It's been a while!  We've been working on a lot of stuff under the hood and working on some exciting new features. Sadly not everything is finished yet, so we hope this update is good enough to tide you over.

• Changed Calibration code - Old way: the game would measure the player's arm length to calculate shadow strike distance and enemy positioning.  New way: the game measures the distance between the player's body and the target.
  • The problem we realized with the old way, is that everyone has different comfort zones in regards to fighting. You may have really long arms but prefer to get up close and personal, or maybe you have short arms and prefer to keep that at reach. So now, we let you strike the target, and show the distance enemies will stand. 

• Startup Calibration Scene - On game load, you're instantly taking to a calibration zone before you're allowed to even go to the basement menu.  It's super simple so as to be as quick as a load time as we could make it.
• We plan to add a "quick start" option that skips the basement entirely so you can go straight from calibration to game play.

• New enemy models!  We've been working...and reworking.... and reworking.. the models to create distinctive, yet stylized enemies for you to punch.  It's a fine balance between looks and optimization but we think we've managed to achieve that with this first enemy. The Punk!
• Oculus native support!  Technically this isn't new, but we found a few areas where it would mistakenly load SteamVR instead.  
• Under the hood optimizations:  we've studied areas of the game that would tank the frame rate and managed to increase frame rates by 15%!
  • Cool notes for Nerds (like us!)
    • Realtime Dynamic hit recoil system is toggled on/off based on distance from player. Every now and then, there's a tiny frame drop when you shadow step to an enemy and it turns the system on for the first time. We have a few leads on how to fix this and speed up the entire system in general.  The system is what makes the punches feel like real punches as it simulates the impact on a humanoid body. Unfortunately, it's responsible for 90% of the lag spikes. 
    • Changed Lighting system from 100% baked lighting to a combination of baked and probed light. (The sheer amount of props and clutter in the level was taking up so much space on the light maps, it was having to use multiple maps which increased the Draw Calls per frame. Which is bad.)
    • Changed scoring, body disposal, timer, and shadowstrike to an Event driven system.   Before this, we were using coroutines and updates to handle these things. Which is a normal way of handling this since they are all time driven! But in spots where the framerate would tank, we would run into weird, non deterministic behavior. The most noticeable was the level timer.  Sometimes it would pause, then rapidly skip numbers, or never restart.  We mess with the TimeScale a lot, combined with occasional lag spikes time dependent co-routines would start to fail out or improperly fire. 

That's it for now!