Dev Update

What’s up duuuudes, we know people have been interested to know what the Infernax team has been up to since launch, so we appreciate you hanging with us while we first did some critical post-launch patches on the game, and since then we’ve been able to spend the last few months working on an upcoming update.

This day one (four months later) update focuses on both Accessibility and quality of life. It’s something that was really important to us as a team that despite spending a lot of time leading up to the launch polishing, we still had more things we wanted to tackle to feel like it was in a good spot.



Due to the nature of Infernax having been developed over the course of so many years, when we realized towards the end of development that we wanted to try to add in options and features to allow as many people as possible to enjoy the game, we were constrained a bit by the actual game design itself. Something that seems simple, like removing flashes or screen-shake turns out to be very hard to modify at all when the game itself has certain effects hard-coded in.

So we had to get deep into the code, and make some changes to the base game to be able to add in more accessibility than Infernax launched with, but it was something we felt strongly about, and we decided like it was an important first major project to tackle before adding more content.

Major accessibility features we were able to add are:

• Accessibility options are no longer linked to the Game Wizard, and are now a menu available from the very start
  
• Element contrast: Add distinct color tints to enemies, projectiles, traps, etc. to make it easier to read a scene visually
  
• User controllable color saturation and contrast
  
• Ability to disable ambient particles and animated backgrounds to reduce visual noise
  
• Further improved the ability to greatly reduce both screen shake and camera flashes*
  

*Due to the way the game is built, entirely taking out every single instance of a flash or shake was impossible, but in addition to removing every single instance that we could, any that are still a part of the game are now low contrast or diminished, with greatly reduced impact to minimize issues for people who are sensitive.



In addition to the accessibility updates, we tackled some still outstanding issues, and made some quality of life improvements to the general game. These include things like:

• In Casual mode, “dying” to a pitfall or drowning will now respawn the player on the edge they fell from if the player has enough remaining health points, instead of instant death *
  
• Minor UX changes like making it harder to accidentally steal from the church
  
• Fixed some issues with doors being unresponsive
  
• Improved V-Sync support
  

*there’s more detail to this but you get the idea, you don’t die every time.

The patch notes are much longer and go into a lot more detail for those of you out there who want the nitty-gritty, and we’ll share those when the update does go live.

We’ve heard everyone asking about new content, and what we can say is: yup, there’s more content we have planned for the game and once this update is out we’ll be about to focus more resources on that directly. We just wanted to leave the basic functions of the game in a state that felt good as far as trying to make it easier for more people to have a chance to play before moving on and expanding the game itself.

Thanks a ton for all the support, it’s been really great to see so many people enjoying their time with the game. The Accessibility/QoL update is planned to go out soon (real soon), at this point we’re mostly waiting to make sure that everything is approved on every platform, and we’ll be good to go.

-Berzerk Team