Rokar is about to get a bit more crowded, Rune Knights.

These past nine months the team has been incredibly hard at work at bringing Until You Fall to our two newest platforms: PlayStation®VR and Oculus Quest. After working on this for so long, the fact that they are launching today is, well, pretty surreal, to put it mildly.

I can’t stress enough how much effort we’ve put into preserving the core feeling and gameplay of Until You Fall. Everyone on the team performed tiny miracles, whether they were clever tech tricks to improve performance or ways to rebuild our assets to perform well (or in some cases at all) on these different platforms, among others. The end result is something that I think everyone will enjoy, and evokes the same feelings of power and awe as the current Early Access version.

For those that have been following us since Early Access, I wrote up what the changes between 0.5 and this initial 1.0 release look like. For many folks, playing on these platforms will be their first trip into Rokar, but I thought it would be helpful to see specifically what has changed since our last Early Access update.

With these new platforms live, our attention returns to bringing a lot of these improvements to the PC version of the game to transition it out of Early Access. In addition to the changes you’ll see below, we have a few other specific bugs we want to track down (looking at you, lunge attacks), as well as some other quality of life changes.

To get some early eyes on some of these changes, we’ve already started a private PC beta to get some early feedback / bug reports, and we’ll be looking to transition to an open beta in the very near future.

On behalf of everyone on the team and at the studio, thank you for your support so far. We’re stoked to announce our PC 1.0 launch date very soon.

I’m incredibly excited to see this new batch of Rune Knights take on the Shattered Woods and help to reclaim Rokar.

Stay healthy, safe and sane to the best of your abilities.

Keep up the good fight, Rune Knights.

- Dave, Project Director

Release 1.0.0
(Quest & PSVR)
Changes & Additions

New Platforms

Obviously, the bulk of the work this year has been bringing Until You Fall to our new platforms. We worked extremely hard to ensure that the game still played and felt like Until You Fall, and are stoked for everyone to try it.

• Oculus Quest
  • Requires both Oculus Touch controllers to play
• PlayStation®VR
  • Requires two PlayStation Move motion controllers to play

Performance Optimizations

As part of our work to bring the game to our new platforms, we put a lot of effort into making sure we were doing things in a clean, optimized way. With any optimization changes though, the best ones are the ones you don’t notice.

• Audio, art and tech have had significant improvements for performance
  • Notable areas of improvement include the Aether Bloom reward moment and particularly busy / intense enemy encounters, but basically everything has had some improvement
• All platforms will benefit from this, including the PC version
  • PC 1.0 / Beta coming soon

Achievements

Clearly, the game couldn’t become a 1.0 release without those sweet, sweet Cheevos.

• 40 unique achievements can be earned on Quest and PSVR
• PC achievements will be released soon as part of its 1.0 launch
  • Players will be able to opt in to a Beta branch soon to help us test these
  • Note for future PC release: Certain achievements will be rewarded retroactively based on your progress, however others didn’t have stat tracking implemented on the back-end, so you’ll likely have to re-earn a few

First Time User Experience Updates

Throughout Early Access (and back when we showed the game off at conventions, when that was still a thing), we’ve received a lot of great feedback from our players, new and old, about things they wish they’d either known earlier or got to experience sooner.

As such, we’ve made some adjustments to the tutorial and early game, as well as the way we award weapons based on your progress (more on that in the next section).

• A selection of three powerful traits are now guaranteed to appear at the conclusion of the supers tutorial
  • This gives players the chance to experience powerful traits early, and learn about the traits system - it was something that could happen organically, but we wanted to make sure that everyone got a chance to learn about this core part of the game
• Rokari Keenblade now starts with two empty trait slots
  • The Keenblade, which originally started with the “nimble” trait, now earns it at upgrade level III
  • This allows players to experiment with which traits they equip in their earlier runs, which helps us to expose the trait system sooner rather than later

Super Charge Crystal in the Runeforge

Based on community feedback/requests, we’ve added a way for players to quickly try out supers in the Runeforge. That dummy won’t know what hit it!

• Added a new augment to the hub: Shard of Ephemeral Power
  • Instantly charges the Super of the hand that crushes it
  • Supers will reset upon re-entering the portal

Weapon Unlocking Revamp

While we were happy with awarding new weapons after each boss fight, we wanted folks to be able to unlock and experiment with weapons sooner. Further, we still felt like we didn’t do enough to communicate when you’ve actually earned a reward, so we took some time to remedy that.

• Weapons now (generally) unlock when you defeat new opponents for the first time
  • Engraved Arming Sword & Rokari Keenblade - Starting Weapons
  • Heartsplitter & Ritual Dagger - Weapon Purchase Tutorial
  • Knight-blooded Crest - Defeat Knight
  • Vestal’s Wrath - Defeat Captain
  • High Arcanist’s Blade - Defeat T1 Boss
  • Spellsword’s Charm - Defeat Spellweaver
  • Duelist’s Edge - Defeat Empowered Knight
  • Mistcutter - Defeat T2 Boss
  • Gemini Stranded - Defeat Empowered Spellweaver
  • Gemini Esper - Beat T3 Boss
• Reorganized weapon racks to be in the order in which they unlock (from right to left)
• Added messaging to alert you to new unlocks when returning to the Runeforge
  • Messaging will queue up in the event you’re awesome and unlock a bunch of weapons at once
• Caught some weird edge cases where you could unlock things even though you had not met the requirements to do so

Visual Updates

There were a few areas we felt could use a little more love for all versions of the game, so we took some time to address those. Oh, also, we basically remade many of the assets from scratch for these new platforms.

• Rebuilt nearly all art assets for Quest & PSVR versions that still feels like the world of Until You Fall
• Agatha, the Runesmith, has received a facelift - the 3D model hanging over the portal to the Shattered Woods has been reworked
• The Aether Blooms in the Shattered Woods have had a visual rework for both optimization purposes and visual styyyyle
• Environmental Aether has been slightly reworked to be more visually consistent
• Added an icon to the aether counter in the Runeforge
• Adjusted colors that show between scenes and added a loading icon animation

Intro & Settings Changes

As we cleaned up the game in preparation for 1.0, we took some time to clean up the settings a little bit, looking to add some missing features and clarify some other already existing functionality.

Gameplay Settings - We broke out the overloaded and confusing “360 Tracking Mode” into its constituent parts, allowing folks to opt in (or out) depending on their configuration.

• 360 Tracking Mode has been broken out into three new settings
  • Strict World Forward
    • Pause screen will appear in fixed location, depending on how you calibrate
    • Moving between rooms will bring up a prompt to return you towards your defined forward (usually your system’s cameras)
  • Loss of Tracking Warnings
    • In-game warning that appears when you are looking ~180 Degrees away from your defined forward (usually your system’s cameras)
  • Loss of Tracking Protection
    • Setting that pauses the game should you look away from your defined forward (usually your system’s cameras)

Intro & Calibration Screen

• These screens will now attempt to follow where you’re looking, reducing cases where you start off looking into utter darkness

Recenter Logic

• We’ve added logic to respond to different platforms’ recentering functionality, allowing you to redefine which way is forward

Audio Settings

• Added a slider to control ambient SFX volume

Weapon Range Adjustments

We’ve made a few adjustments to how far weapons can reach to smooth out some of the more frustrating areas.

• Extended the reach of all weapons slightly to help hit more foes
• Made some big modifications to the Aether Horror’s hitboxes to make it easier to strike; especially with shorter ranged weapons like daggers and the Katars.

Notable Changes & Bug Fixes

• Upgraded our Unity version to 2019.3, providing a slew of small improvements for both performance and workflow
• Resonant increased to 2x Super Charge on block
• Added a few more encounters to several rooms in T1 that had been missing them. This should help make T1 a little less repetitive, especially for new players
• Fixed instances of enemies aggroing the Rune Knight as soon as they enter the room, before moving
• Fixed an issue during that final boss fight that could cause strange weapon behavior if the Rune Knight got too close to the Red Aether around the edges of the arena