Note: The save system has been completely reworked, meaning all outdated save files will be deleted. This was done to ensure future updates will never delete save files, and to improve modability.

New content:

• The left hand now has more animations for different melee attacks
• Sling move has been added

Removed Content:

• Removed shotgun dash attack
• Removed shotgun charge-up move

Major gameplay changes:

• Enemies in general have had major reworks to their systems
• Enemy stun system full redesign
• Enemies are now stunned for a much more standardized amount of time. The previous system lead to both absurdly high enemy and barely noticeable stun times, and was generally far more complicated that it needed to be
• No more neutral clashes
• The idea of the clash system is to punish player spam by stunning them, but neutral crashes created a scenario where player spam was only punished in a scenario where one enemy's attack is clashed against, and another enemy hits the player afterwards. This really just ended up encouraging more spam after the stun to try to escape that second enemy in time. Clashing will now either clearly reward attacking during enemy's light attacks, or punish attacking during an enemy's heavy attacks
• Enemy movement and movement goal system redesigned
• Aggression slots mechanic has been removed. Enemies will try not to be directly on top of each other, but won't dally about waiting for the other enemies to attack
• Redid the enemy hit animations system
• The previous system could be very stuttery, and was randomized, meaning the player's hits wouldn't line up with the hit animation
• Enemies now react to hits more closely to as if they've been actually hit, instead of generically recoiling
• Animations are also included for when the player hits the enemy in the side or back
• Many animations have been adjusted or changed
• Most player scripts have been rewritten. This includes movement, taking damage, parrying, attacking, and some animation script changes.
• Basic movement should feel very similar to what it was before, but most advanced movement tech has been changed to some degree
• Timings on things like attacks or parries have been changed
• Diagonal inputs now actually effect some attacks
• M1's boss has been redone with mostly new animations
• Combat encounters have been rebalanced to reduce difficulty spikes
• Added the ability to disable weapons
• What weapons a mission is completed with is saved, and you cannot change equipped weapons mid-mission (unless a new weapon is unlocked mid-mission)
• Light core attacks changed
• Holding forward and the core attack button now causes the player to select an enemy, an sling towards it
• The shotgun dash attack has been removed
• The updraft staff attack is now done by holding the melee attack button while in the air
• This was a really tough change to make, since it's such a big muscle memory change, and I expect it to be somewhat annoying in the air to accidentally execute. However, it was necessary to fit the other light core attack changes. Possibly will add an option to require holding jump to do the attack, but definitely as an option, since it'd be difficult to execute on a controller (When controller support is added)
• The railgun is now usable on the ground, replacing the weapon boost move
• The weapon boosting mechanic has been removed
• The boosted shotgun's self-knockback has been moved to the base attack
• Parrying gives less energy than before
• The total amount of energy each enemy will give is the same, but it takes more perfect parries to get this amount, and blocking only returns more energy than the player takes from parrying when on the minimum difficulty setting

Visual and "feel" changes:

• The player's camera has been moved down slightly to more be more accurate to Pax's actual height (This height was now already accurate in cutscenes, so only in game player height has changed)
• Red brick texture has been changed to make it tile in a less obvious way.
• Rain now has collision with the overhangs in M2
• Changed some UI elements in the chapter select menu
• Changed the selected mission border and arrow to highlight when hovered over
• Added a border to mission images
• Added display of what version, and with which weapons a mission was completed on
• Added a menu to filter version and selected weapons
• Custom resolution menu has been improved overall
• Guide arrow now has more rotation smoothing on it

Noticeable bug fixes and minor changes:

• Control categories have been made more specific
• Time between multiple different Spider Turrets firing is now enforced to allow some breathing room
• Enemies are no longer likely to get stuck running into a corner
• Changing resolution would wrongly set some UI scales. This has been fixed.
• Fixed the slam attack causing the player to get stuck on certain slopes
• Made the final enemy gauntlet in M2 a lot less jank (Progression should be more consistent, and enemy cutscene bodies should despawn at correct times consistently)
• Widened one side of the crossing alleyways in M2
• Fixed the objective indicator arrow appearing in the M1 apartment
• Fixed an issue where certain level data would transfer between levels causing strange occurrences
• Fixed the "New Game" button inconsistent behavior when there is an existing save
• Controls options menu has been separated into mouse/keyboard tabs
• Menu navigation via buttons is now possible
• Fixed the animation jitter when not finishing the standard staff combo
• Starting cutscenes will no longer lock the player into their running or parrying animation while being shifted into position for the cutscene
• Buffs no longer run their duration timers during cutscenes
• Dealing damage while using the lifesteal buff no longer lowers the combo meter
• Fixed the text in the save deletion menu
• Fixed the shotgun's position breaking in the M1 intro animation
• Fixed the end screen not displaying previous mission rankings
• Fixed an issue where loading a save in which an interactable is available would display parts of the input overlay it shouldn't
• Changed the content warning text in the first launch settings screen
• Added a setting to enable disturbing cutscenes after the first time setup
• Fixed a wrongly assigned material on Mission 1

Other changes that won't really be noticed in game:

• Changed Twitter links for Bluesky
• Fixed demo end screen link buttons
• Fixed typo for a weapon that isn't even in the game yet (Distruptor -> Disruptor)

Technical changes (Various effects):

• The node tree has been reorganized
• As a noticeable effect, this has reduced VRAM usage in resolutions below 2160p
• Player attack hitboxes, and enemy-side hit detection has been reworked
• Player hit detection has been changed to work more similar to enemy hit detection
• Audio code optimizations
• Unspecified optimizations in many places (Such as any of the rewrites, as they *should* be less taxing on the CPU)
• Forewarning, if the game was unplayably laggy before, don't expect performance to be good, or even playable now. I'm at the point where the tools available aren't giving enough information on what I can do to improve framerates. My script functions only directly contribute to about 8-10% of the processing time, and everything else I can only assume are various engine calls.
• Combined some pck files
• I figured that since there appears to be a decent chunk of what is effectively just header data in each pck file, that it's probably best to consolidate some of the smaller files, so that less space is wasted purely for needless organization.
• Updated Godot. This new version had a nice performance bump I noticed in working on M3. Doesn't seem to effect the overall performance too much, but helps a lot with real time mirrors, which have been added to the first time setup preview, and will be in M3. Reflection probes have been greatly changed, which, given their heavy usage in the game, means the game looks a decent bit different. Also, with a new monitor, I have a lot more color accurate viewing, so I made some intentional changes.

Some plans for the next update(s)

• M3 (Uses M2 map, ends in a new boss fight)
• New left arm core

Dev Note:

This update has a bit of a story to it, because it did not start off as an overhaul update. This was originally the final content update to the Punkageddon demo, which would have added M3. This means M3 is quite close to finished, but before I completed it, a lot happened.
In the process of making the next boss, I figured that I ought to improve the enemy animations. In the process of improving those animations, it became really clear how much the animations did to cover up the poor stun system, so that lead me to improving the stun system. At that point, I decided the update was delayed enough, so I may as well delay it more and overhaul the save system so I could add the ability to equip/unequip weapons. And then to rewrite player movement. And then to rewrite the player attack script.
In the end, this update became the one where the most game components have been redone in some way, with only the missions script remaining almost entirely untouched, since it's still holding up from the last rewrite. M3 is still going to take a bit, even though all that needs to be done is the boss fight, and some encounter rebalancing, so don't expect it too soon.
And another note, in the M2 changelog, I mentioned how I should've split that update into many pieces. Well, in this case, while that *could've* been done, changes were mainly decided when one change to a game system, involved another game system, so it would've been extra work to make the new systems work with the old ones, as oppose to overhauling everything at once.