights, we'll be closing the cycle of version 0.25. Our focus will then shift to bringing back the prologue and advancing the story, all within Unreal Engine 5, ensuring the game runs better than ever!

Thank you for your continued support!

Fixes

• Fixed voices sounded muffled during the first encounter between Kalyskah and Nemesis.

• Improved cameras and overhauled the cutscene visuals for Kalyskah's meeting with Nemesis, including camera positioning and facial expressions.

• Fixed incorrect enemy spawning in the Blood Arena.

• Fixed an issue where players were unable to select spells on the UI.

• Fixed Merishya not following the player after dialogue or toy system interaction ended.

• Fixed rendering issues with lights and materials.

• Fixed Kalyskah not returning to level 1 in a new game, along with her XP and other data that weren't being properly reset.

• Fixed Kalyskah moving forward indefinitely during tutorials.

• Increased the volume of the line "Magnificent, now I will have to find another way out."

• Fixed Hexblades not properly dropping their gloves upon death.

• Fixed Kalyskah equipping her weapon multiple times when attacking (No more dancing Macarena).

• Fixed issue allowing players to repeatedly press to enter the Vampiric Vision.

• Fixed players being unable to exit the Garden of Blood.

Enhancements

• Made it so that when a new spell is learned, it will automatically be set to the next available hotkey.

• Improved the memory usage so the game now requires less memory and CPU to run. This was most of this month's work as we went through every single class and event we could find and refactored their implementations.

• Reduced the size of several textures to improve game performance.

• Enhanced Root Motion on hit: Kalyskah will stop moving forward after landing an attack.

• Removed hyper-armour from Brooke; she was too difficult. Her fighting techniques will be improved in the future to make the battle more challenging yet fun.

• Made backend changes to the follower system, making it generic by transferring Merishya-specific systems to a parent class. This will allow different characters to become followers when the story requires it.

• Reduced the damage reduction on Gremnoch so players who do not figure out how to defeat him won't have such an impossible time; it will just take longer.

• Improved the visuals of several particle effects, including those for blocking attacks, jumping and attacking, and drinking blood from afar.

Features

• New dialogues for the Garden of Earthly Delights (not yet fully voiced):

  • Catherine

  • Jessie Sawmill

  • Rulfio

  • Heather Durand

Known issues:

• We temporarily disabled the photo mode until we tweak it.

• After I packed the game, I noticed that the mist Form wasn't behaving as it was supposed to. We'll release a new patch next week addressing this issue + anything else you report to us that we can fix during that week.

• There's some jittering in the camera during cutscenes. That's on our to-do list to solve in the near future.

DOWNLOAD

If you are a VAMPIRE, ROYAL BLOOD or NIGHTSTALKERS patron, follow these instructions:

• Itch: Link your account HERE, and download the game HERE. If you have Itch's launcher, the game will auto-update itself.

• If you have any issues linking your account to itch, feel free to message us to we can send you a mirror to download the patch. But I would recommend downloading it through itch because we are already gathering a list of improvements and there will be a new patch next week to fix some issues that were left and also to add new content.