First of all, a massive thank you to everyone who has jumped into the Guineapig Runaway Together demo. We’ve been blown away by the response: nearly 2,500 players have explored our world, clocking in over 1,000 hours of gameplay! We’ve been watching your streams, reading every piece of feedback, and taking notes.

Based on your suggestions, we’ve put together a major patch to make the experience smoother, more accessible, and even more fun. Whether you're playing with a friend or tackling the challenge alone, this update is for you.

Check out what’s new below:

• Solo Mode: You can now play on your own! Control both guinea pigs at the same time and explore the levels at your own pace no partner required.

• Direction Arrow: A new arrow above the balloon shows where the balloon is actually heading. It stays accurate regardless of what inputs are being pressed if both players are fighting each other and the balloon barely moves, the arrow turns red to let you know. This can be toggled in gameplay settings.

• Physics Interactions: You can now physically interact with objects in the world. Don't forget to score a goal with the football in the garden!

• GPU performance has been optimized across the board.

• Some game systems now take advantage of multi-core processing, reducing CPU bottlenecks and improving frame rate stability.

• Volumetric lighting and reflections have been optimized for better visual flow.

• Shadows are now rendered more accurately and efficiently.

• LOD (Level of Detail) settings have been fine-tuned for better performance on various hardware.

• Build Size: The demo build size has been reduced by 40%.

• Steam Deck: Special optimizations have been made to ensure a smoother experience on handheld.

• Various physics improvements to make coordinating movement between two players feel more natural.

• Input buffer system has been improved to reduce input latency.

• Bounce pads are now significantly easier to use.

• Movement on the trampoline and sloped rooftop in the garden area has been improved.

• The balloon's aerial movement is now smoother and more predictable.

• Guinea pig animations are now more responsive to player input.

• Camera auto-correction is now more reactive to player positioning.

• Accessibility improvements for better navigation and orientation within the map.

• Fixed a bug where the controller cursor would stop working in certain situations.

• Fixed a bug where starting a lobby after exiting solo mode caused the host to control other players' characters.

• Fixed a bug where guinea pigs would spin in place instead of moving backward.

• Fixed a bug where the balloon's movement direction was occasionally calculated incorrectly.

• Fixed a bug where the balloon would start facing the wrong direction when loading from a checkpoint.

• Fixed a bug where water splash particles did not appear when falling into water.

• Fixed a bug where falling into water did not result in death.

• Fixed a visual bug where balloons would briefly overlap when spawning at a checkpoint.

• Fixed a bug on 16:10 displays (like Steam Deck) where opening settings would reset resolution to 800x600.

• A bug that prevented save files from being correctly initialized has been resolved.

• Fixed various spots where the balloon could get stuck in the environment.

• Fixed a bug that caused the "disconnect" notification to persist in the main menu.

• End of Demo: Players will now be taken to the credits screen instead of the main menu.

• Fixed a bug that caused the settings menu to open with a noticeable delay.

• Resolved various collider issues and applied several other minor fixes.

What’s Next?

We are still working hard to polish the full experience, and your feedback continues to be our most valuable resource. If you enjoy the demo, please consider adding Guineapig Runaway Together to your Wishlist, it helps us immensely as an indie studio!

Don't forget to join our community and let us know what you think of Solo Mode. Happy Running!

— The DWS Interactive Team