Demo Update for Pax East Online

Reina and Jericho

Create a perfect chain of cause and effect in Reina & Jericho, an intense story-driven adventure through a fortress defended by Reina's worst enemies. Confront Reina's past, present, and future as she battles her foes and bends time itself.

We've made a few major updates to the Reina & Jericho demo, but in celebration of being selected to the PAX East Indie showcase we released our biggest update yet. I'll keep the exciting stuff at the top and then more patch-notes sort of stuff down below. First and foremast, we've made a ton of improvements to things from animation, to Reina's movement timing, environment visuals, and a ton of bug fixes. We also introduced a [b]new game mode[/b] for speed running that is unlocked after you complete the demo normally one time. Right from the outset of development we knew we wanted to make Reina & Jericho a good speed game by giving Reina good movement abilities (especially the artifact from the Inquisitor), but also having good support for that way of playing the game. Some players started timing themselves as they played through the demo multiple times though, so we figured we'd get speed run mode added to the demo right away. Speed Run mode cuts out [i]most[/i] cutscenes in the game, and the few that remain are switched to be unskippable (we have a good reason) and very, very short. Most of the time we just removed the scene entirely so people can race the game without spoiling the plot, but in some cases we felt it was good to have a quick three second cutscene so the player has a moment to catch a breath, seeing as we removed literally every other break in the action. I'm also going to come out and say it: introducing a new game mode also introduces the risk of new bugs. In the middle of PAX. Let us know what you find, and be merciful. Other big improvements include better animations on most of Reina's key movements and associated timing changes to make them faster, punchier and easier to implement (mostly through buffering inputs and the like). There is more work to be done on this (e.g. letting Reina buffer a dodge roll after mantling onto a ledge still needs to be worked in), but we've made really good progress and the game is really starting to feel great to play. Reina's got an aerial dodge to go with her backstep and dodge roll and it makes closing in ranged opponents a lot less painful. Literally. She gets shot a lot less now. You cried out on the forums and we heard your cry and put in that feature that we had been putting off forever and really should have prioritized, so thanks for the sanity check!