Beta v0.61.9

In preparation for the public release of Nocturne: Prelude, we’ve released a final Beta update. You can read more about the release details in this blog post.

Records
Your highscore for each enemy is now saved and can be viewed in the Records tab of the menu. Highscores are saved separately for each difficulty.

Item Drops
Enemies now drop a unique item. They have a 30% drop chance and will only drop once from each enemy.

New Active Ability: Fortify
We’ve been experimenting with Active Abilities for a while, and have now added Fortify into the game. Once per encounter you can press the Active Ability keybind (default: Space) to activate Fortify. You will have an additional 25 armor for just the next attack.

Latency Improvements
After lots of feedback about various latency issues, we’ve done a deep dive into timing & latency code. A few underlying bugs have been fixed which make huge improvements in overall timing accuracy and has solved many edge cases which would cause notes to arrive at incorrect intervals. In addition, C-Mod has been reworked to be more reliable and accurate. We strongly recommend you reconfigure your Delay setting when playing the new update.

Silence Scaling
Playing Silence now scales with your difficulty setting. A progress bar appears in the bottom left which displays how many notes you have to hit. At lower difficulties, less notes need to be successfully hit. Previously you were required to hit all notes.

Additional Changes

Combat

• Enemy damage has been changed, and scales by difficulty. Overall the easier difficulties do less damage and harder difficulties do more damage.

• Enemy attacks are now manually timed as part of the beatmap, rather than occurring after a fixed number of notes. This means attacks are now timed exactly the same across all difficulties, rather than happening faster on higher difficulties.

• Adjusted the timing of judgement zones.

• Added SFX to the combat score bars.

• Tweaked the rank percentages to make rank C have a higher requirement to achieve.

Items

• Balance changes to all items, to reflect the changes in enemy damage.

• Armor now subtracts from total attack damage rather than individual note damage.

• Abilities now have ranks, where higher ranks of the ability are objectively better, instead of the old system where it was extremely unclear which abilities are upgrades or not.

• Removed “Resistance” ability from the game.

• Added various new items and changed which items are found in some chests.

Cutscenes

• When standing near an interactable object or NPC, an interaction icon appears to indicate you can interact.

• Updated all character portraits to final versions.

• Many minor updates to dialogue, eg: removing typos, making language more concise, etc.

• Names of items are now displayed in yellow with an icon to make them clearer during dialogue.

• Cutscenes are now able to transition between maps mid-scene.

• If you fail the “Ultimate Attack” during Kimothy’s Tutorial battle, instead of forcing you to retry, the game continues with alternate dialogue.

World

• Added a new corrupted object in the park, which rewards a special item for completing.

• Updated all lighting across all maps. Lighting is now more contrasted and has been adjusted to retain the original colours of the pixel art.

• Collision for all maps have been improved.

• Added various ambient SFX such as flowing water and howling winds.

Menus

• Changed the default keybindings.

• You can now equip items from the Inventory tab, and the game will redirect you to the appropriate section the Equipment tab.

• Removed Memories & Submit Feedback.

• Added V-Sync, which can prevent screen tearing on some displays.

• Added Keybindings into the combat menu.

• Added option to enable Note Miss Sounds, which play if you miss a note during combat.

• Added Master Volume slider.

• Updated all help text for all menu options.

Refactoring

• Performance optimizations.

• Improved how data is stored and loaded.

• Reworked how the game’s systems are managed.

• Spit the menu controller into separate scripts to handle different types of menus. This allows for more flexibility in menu features and improves performance.

• Many minor latency tweaks that improve overall timing accuracy.

Notable Bugs & Adjustments

• Fixed an issue which caused the “Nothing” button for Equipment to actually do nothing, instead of unequipping the current item.

• Fixed an bug that caused all damage taken in battle to be counted towards the first attack only and all following attacks would be 0 damage.

• Evade and Block now occur as intended. Evades happen when you miss no notes. Blocks happen when you do miss notes, but the attack damage is reduced to zero due to an effect, item or ability.

• Fixed a bug which caused the Silence mechanic to use the incorrect judgement zones when the BPM was set to C-Mod.

• Fixed a bug which caused a map transition to loop endlessly between two maps due to a change in the size of the player’s collision box.

++ many minor bug fixes and adjustments.