Damn, I was waiting for this too!

A little confused though. On itch, the minimum price is $10. Does this mean I have to pay $10 to play the early access demo now, or is there a free demo I can't find and the full game will cost $10 when it's finished?

@3 Tap h a few times and you should land on the "download demo" heading. $10 gets you the full version, and I'll bump the price to $12.99 once early access ends.

You can also download the demo in the Microsoft Store and upgrade it from the main menu, or directly from the end of level 3 if you've got a good run going and want to continue. I haven't tested that last bit yet--testing IAP flows is surprisingly difficult--but it should at least unlock the full version for your next game.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll likely continue to tweak shot accuracy over time. Note that different robot types also have different accuracies. Dumbasses aren't intended to be as accurate as badasses, for instance. Also, their accuracy is lower over greater distances, so sniping them at range means they're less likely to hit you even though your own shots do less damage.

i ALSO WISH THAT WHENEVER i GET A TRUE "SYSTEM FAULT" AND THE GAME CRASH OCCURS, THE GAME COULD SAVE EACH LEVEL, of course temproralily. ALso when I exit the game during the run, it should be temporarily saved. When I die, the save should get cleared.

@9 Unfortunately I can't do game saves right now without teaching each subsystem how to save relevant data, which would be a lot of work. The real fix is for my engine to support saving/loading internally, which is probably coming in another version or two. But ideally the game doesn't crash, which is something I'm working to address in early access. Apologies for that.

OK folks, sorry for the confusion. I'm now linking directly to the itch page since the "buy now" popout setup doesn't link to the demo. Hopefully that makes it easier to find.

The way room descriptions work is as follows:

• If any robots are visible, sort them based on distance and possibly difficulty--I don't recall off-hand.

• Next, list each exit from the room.

• Whenever an exit is listed, list the items and exits reachable through that exit before moving on to the next exit from the current room.

So for instance, say you're in a room with an exit to a room ahead containing a shield, and a robot in the room to your right. The description should first read the robot, then the exit ahead, then the item, then any exits visible in the room containing the item, then any other exits from the current room. The idea is that, when an exit is spoken followed by an item/exit, you need to take that exit to reach the next-read item/exit. I realize it's a bit convoluted, but I worked hard to pack a bunch of detail into as few words as possible. When I just sorted things by distance, it was hard knowing which exit to take to reach a given item. It's possible I may have gotten it wrong, though, so feedback on how to improve that ordering is welcome.

You're not the first person to ask to filter out exits seen through other exits, so I'll certainly consider it. OTOH, I sometimes find that it changes my strategy. If I hear that another exit is ahead 24 tiles, I know that I've got a straight run, and that I'll likely spot any enemies either before or immediately after they spot me. If I hear that an exit is ahead and left or ahead and right, I know that I'm approaching a corner and should probably be more careful in case a robot is in that side passage since it might pop out from behind a wall. Eventually, when I add turrets that can shoot across multiple rooms, hearing that you're in a long straight stretch of rooms might warn you to be on the lookout for turret-sniping. If you're still struggling with it after a few days then I'll revisit it. I do acknowledge that there's a lot to get comfortable with, but I'd like to see how manageable the information stream is after you're a bit more familiar with the gameplay before I make too many major changes.

Interesting thoughts on movement speed, would be interested in what others think on that one. Right now the player moves at 4 tiles/second, and all rooms are 16X16. I'm worried that speeding things up might either make navigation trickier or will make outrunning robots easier.

Thanks again.

Cool, thanks for all the feedback. A few responses in no particular order:

An exit scan is a good idea. I'll ad that in the next build.

Your weapon range is actually further than your visibility. When you hear a robot warbling, that means you can see it, and you can definitely shoot it in that case. I'm sometimes able to shoot robots in distant rooms just by firing blindly into them. So it shouldn't be out of range if you hear the warbling.

Server rooms start appearing on level 3. There's only one per level until you get to level 5 or so, at which point they become a bit more frequent.

If you haven't tried this yet, shooting into rooms before you enter them is a good way to draw out enemies. It gets a bit trickier once they can move as quickly as you can, and it isn't foolproof since they might be tucked away in a corner. But that usually gives you a bit of a heads-up, and you've got a bit more time and space to formulate a strategy. Sometimes you can also spray an area with shots if a single shot doesn't bring them out. I'll probably nerf that strategy a bit at some point, but for now it might help.

Sorry about the crashes. Unfortunately they're in the engine itself, but a new major release came out about a week or two back and I'm mostly through the port. Hoping the engine upgrade either fixes the problems outright, or gives me enough info to fix them myself.

There seem to be a lot of glitches with the audio positioning taking forever to update. A lot of the time I'll only find out there's a wall after I ran into it because the wall sound only seems to start playing when you're about two steps away and even then it takes a slight amount of time to start. Also when you turn when facing something, the positioning doesn't change for a bit so if I try to follow a wall to find an exit it is highly likely I'll run into another wall unless I'm mentally mapping out every step, which isn't ideal. The audio positioning is also inconsistent between the various types of objects, for example exits pan naturally but a robot will suddenly jump to the far left of the stereo field if I strafe a single step to the right. turning is also either much slower than it feels like it should be or the robot audio isn't updating immediately as you turn, I kind of just end up spinning in a circle, holding space, and hoping.

Anyone else getting a weird error about a VCruntime when I try to open the game? I tried running as admin and it didn't change anything and I've never heard of that runtime.

@19 Hmm, what are your CPU specs? It's possible that I just haven't optimized things as well as I could, but that's not something I've encountered personally. For technical reasons I won't get into here, profiling has been hard for me to do until now but is about to get a lot easier. So if you're on a slower PC then that's probably good encouragement for me to look into profiling. If you're on a laptop, make sure it's plugged in since apparently it'll get throttled if it isn't.

@21 Yeah, it's some VC++ Runtime redistributable package, likely the one containing vcruntime140.dll. The Microsoft Store installation process handles that for you, but I'm not sure if it's a good idea to ship it with the game itself, if I should statically link it in, etc. Chatting with a knowledgeable friend about that now, so hopefully I can get that fixed. But for now, grabbing the most recent runtime should do it.

Thanks everyone.