Corvian Curse - April 2026 Update

Wow. Over a year since our last update and 2 since we’ve done any significant work on Corvian Curse. It took me a while to get back into a good groove after I started working again. Personal projects were just hard to find the time for, but for the last few months I’ve found a second wind and we’ve all been really going hard again.

Commit graph of Corvian Curse showing a two year gap with low commits

Well, we’re finally ready to release our next update, and it’s a big one! Here are some of the changes you’ll see in the 0.0.7.x release of our demo.

Content Changes

While we don’t want to spoil much and want you to discover the new content yourself, there are a handful of changes you’ll notice while playing.

The system for healing has been completely revamped so keep your eyes peeled for something refreshing
New enemies are roaming the castle
New item(s) in the merchant stand.
New trap(s)
Fountains now expect a donation. You’re able to take a potion without it, but should you?
Bookshelves are now destructible.
Webs are no longer just decoration.
The Merchant aggro has changed significantly. This is something we’re still playing with but it feels a lot more dynamic than before.
There’s a new tile type you can find around the castle.
New Hoard chunks and rooms and more rooms in general.
Be nice to the new critters scurrying around.
There’s now an ending to the demo with a cutscene!
You probably shouldn’t linger for too long in any given level.

Movement & Combat

We’ve added two new player states. Teetering now exists so be careful standing too close to a ledge or you may drop something. We’ve also added the long requested Flip Hang to let you safely descend into spikes or down a ledge.

Another piece of feedback we got often was that the player speed was too fast. After taking a break and coming back with a fresh perspective, we agreed, so you’ll notice that the player speed feels much better now.

A few other changes:

Up-throws now go straight up instead of in a higher forward arc. This takes a bit to get used to but adds some fun capabilities. We’re still playing with this idea but give it a chance!
Tweaks to how movement feels when holding “heavy” items.
The teleport potion had a big change. We no longer have an ephemeral potion type. Instead, the potion is fragile and will move you through the wall where the potion collides. This makes it a lot easier to navigate back up through a level, especially paired with the changes to up-throws.

Game Modes

We’ve removed Endless mode this update. We felt the demo needed a more definitive ending. To give the demo a bit more content, we’ve extended the castle across two areas. The second area introduces some new rooms that will appear towards the end of area 1 in the full release, along with higher spawn rates.

In its place, two new modes:

Seeded mode lets you replay the same generation over and over. This is unlocked upon completing the adventure.
Daily mode generates a fresh run every day that everyone plays against on the same leaderboards!

I’ve been having a lot of fun playing the dailies and hope to see people share their runs! We even added a text share in the death/win menus of the daily.

Menus & UI

Save slots. We added a way to have multiple save slots. From the title screen you can easily create a new slot if you wanna just do a quick AJE run or for any other reason.
Death replays. When you die, you can rewatch the last 5 seconds and figure out what exactly killed you. You can also save replays, both death replays and the buffer of your current run.
Death messages have also been added based on how you died.
The leaderboards now support pagination instead of capping out at the top 25, plus a “jump to me” shortcut.
Leaderboard layouts got cleaned up to fit longer names and more columns.
Journal unlock toasts now show which journal entry you unlocked, and they stack if you trigger more than one in quick succession.
A new Feats menu tracks in-game achievements.
Tutorial billboards show up in the tutorial area to give pointers for new mechanics without dumping a wall of text on you.
Focused nodes in menus now have a chevron to make it clear which item is selected beyond just color.

Audio

We’ve got both new and improved SFX for your listening pleasure.
New music tracks and effects on music tracks have landed.
Some changes to existing tracks are in, including intros to area music.

Controls

We made a handful of changes to the key-binding system.

Left vs right Shift/Alt/Ctrl are now treated as distinct keybinds. If you bind something to right-Shift, left-Shift won’t trigger it.
Physical instead of Logical bindings are now tracked so numpad bindings should behave the same regardless of num-lock.
Secondary keybinds are supported, so you can have a primary and a backup binding for any action.
UI Controls are now synced with player movement controls so if you rebind player movement on keyboard those bindings will also work for navigating menus.

What’s next

This was a lot of work for us and represents a much bigger step towards having a full vertical slice of gameplay. We’re going to take a small break after this to work on a jam but after that we’re going to start pushing into new areas to start fleshing out what the full game will look like!

If you haven’t already, the demo is on Steam. Wishlists and plays are greatly appreciated! Also join us on Discord and share your feedback and daily results!