Hi folks,

DemonCrawl's Easter event has come to a close! We hope you managed to collect many baskets of eggs this season. If not, don't worry - these holiday rewards will be available again the same time next year.

In other news, we just released a beta update that introduces many new features for Arena, our online multiplayer gamemode. Beta testers can now choose between Autosweeper and Manual Division, create custom sign messages, apply paints & holographs to emotes, and check out new Arena-only stage mods.

While we're still a few weeks out from Arena's stable launch, we wanted to share the patch notes with you below - this should give you a good sense of our progress.

We also recorded a full gameplay match against AI opponents for your amusement:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqe_akpHKBc

Finally, we are releasing an early version of v1.74 to the stable branch as it contains an important GameMaker runtime update and a few bug fixes (notably, Hero Trial leaderboards may work correctly now.) A follow-up patch is planned for next week.

Enjoy!

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Arena (Beta Branch)

• Manual Division is now available
  
• New homeland: Mountain - "Whenever you make a mistake, reduce the stage timer by 5 seconds times the homeland tier."
  
• Ruins homeland buff: "Drop your passive and consumable items into random cells at the start of the stage."
  
• Ocean homeland buff: "At the end of the round, drain 100 mana times the homeland tier and send it to your opponent."
  
• New T2 arena mod: Boost - "Increase the homeland tier by 1 for the purpose of other effects."
  
• New T3 arena mod: Reboot - "When the stage timer hits 5 seconds, you restart the stage."
  
• Deadeye buff: "When you interact with an object, it has a 20% chance to get destroyed instead."
  
• Sign editor: you can now customize your homeland sign message with hundreds of unlockable sign parts
  
• Added a bunch of new emotes
  
• Minor visual improvements to existing emote designs
  
• Emotes can now be customized with paints and holographs
  
• Waygate is now available in Arena
  
• Lighthouse is now available in Arena
  
• Fixed an issue with Smithy providing its reward too soon
  
• Fixed a potential issue with Tunnel stairwell not spawning in arena
  
• Fixed minor alignment issue affecting emotes in the prizebox
  
• Fixed an issue with stage timer evaluation
  
• Prophet I now affects the AP you receive at the end of an Arena match
  

New Features

• Default leaderboard version updated to v1.74
  

Bug Fixes

• Updated GameMaker runtime to v2.3.2.426
  
• Fixed a minor issue with the "total unlocked" label of the Customize menu
  
• Speculative fix for leaderboard issue related to score loss