Hey everyone!

After a quieter period due to various team members being away from the studio, we have a new update for you! This is a big one, containing several months of hard work on a lot of topics. Most importantly, this update comes with a brand new map! This one will let you visit a vital part of the Overseer's domain, and face new challenges. 

A lot of quality of life features also make an appearance, and some of those require us to reset your options (PC player keybindings, gameplay modifiers, ...). Hopefully we will not have to do that anymore going forward, but if so, the game will warn you in the main menu. Sorry for the inconvenience! 

Remember that Steam Remote Play Together also works with Panoptic, so it is a good time to get some VR during the holidays! And while we really wanted to get this update out before the holidays, we might have some more surprises coming sooner rather than later... ;)

As usual, feel free to share your thoughts with us on Discord, Twitter, the Steam forum, or any other means.

Following is the full list of changes.

New Features:

• NEW LEVEL: discover the Foundry, where the Challenger will have to navigate a more industrial environment, and mix up their approach to stealth from the usual hiding in a crowd to more... active hide-and-seek, as well as avoid the gaze of ever-vigilant Watchers. Also has some new music!
• Foundry: Introduced blue Watchers, who are scanning, and ready to denounce the Challenger as soon as they see it, even if it trying to blend in.
• Foundry: Introduced conveyor belts on which you can travel and mimic other Beings. Be careful, the blue Watchers will still see you!
• Levels: The white lines connecting elements in the level now pulse from their "source" towards their "destination", helping to orient the Challenger and hopefully explaining better how elements fit together.
• Controls: Added Vive Cosmos bindings.
• Controls: Made the Challenger stop quicker when releasing a key, in order to give more precise control to the player.
• Controls: Changed the camera controls when doing a blending in action : the camera now orbits the Challenger.
• Controls: You can now rebind the controls in the in-game menu (no need to go back to the title screen)
• Controls: We moved all the options in the main rebinding screen. That means that the axis inversion is now done on the remapping screen, and no longer as a separate option in the menus.
• Controls: Added the option to remap more keys and controller functions, to let you customize your experience further.
• Misc: Added a warning messages that will appear when a change requiring the reset of game options and key bindings happens (hopefully you will only see it once, but we might have to do it again once or twice before leaving Early Access).

Bugs Fixed:

• Challenger: Adapted the angle of the head rotation for the Challenger when looking up or down to make it a bit less obvious for the Overseer.
• Challenger: Prevented the character walking in place when you open the in-game menu while moving.
• Overseer: Fixed the Challenger having no texture in the first few seconds of the level, when you see its position in the level.
• Crystal Mines: Added some invisible walls to prevent you from jumping to the ground.
• Waterworks: Tweaked an invisible wall that was sticking through a platform.
• Tutorial: Fixed the starting position of the Overseer.
• Tutorial: We fixed the Overseer player seeing the location of the Challenger at the start of the level, and the Challenger being shown the position of the last Orb before the relevant section.
• Watchers: Fixed an issue where the Watchers kept their crystal pointed at the Challenger even when losing track of it.
• Watchers: Fixed some slight issues with the Watchers spawning locations.
• Watchers: Fixed the light cone of the Watchers not always matching their detection radius. This might introduce some strange visual glitches in rare cases, but this will be addressed down the road.
• Lighting: Rebaked most of the light maps in the level, removing some artifacts.
• Lighting: Fixed some light leaking through walls in several levels.
• Action camera: The camera now resets its position each time you do an action to blend in.
• Action camera: If you open the in-game menu while doing a contextual action, the camera will stop moving.

We hope that you enjoy this new version, and do let us know what you think! :)

— Team Panoptes