Greetings explorers,

Sincere apologies for the long waiting time. There is no sugarcoating and no real excuse able to somehow justify this long silence - But what is the most important: At no point came it to my mind to quit or abandon the project, though I have to admit that while the time flew by there were days that felt worse than others. Being a solo Developer comes with a lot of benefits, but as well all of the burdens - I'm sorry that in the end it was a very long run for all of you without any substantial updates or content. So I thank the Hidden Deep community, my friends and family for their patience.

But let me explain what happened:

As you already voiced very loudly, Multiplayer is one of the most asked for features and I really wanted to make it work - It looked feasible, it looked even relatively easy - until I actually hit the first roadblocks. There was no other way than reworking the game up from the very ground. Now I’ll have the tools at hand to not just fulfill your biggest feature-wish but to increase my output for future updates as well.

Luckily all of this brain-breaking, depression-inducing groundwork comes to an end now, since with this update I’m releasing today, we now have a foundation for more stable and more frequent updates. Again, as stated, I'm very sorry it took me way longer to get rid of the old codebase that kept the game down, but now we’re in for a bright future… as far as that’s possible down in the caves.

Please believe me that “only” delivering the foundation now bothers me deeply - there are still so many things on my checklist I want(ed) to get done before pushing this update live - but hearing your outcries for something, some sign of life, needed to be acted on - again, sorry that it took so long for that to happen:

This update contains:

• Stable and native two player multiplayer (still in beta, but that’s rather referring to the features, number of players and content still to come).

• Two levels/game modes for the multiplayer: coop mission and survival mode.

• Monster behaviour code massively improved and streamlined for easy adaptiliy.

• Advanced pathfinding: ground-bound monsters can now chase you from the other side of the map, while jumping from wall to wall! .  

• Advanced visual effects like “breathing” sprites.

• Advanced multi layered guts rendering after shooting the monsters.

• Nice smooth turn-around animations.

• Convulsions: flying monster can have convulsions before ultimate death

• New complex hit detection based on model bones and custom hitboxes!

• New varied weapon hit effects depending on range, calibre and target material. 

• New weapon Nitro .700 - super powerful and fun to watch :)

• New sounds for some of weapons

• Spider boss is now a true boss - you can’t just empty the mag into it!

• 100+ bugs found and corrected

While your game progress will be preserved, savegames inside a level won’t work anymore, so in the worst case scenario you’ll have to restart the latest level you were in. But we’ll also move the current version over to the legacy branch so no progress will be completely lost.

Thanks again and all the best

Wookie