Hey everyone! Although we're still working on our new big castle, we just have too many additions in the testing branch to not move over onto the main branch. Here is a big ol writeup on everything that's included in this update!

(If you want news on the big castle, skip to "Is the New Castle in this Update?")

This update includes the myriad of fixes, polishes, and additions we've been adding on the public testing branch.

The Prop Collection is a new feature in the Spy Lair. You'll find a machine you can interact with that lets you browse through a mysterious list full of. . . what are those, props? On the side of the machine is a collection platform that you can drop any prop in the game onto. Once you do, it is now permanently listed as having been collected, and you'll even get a small reward! Props have different rarities, and some are incredibly tricky to collect. You've gotta' really figure out some weird ways to get some of them into the collector.

Additionally, if you aren't the type that is too keen on collecting things, there are also portable collection platforms inside of the Spy Lair that can be Perambulated around the castle to reduce walking time. Grab some friends and fill out your collection! You might find it helpful in a later update. . .

If you haven't kept up with our dev updates, the Personum Assumum spell has been completely reworked. It was always the weakest of the original lineup, and my intention for the past year has been to come back to it and add some pretty needed functionality. Well, I finally took the time to do it, and it was a doozy. With work that spread over a period of almost three months, literally hundreds of QA bugs to address, and lots and lots of working and reworking, Personum Assumum is now capable of possessing (and unpossessing) any prop and any NPC in the game, fully networked (had to mention that because OH MAN, trying to work this into the bounds of everything else going on in Wizard Boy was nuts).

This is the sort of change that might mean nothing to a lot of players, but it means everything to some players. For you that get it, I hope you find this change worth the time! Go play Wizard Boy prop hunt.

15 new missions have been added!

• 4 missions dealing with how many props you've collected

• Prop Undercover

• Pocket Pal

• No Time to Fall

• Intentional Decoration

• Extreme Velocity

• Reflection Master

• Spy Lair Investigation

• Spider Brawler

• Jointless Potion

• Biscuit Ball

• Invisible Navigation

Three new gadgets have been added!

• Collection Jaws (items that you consume with Metal Jaws will be instantly added to your Prop Collection)

• Compression Legs (when you take fall damage, it's stored as jump power for your next jump)

• Emergency Explosives (explode on ragdoll)

Four (or was it five? Literally can't remember at the time of writing lol) pieces of new music have been added into the rotation as you explore around different areas in the castle.

There's now an area behind the dungeon door where you can view stats that will start getting tracked with this update, as well as things like how many secrets you've found, how many spells you've found, and how many emblems you've collected.

(Don't look at how many biscuits I've collected)

Some spider enemies have been scattered around the dungeon sewers. Why? 'Cause with the new possession spell changes it's clear you need spider enemies to possess and wreck havoc with.

(Arachnophobia toggle has been added to settings)

This is an odd one - I have completely rewritten all of the NPC logic in the game from scratch, although in theory it should be completely invisible since it was written to fully mimic the old version of the NPCs. Why the rewrite? This version both is more performant, but also is significantly easier for us to add new functionality to, which we're gonna want for our new castle (see "Is the New Castle in this Update" for data on that).

I've taken a ton of time since the last update to learn and implement a ton of optimizations into Wizard Boy. Although it's different on every CPU architecture, I have seen somewhere in the range of a 25% to 30% decrease in CPU usage on my relatively beefy development CPU, which should be even more of a savings on a lower-end machine. I felt like this was needed for us to feel confident in being able to expand the playspace of the game inside of our new castle, and at this point I'm feeling good about how the game is running on most machines.

This has given me the guts to enable something that I was afraid to before: 8 player multiplayer. NOTE - THIS HAS NOT BEEN PROPERLY TESTED, but is in the game and in theory fully functional. PLEASE tell me if you are or are not able to play with this many people properly! (I also recommend that the person with the best CPU is the one to host, BTW).

Player visibility has been rewritten to work with Unreal's Perception tools. This is a significantly more accurate form of doing perception, which has subsequently enabled me to add in a HUD element that tells you whether you're currently visible or not.

To go along with this change, I've also reworked the "off limit areas" system to be more stable, easier for us devs to use, and more clear to the player when they are and are not in an "off limits area." There's now a big ol HUD readout if you're where you're not supposed to be (or, in reality, exactly where you're supposed to be). In general, I wanted to give more info to you players, and these changes have allowed that to happen.

Okay, I'll just list all the minor changes together and then describe what they do for gameplay as a whole. Fall damage has been made slightly more generous, but fall damage upgrades have become less effective. The ability to upgrade to have multiple jumps has been significantly toned back, but we've also re-added "boot pickups" in-world that will give you complete negation of fall damage one time for every upgrade you pick up.

As a whole, these changes take away a couple of moments for new players where fall damage felt unfair to several people, but takes away the ability to functionally negate all fall damage via upgrades for the "power players," which is actually something the community on Discord asked me to remove since it was making things too simple. Additionally, the community asked me to scale back the amount of extra jumps you can receive as it was trivializing navigation, and especially in the new beta castle that was going to make designing interesting areas to get to really hard for us on the dev team.

Before you get too scared, you can still Dopelo biscuits like before and it functions the exact same way as it did. However, I introduced the ability for biscuits to save over loads (which up to this point, they got wiped clean every week), but duplicated biscuits will not save over loads. Duplicating biscuits kinda' made it impossible to save biscuits over loads, since you could literally rack up millions of them and then there would be no reason to ever collect them again.

Duplicated biscuits are now counted as "purple biscuits" similar to how duplicated props are purple. Like with duplicated props, these biscuits will reset to zero every week just like we're all used to, but "real" biscuits that you collect around the world will not.

Vehicles have been added to the game! That said, due to no real space to drive them in the current castle, the only one that's currently accessible is on the roof. . . unless, you switch over the beta branch and play in the new beta castle. See "Is the New Castle in this Update" for more info on that. I'll probably count this one towards the next update since for all intents and purpose they're barely represented in the default branch.

• AI no longer jitters around on multiplayer clients

• "Reset Saves" button has been added to the main menu settings page

• Blue biscuits have been given a golden sheen and fancy particle effect

• Toilets have now been stopped from eating MORE PROCESSING POWER THAN ANY OTHER PROP IN THE GAME (for real)

• Prompts around the game have been sized up to make them much easier to read

• Right mouse button (left gamepad trigger) has been given a very important function (go find out what it is)

• Fire has been rewritten to be more reliable and also more performant

• Many props that were missing data like not having a name or icon have been fixed

• "Mission Failed" has been rebranded to "Cleanup Day"

• Batterton Smackerton no longer turns into a normal bat when take out of the inventory

• After selecting an inventory item, pressing Q and E will no longer permanently make weird sounds

• Commander Johnson now wears his key as a hip item, meaning it can be stolen without attacking him

• Trader Charlie no longer twitches back and forth

• NPCs around the castle have been given more spells to cast

• The crusher is no longer invisible on client

• NPCs now have all dialog when playing as client

• Placing the trapdoor button into your inventory and taking it out no longer turns it into a default object

• Fire no longer ignores armor on client

• Fall damage no longer ignores armor on client

• Possessed NPCs will now drop their inventory when unpossessed and ragdolled (avoids a softlock)

• Spider camera objects is fixed

• Swivel chair object is fixed

• Possessing a shopkeeper means he can pick up his own items without stealing them

• Tripwires have been altered to be significantly more reliable (also more performant)

• Several issues regarding the pause menu sticking on screen have been fixed

• After perishing, you no longer need to press pause twice to bring up the pause screen

• Oil lamps now explode when hit with a melee weapon

• Wizard Boy now only rotates to the camera when you're moving, meaning you can see his face!

• Many other minor fixes and tweaks

We've been working on the new, large castle for quite a while, but it's not quite ready for a default branch update. With that said, we've uploaded the in-progress version onto the public testing branch, as well as made that branch fully public to access with no password. If you're alright with things being in an unfinished state, you're more than welcome to start running around, giving feedback and ideas, and seeing it evolve over the next few months! (There's also a collectathon quest specific to the new beta castle if you want to have a reason to explore. Will be removed later on and many of those locations replaced with emblems, so play around with it while you can!)