We’re back with another massive update. The central focus of this update is a revamp of our core Chips Upgrade system, but we’ve also made numerous Quality of Life improvements across the whole game.
23 New and Improved Chips
Our efforts to revamp the chip system started last year as we sought ways to better balance the game. To that end we have made several major changes:
We introduced Nano Stims - a new way to boost your health. Keep your eyes open for them.
We created a new category of Economy chips that heavily involves gears with 7 new chips
We revamped the Projectile category - chips affecting bullet damage - with 9 new chips and 3 improved ones.
We also revamped the Quickfire category - chips affecting firing rate, magazine size and recoil - with 2 new chips and 2 improved ones.
We removed some of the less interesting chips.
Here’s a full list of all the new and revamped chips in this update
Whenever we could, we tried to combine at least two systems to encourage more interesting builds to evolve. It’s been fun watching our community during Beta testing come up with new and different ways combinations and builds.
Later this year we plan two further updates refreshing the rest of the chips, as well as bringing further improvements to these systems.
Explosions Rebalancing
We wanted to make grenades more interesting and useful in the game. To that end, we did a pass on their strength and radius to make them more impactful.
We then did a pass on ALL explosions in the game to change their radius, fall-off curves and corresponding visuals. Explosion visuals should now more closely align with their visuals.
Improved Holosights
We have massively improved the visuals for the holo sights (laser-sighted handgun, focus handgun, assault rifle and both sniper rifles). We also added a dot to the laser pointer on the lasersighted handgun for more precise aiming.
Improvements for First Time Player
We’ve taken the time to once again thoroughly test the experience for first time players. It’s quite easy to take this for granted ~4 years after launch, but it’s also one of the hardest areas to get feedback on from players.
Despite that, we’re still doing what we can to improve our first-time experience, as well as making our more hidden mechanics easier to notice for returning players:
We added a “Tips” screen in the homebase, scrolling through our most frequently requested tips
We added a clearer explanation (and reminder) of the existence of our map. Also added an indicator on your wrist.
We added a Settings Screen directly in your homebase, to more directly surface our extensive options for the player. And also as a QoL feature, so you can finally directly see your changes live when adjusting your graphics settings or holster positions.
Gears are now more easy to spot, with added particle effects (color-coded to indicate value)
Better on-boarding of comfort options and leaderboard
Weapon-Environmental Collisions
Last year we introduced a fundamental rework of our collision system, allowing players to prevent collisions between their weapons and the environments. This was a commonly-reported source of frustration for first-time players.
We’ve now disabled weapon-environment collisions by default for all players. For existing players, you can re-enable collisions if you like in the Weapons settings menu.
New Settings
We’ve added several player-requested settings in the last few updates that we would like to highlight:
Over the shoulder slot height adjustment
Optional speed run timer
Extra player height offset
Quest 3 now has a custom graphics settings screen
Various Other Chip Improvements
We’ve made several visual improvements to how we present chip information. Better layout, better use of color. We have further improvements still planned, including an improved system for conveying the chip active status.
Improved In-Game Patch Notes
We’ve reworked our in-game patch notes system to communicate a summary of our last 5 major updates. This new system also allows us to update the patch notes without an update to the game. We plan to use this in the future to communicate upcoming changes and other developer news.
Save & Quit
We’ve revamped the Save & Quit to make it a bit more robust against leaderboard abuse and class-based progression issues. After some internal discussions, we’ve also decided to remove the “Save & Quit” station once you move past the first room in the level. We’ve improved our Class Stats tracking, including across Save & Quits.
Melee Improvements
We’ve made several improvements to our melee weapons so that they behave more reliably. There’s still further improvements to make in this area but it’s going to take a deeper undertaking to get right.
Improved Bug Reporter
We’ve improved our bug reporter interface (better keyboard, avoiding duplicate logs) and the underlying tech (we can now see errors you ran into in a previous run, not just the current run). This helps us investigate some of the rarer issues players run in.
Conclusion & Next Steps
We’ve made a bunch more smaller touches here and there, please see the full list of improvements and fixes below.
A big thank you to our Discord community, especially our Beta Testers. We released 4 major betas for this update over the last few months, and our testers helped us track down quite a few bugs, new and old.
This is again, a big Quality of Life (and FREE) update. It’s our big thank you to all those who keep playing and enjoying our games. We appreciate all your kind words and feedback.
Stay tuned later this year for Part 2 of our Chips Revamp\!
Release Notes
Improvements
Gameplay: Added Nano Stims that give you a health boost (performance chip has been correspondingly removed)
Chips: Reworked overpowered chips Mobile Malware (scale based on damage \+ probability) and Health Regen (removed)
Chips: New Gear/Economy category with 7 new chips
Chips: Revamped the Projectile and Quickfire chip categories with 11 new chips and 5 improved chips
Chips: Revamped and improved chip tiers and chip distribution
Gameplay: Rebalanced level distribution to better work with Economy chips.
Gameplay: Player grenades are stronger, with a bigger range
Gameplay: Save & Quit station is removed once you leave the start room of a level.
Gameplay: Enemies are less accurate after you teleport
Gameplay: Buffed auto-reloading (faster) on Heavy Submachine Gun, Burst Shotgun and Heavy Grenade Launcher
Gameplay: Improved teleporter pad behavior so it’s easier to approach them from behind
Gameplay: Healing pods no longer heal each other
Gameplay: Healing pod “heal” visuals match correctly to affected radius
Gameplay: Improvements to the final boss scenes including reducing overall performance impact
UX: Tips screen in homebase
UX: Settings screen in homebase
UX: Improved in-game Patch Notes
UX: Improved comfort options descriptions for first-time players
UX: Weapon-Environmental Collisions are off by default now
UX: Show “no leaderboard available” until player has completed first run
UX: Vending Machine UI improvements: more clearly communicate level progress and gear usage
UX: New map visual indicator on wrist
Visuals: All enemies now have muzzle flash and recoil when they shoot
Visuals: Leaderboard layouts and highlighting active leaderboard
Settings: new option for adjusting over the shoulder slot height
Settings: Optional speed run timer
Settings: Extra player height offset
Settings: Replaced 3rd graphic mode on Quest 3 with customizable settings
Visuals: Gears are more visually apparent
Visuals: Chip UI improvements
Visuals: “Snappier” animations for sniper scope
Visuals: Improved feedback on elevator button and vending machine buttons
Visuals: Tunnel Robot now has an idle animation
Bug Fixes
Katana EMP: fixed triggering completely refilling the energy (now should gradually refill)
Melee weapon collisions with environments
Fix BlastAcidGrenade null collision issues
Fixed duplicate bullet reload sounds
Sewers: fixed bridge that didn’t lower visually but collision lowers
Class specific leaderboard stats track correctly across saves
Fixed class progression on grenadier class so that all grenades count
Fixed incessant beeping on turret spiders
Fixed duplicate holo sight element on rifles
Fixed room generation issues with overlapping containers
A number of bugs reported by the community during beta (including infinite ammo, broken crit chips, infinite gear issues and a lot of balancing issues).
Added a 1k cap on max amount of gears
Update 13.2 - Daily Leaderboard Hotfix
Fixed daily leaderboard scores not updating since January 31st (ran out of magical numbers). Thank you to Darkcave for reporting this.
Update 13.1 - Don’t Get Lost
We hope everyone had a fantastic start to the new year! Today’s update covers Patch Update 13.1, but first, let’s catch you up on our recent developments.
Since November, we've been hard at work on Update 14, a major Chips Redesign. This update rebalances core in-run progression, introducing new upgrade types while refining chip upgrades that don’t currently work well. Our goal is to ensure that every chip upgrade feels meaningful and impactful.
However, Update 14 has grown more complex than expected. Since it touches such a fundamental part of the game, extensive testing and iteration are required. We're now aiming for a Q1 release.
In the meantime, thank you all for your feedback, reviews, and bug reports! To address some key pain points, we’ve decided to roll out a smaller patch:
Added a large poster in the elevator room explaining how to access the map (our dynamic reminder doesn’t always trigger reliably, so this is a simpler way to help players who never notice the map).
Added an extra height offset adjustment in the “Movement” settings, allowing for finer control beyond just sitting/standing modes.
Fixed a broken setup in one of the Mines Conveyor rooms.
Fixed an exploit where Holo weapons could be hacked out of home base by abusing the continue system (except for the trainee class, where this remains intentional).
Fixed an issue where the final boss explosion could damage players unexpectedly.
Fixed a bug causing partial continuous reload sounds.
Fixed duplicate reload sound effects.
Added additional logging to help us track and fix specific bugs.
At a player’s request, we’ve also made our localization and translation files publicly accessible via Google Docs. If you'd like to contribute corrections or improvements for a particular language, please reach out via email or Discord (https://discord.gg/salmigames).
Finally, we’d love to hear your feedback (and reviews)! We’re tracking a few hard-to-reproduce bugs that seem to appear only after extended gameplay or with specific playstyles and settings preferences that we haven’t been able to replicate. If you’re encountering any strange issues, please join our Discord and let us know! If you’ve managed to capture a video of the bug, that would be a huge help.
We’ll be back soon with Update 14!
Love, Salmi Games
Update 13 - New Visuals, EMP and Explosive Balancing
Hello friends,
We’re excited to release another major update to Sweet Surrender, full of improvements and completely free. Building on our previous visual revamp from Update 10, we’ve focused on adding further visual details and satisfying effects to the game.
Visual Improvements
We’ve gone through the whole game and added higher quality objects, particles and animations to our environments.
We've added more detailed meshes everywhere, new and improved particle effects and custom animations.
We would have loved to include these in the game a long time ago. Our massive Update 10 finally opened the door for us to do a full pass on the environment models. These improvements help bring the world further to life.
We can’t wait for you to experience them and we look forward to your feedback!
EMP Chips Balancing
We’ve completely reworked the Mobile Malware EMP chips to offer a better gameplay balance. Previously, the EMP chips could easily be abused to turn the game into “easy mode”. It’s taken us several iterations but we’ve reworked the chips in a way that they feel more balanced in terms of cooldown duration, chance of doing a stun and bullet firing rate. As you can imagine, it is challenging to balance an EMP chip so that it feels fair both with a double-barrel shotgun and a SMG.
This rework also lets us better balance the new and improved final boss fight. With our last update, it was too easy to stun and skip most of the Boss’ attack phases.
We are quite curious to hear your feedback on these latest balancing changes.
Grenade Launcher and Explosion Chips Balancing
In Update 12 we made quite a few improvements and changes to the Grenade Launchers. We’ve made further improvements to better balance them:
Increased range of grenade launchers during boss fights
Explosion damage stack additively now (instead of exponentially)
Rebalanced Explosion Impact chips (both spread and damage amount)
We plan on making further improvements to the Grenade Launchers and related chips in future updates (including making the enemies more adept at using grenade launchers).
Halloween
This the season for spookiness and silliness. We’ve added another time-sensitive event that enables Halloween-themed changes to the game. You can experience the “Halloween Mode” visuals (and gentle nods to other games) until November 7th!
Next Steps
We continue to monitor player feedback and work on further improvements to the game. Our next update is shaping up to be a big pass on Chips and Balancing and perhaps, new upgrades.
We’d love to continue working on Sweet Surrender. If you want to see more updates, please tell your friends and/or leave a nice review. Every bit helps.
With love, Salmi Games
Release Notes
Improvements
New particle effects for all grenade idle and activations states
Improved meshes for panels, buttons, light fixtures, crates, barrels, pipes and props in the Mines, Slums and Sewers areas
Improved meshes for generators, turbines, presses, pistons
New animations and particle effects for generators, turbines, guardian pods, liquid tanks and pistons
Improved Medical tanks and cryo chambers meshes
Improved meshes for Modern City buildings, neon signs, lights and environment props
Added new particle effects for Modern City neon signs and lighting
Various new glass meshes
Better label for ProTube “Invert Hands” option
Improved Boss EMP spam
Re-balanced Mobile Malware chips
Increased range of grenade launchers during boss fights
Explosion damage stack additively now (instead of exponentially)
Rebalanced Explosion Impact chips (both spread and damage amount)
Halloween Hats
Updated tooltips for Grenade Launchers
Bug Fixes
Fixed Unstuck behavior in Sewers levels
Update 12.2 - Hotfixes!
We just released a patch update with some important fixes. Thank you to everyone who reported these issues: - Save+Quit button now correctly saves all weapons (including floating ones) - Aim Angle setting is working correctly again - Settings are now saved more aggressively (on every menu refresh or closure) - Weapon UI Display settings now correctly saved - Unstuck button in sewers behaves correctly
We’ve got another update with further improvements coming “very soon”.
Enjoy!
Update 12.1 - 3rd Birthday!
Three years ago, on September 30th, 2021, we launched Sweet Surrender—and what an incredible journey it’s been since! From the countless hours preparing for release to the 12 major updates we've rolled out, we’re so proud of how far the game has come.
But more than anything, we want to thank YOU—our amazing community. Your feedback, bug reports, feature suggestions, and even just taking a chance on our game, have meant the world to us. Sweet Surrender wouldn’t be what it is today without your support. Seriously, we can’t thank you enough!
To celebrate this milestone, we’ve got a little surprise for you. After three years of facing off against your unstoppable skills, the enemy robots have found their ultimate countermeasure… birthday hats! 🎉 For the next week, they’ll be donning their festive gear until supplies run out on October 7th.
It’s a fun, limited-time event, and the perfect opportunity to take on the new final boss from Update 12 if you haven’t already. So dive in, enjoy the chaos, and celebrate with us before time runs out!
Update 12 - Complete Revamp of the Final Boss
Hello friends,
Update 12 is here, and we’re excited to share the new changes. Just like all our previous updates, this one is free. We look forward to your feedback, enjoy!
The Final Boss
We’ve reworked the final boss (and its arena) from the ground up to give you a whole new finale experience. The final boss was one of the last things we added right as we were barrelling towards launch three years ago (September 30th 2021). Just like other parts of the original game, it never got to enjoy as much love as it needed. We made a first pass to address that in Update 10 back in May.
We’re now back with a full rebuild of the final boss, with an expanded arena, destructible cover, missile launchers, a shield system, homing bullets, new attacks, new phases, new visuals and various other improvements. The final boss is now a proper challenge.
We would love to hear your feedback!! We encourage you to try different approaches to taking on the final boss.
Btw, the Lunatic version of the final boss is also crazier. Good luck!
Consequences
Making the final boss so much harder means that it also takes more time to beat the game. This directly affects time-based Leaderboards. After consulting the community, we’ve decided to reset the leaderboards for the Lunatic and Sniper classes, both of which are time-based.
We also left an archive of the old leaderboards, which you can consult if you ever had a valid run before.
Grenade Launchers Love
In Update 11, we tweaked the Grenade Launchers, their behaviors, timing, fuse, and a lot of physics and collision behavior. In investigating one reported issue (exploding grenades if you were holding the weapon too close to your face), we made several improvements to both grenade launchers, including falloff damage based on distance.
The Tier 2 Grenade Launcher now shoots Sticky grenades.
The Tier 3 Grenade Launcher now shoots Impact Cluster grenades with a mid-air 4-way split.
We’ve also fixed several bugs, including the aforementioned head explosion issue (by disabling any collisions between grenades launched by you and your head collider).
Teleport Movement
Off the back of Update 11 where we improved the teleport behavior quite a bit, we saw a few more edge cases we could better deal with, especially in the situation where you have teleport and rotate on the same stick. Small adjustments but hopefully for the better.
ProTubeVR Haptics
We also made improvements to our ProTubeVR haptic feedback integration so that players will get a more consistent experience. These improvements also apply to dual-wielding players.
What’s Next
Can you believe that we have not just one but two more updates already cooking for you? Update 13 is going to bring another set of beautiful visual and environmental improvements. More on that soon. Update 14 is shaping up to be a big pass on Chips, Balancing and perhaps, new upgrades. Stay tuned.
And if you love this game and want to see more updates, please tell your friends and/or leave a nice review. Every bit helps.
Love, Salmi Games
Release Notes
New Boss Mechanics
New fight mechanics including:
Missile Launchers
a Shield System
Destructible Cover
Homing Bullets
More complex spread patterns
Improvements
Boss: revamped final boss arena
Boss: added and improved particles (including new missile explosions)
Boss: improved atmosphere, skybox gradients
Boss: added more background details
Boss: added sky fade-in and fade-out
Boss: improved attacks, balancing, telegraphing of actions
Boss: new shield fade-out animation
Boss: improved sounds, added new effects
Boss: improved intro and outro sequences
Improved Lunatic Final boss
ProTubeVR: better integration to support dual-wielding hand-guns
Reset leaderboards for Lunatic and Sniper, added archive of old leaderboards
Damage Dealt now takes into account Guardian Bots and Turrets
Guardian Bots no longer display damage numbers twice
Fixed Null error when explosions interact with dead bot parts
Grenade Launcher projectiles no longer collide with the player
Update 11: The Quality of Life Update
Hello friends!
Since Update 10 we’ve continued to focus on addressing the most common (or reported) points of frustration (recent and old). We’ve touched many areas of the game to fix and improve as much as we could. We hope you enjoy this update!
Update 11 includes a 🎽 New Trainee Mode and Improvements in these areas: ⚛️ Physics and Weapon-Environment Collision 🤸 Class Re-Balancing 💣 Weapon Feel 💨 Teleportation Movement Polish 📲 Chip Usage and One-Handed Play 🏞 Level Layouts and Ladders ✊ Stability and Consistency
Trainee Mode
Our biggest addition for this release is a new Trainee Mode.
A common point of frustration from certain players is that the game environments are too repetitive. This is an unfortunate quirk of roguelike games where, if you die often, you end up never seeing some of the later areas. We want those players to have an opportunity to experience the breadth of levels and environments we offer.
In Trainee Mode, you can continue from the same level you died from, and in this manner, get to see more of the later game levels. The trade-off is that there are no leaderboards, no achievements can be unlocked and no class unlock progression. We’re quite curious how this new mode will be received.
Weapon Environment Collisions
Weapon collisions with fixed environment objects are now DISABLED by default. Weapon collisions have been a big source of frustration from some of our players and we’re excited to finally be able to offer this behavior as an option. This “minor” improvement involved quite a bit of work, adjusting every existing environmental object in the game.
For players who want to stick with the original behavior, simply go to “Settings->Weapons->Environment Collisions”.
We don’t usually change a default behavior with an update, but based on our internal testing, it feels like the right way to go.
Class Re-Balancing
We’ve re-balanced the Sniper and Grenadier classes’ unlock progression to make them feel less grindy/ridiculous. Thank you for the feedback on these, it’s given us ideas for further (future) improvements.
Weapon Improvements
The Grenade Launchers have been improved to be more effective and fun. The fuse times on the grenades are now much shorter (sticky grenade 4s -> 1s, contact grenade 3s -> 0.1s).
Shotguns now have a subtle kick-back when pumped.
Teleportation Movement
The teleportation system has been improved in several ways:
It now accurately jumps to the target on the floor
There’s subtle movement filtering of the aim target
We fixed a bug that took the wrong position to offset the aim
Settings Improvements
We’ve made a few (player-requested) improvements to the settings: The “Fall down” setting now applies to all types of falling down (off a ledge, after using the grapple hook), not just when teleporting off the edge of raised floor. Players can choose between Instant, Linear speed or Normal gravity-acceleration. Players can now toggle on/off the display of damage numbers.
Chip Usage and One-Handed Play
This is long overdue, but you can now equip a chip in the hand that’s holding it by simply pulling the trigger. Sweet Surrender is now officially playable one-handed. This improvement also introduced one of the silliest bugs we’ve ever seen, where you could equip all sorts of weapons into your chip slots.
We’ve also fixed a lot of edge cases where certain chip effects wouldn’t stack or work properly, especially in the reloading, time slow down and EMP effects.
Environment Improvements
The Sewers were the only environments to use ladders, and they seem to cause endless problems. We never found a fun way to use ladders in the game, so we decided to remove all ladders from the Sewers and replace them with teleport jumping pads.
In the Mines area, we’ve cleaned up a few rooms that occasionally placed an annoying amount of debris in your path.
Physics Improvements
We made minor (but important) improvements to make the interactions physics feel more consistent:
We (finally) added collision marks for bullets that hit doors
Weapons dropped by enemies now react to bullets (they used to stay static)
New Achievements
We’ve added new achievements, including a handful for funny/silly deaths. In the process of testing some of these, we discovered (and fixed) a crazy bug that left you in a weird zombie state if you were killed by a bullet deflected off a crystal!
Moving Forward
Thank you for your continued feedback and support. We still have a few updates planned for Sweet Surrender, so stay tuned for that as well as our future games.
As always, you can keep track of our plans in the Public Roadmap and stay in touch with us and the community on our Discord.
We also want to thank super-fan Shep for creating the fan art used in the header image for Update 11! ♥️♥️♥️
Here’s the full changelog for Update 11:
Improvements
New weapon-environmental collision option
Improved collision layers of all environmental and prop objects in homebase, mines, slums, sewers and industrial areas.
Improved weapon collision shapes
bHaptics sleeve feedback support for weapons, items and chips
WIP: new Continue button that allows players to continue from the level they died
Decluttered derelict mineshaft rooms to reduce objects in your path
Smoothed teleport pointer estimation
Re-balanced Sniper and Grenadier class progression unlocks (should be easier to achieve)
Reduced grenade bullet fuse durations (1s for sticky grenade, 0.1s for normal grenade)
Player can now equip a chip on the hand they are holding by pulling the trigger
Door frames now have proper bullet collisions
For smooth turning, scale turning speed to joystick strength
Massively increased Sewers bridge opening speed
Added detailed logs on player actions (items pick-up, drops and uses) and VR device used
Dropped Enemy weapons now behave physically (you can shoot them)
Improved enemy AI and navmesh navigation, especially around jump pads
Boss enemy improvements
New trainee class where players continue from the same level after death (but without achievements, leaderboard or progression unlocks)
Improved deadzone for joystick rotation
Improved units sticking to their navmeshagents
Replaced ladders with jump pads in all sewer rooms
Added chargebot behavior with warning indicator and better charge path generation
Performance: Deactivate vignettes fully when their alpha is close to zero (was causing unnecessary overdraws)
Performance: reduce mining walls overdraw
Option: you can now show or hide damage numbers
Added new death and trainee achievements
Shotguns now have small kick-back on pumping
Added a “Leave a Review” button
Fixes
Improved reset behavior for edge cases, better handling in slums elevator
Fixed logging issues on PC version
Regenerated meshes with reduced polycount for all homebase assets, all mines assets, all slums assets, industrial medical assets, modern city server room, sewers tiles and decorations
Fixed credits in server room
Prevent spider bots bullets from colliding with itself
Prevent spider bot-hive collisions
Fixed a handful of collision issues
Fixed a handful of null exceptions (during weapon placement, bullet particles, bullet replacement chips)
Fixed charge behavior for Big Red robot
Cleaned up various log spam
Fixed missing modifiers in mesh atlas.
Fixed shading issues on some slums meshes
Improved level generation time (by fixing null issues in room list)
Fixed occasional missing health packs in vending machines
Fixed broken health stations in occasional Mines rooms
Fixed potential Reaper class unlock issues
Chargebot’s actions are now executed in the correct order
Fixed a bunch of incorrectly serialized prefabs which previously caused all sorts of weirdness
Fixed enemy weapons overwriting collision layers on pick-up
Fixed flickering health dispensers
Wooden planks are no longer melee weapons
Menu laser pointer no longer disappears if you press X or A
Fixed a long-standing dash/teleport offset position problem where it would only work correctly if you never move around in your real life space.
Fixed teleportation so that it jumps exactly to the location you aimed for, and not a meter/yard shorter
Fixed headshot reload chip not working properly on some weapons (sniper, laser sight handgun)
Fixed time slowing inconsistency bug
Beta Preview - Update 11 - Quality of Life Improvements
Since Update 10, we’ve focused our efforts on continuing to improve the stability and quality of the game. We’ve been reading player feedback and bug reports as well as addressing other issues we’ve spotted.
We have a few changes we would love to get your feedback on
Weapon Environment Collisions
You can now disable collisions between your weapons and fixed environmental objects. You can try this out in “Settings->Weapons->Environment Collisions”.
Caveats: due to historical reasons with how our levels are set up, we have to go through the whole game and make sure various objects are split up correctly on different layers. So far we’ve only implemented the Homebase and Mines but we are working through the rest of the game. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Is this a worthwhile addition to the game? Would it improve the default first-time experience for new players? Please note this new feature is still WIP, we still have a few things to implement (your hand should also pass-through, haptics are working inconsistently).
Balancing
We've made several changes to the game's balancing, hopefully for the better:
In order to make the game more friendly to new players, we’re also working on a “Trainee” mode, which basically lets you continue from the level you died in, but doesn’t include any progression, unlocks or leaderboards. This is still WIP but you’ll notice a new “Continue” button when you die.
The Sniper and Grenadier class unlock progressions have been re-balanced based on player feedback
The fuse time on the grenade launchers have been severely reduced (sticky grenade 4s -> 1s, normal grenade 3s -> 0.1s). Very curious to hear your feedback on these changes.
One-Handed Play
Sweet Surrender has been nearly playable one-handed since very early on. The only thing missing was an easy way to equip a chip on your active hand. Well, we finally achieved it. After a lot of sweat, research, and endless nights of discussions, we finally came up with an incredibly elegant solution to equip a chip on your active hand: simply pull the trigger.
I know, brilliant.
How to access the beta:
Steam - Right click on Sweet Surrender in your library, select properties > betas. Then select the “beta branch” from the list, then you should be good to go!
Oculus - On the Oculus mobile app, go to account > library > Sweet Surrender, then click on the “Version”. From there, you can select the Beta channel.
To provide beta feedback, just drop us a message in our Discord server. You will be added to the Beta testing group, where you can provide feedback/suggestions in dedicated channels!
Full Patch Notes
Improvements
New weapon-environmental collision option
Improved collision layers of all environmental and prop objects in homebase and mines
Improved weapon collision shapes
bHaptics sleeve feedback support for weapons, items and chips
WIP: new Continue button that allows players to continue from the level they died
Decluttered derelict mineshaft rooms to reduce objects in your path
Smoothed teleport pointer estimation
Re-balanced Sniper and Grenadier class progression unlocks (should be easier to achieve)
Reduced grenade bullet fuse durations (1s for sticky grenade, 0.1s for normal grenade)
Player can now equip a chip on the hand they are holding by pulling the trigger
Door frames now have proper bullet collisions (homebase, mines, industrial)
For smooth turning, scale turning speed to joystick strength
Massively increased Sewers bridge opening speed
Added detailed logs on player actions (items pick-up, drops and uses) and VR device used
Enemy weapons now behave physically (you can shoot them)
Improved enemy AI and navmesh navigation, especially around jump pads
Boss enemy improvements
Fixes
Improved reset behavior for edge cases, better handling in slums elevator
Fixed logging issues on PC version
Regenerated meshes with reduced polycount for all homebase assets, all mines assets, all slums assets, industrial medical assets, modern city server room, sewers tiles and decorations
Fixed credits in server room
Prevent spider bots bullets from colliding with itself
Prevent spider bot-hive collisions
Fixed a handful of collision issues
Fixed a handful of null exceptions (during weapon placement, bullet particles, bullet replacement chips)
Fixed charge behavior for Big Red robot
Cleaned up various log spam
Fixed missing modifiers in mesh atlas.
Fixed shading issues on some slums meshes
Improved level generation time (by fixing null issues in room list)
Fixed occasional missing health packs in vending machines
Fixed broken health stations in occasional Mines rooms
Fixed potential Reaper class unlock issues
Update 10: Resurrection
After more than a year, we’re excited to bring you the biggest update yet to Sweet Surrender. We’ve carefully gone over the whole game to take greater advantage of the hardware capabilities of modern VR headsets and PCs. We’ve also extensively improved the overall player experience based on your feedback.
Update 10 improvements include: ✨ Bloom and HDR 💯 100s of New Visual Effects 🔫 Horizontal Weapon Recoil 🐂 Final Boss Revamp ⚡ No more insta-death on Void Glitch 🥞 Unstuck Button 🐞 Improved Bug Reporting tool 😂 💪 Dozens of bug fixes and performance improvements
This update includes a full-fledged visual overhaul (with incredible results), long-requested improvements to the early game, a reworked weapon recoil system and a whole bunch of quality of life bug fixes.
Before we dive in, check out the trailer to it all in action!
Visual Revamp - Bloom and HDR
We’ve unlocked incredible visual improvements thanks to the addition of bloom and HDR tone mapping.
These new visuals are available on PC, Quest 3 and even Quest 2! (and actually, even on Quest 1 in experimental mode, don’t ask us how we pulled this off). We’ve re-tuned pretty much the whole game so that it works well both with and without these new visual effects. We hope you enjoy them!
100s of New Visual Effects
We’ve gone over the game’s visuals top to bottom to make sure we’re using these new effects to the best of our ability. In particular, we’ve touched up almost all the particle effects and material animations used in the game and added quite a few more. You will see improvements in the bullets, shot reactions, smoke effects, explosions, sparks, and in many more subtle places.
Honestly, you should just go try it. We think it’s such a huge leap forward, we’ve left the old visual mode in for comparison purposes.
Graphics Settings
In the new Graphics Settings menu, you can pick between visual profiles and adjust the intensity of various effects. Depending on the platform’s capabilities, we offer other additional options.
For PC users, we’ve added quite a few options that we wish we had included years ago. We think the game looks even more amazing the higher you go in render scale. But it will still run on a potato if needed cough cough Steam Deckard cough cough.
Horizontal Recoil
We’ve done a full pass on the recoil system of the weapons to implement a better feeling positional recoil. We’ve then re-tuned every weapon to make them feel extra juicy. Finally, we’ve done some slight adjustments to the recoil behavior of certain weapons to bring them better into balance with other weapon choices.
Jump into the improved tutorial to try some of the old/new recoils side-by-side.
Final Boss Revamp
For the first time in 3 years, the boss has received a bit of love and attention. We’ve gone over all the visuals, improving and adding effects, enhancing the color balance to give the player better feedback.
We also fixed various broken attack behaviors and cooldowns. Normal attacks are now easier to read against the background and the player has a better chance of evasion
Overall the boss should feel a lot more balanced and hopefully more challenging. We’re still considering further improvements and we are always happy to hear your feedback.
No more Insta-death on Void Glitch
We’ve addressed one of the most frustrating user complaints: accidentally falling through the ground of the level into a glitch zone that kills you. While these didn’t happen often for most players, unfair deaths are extra frustrating in roguelike game.
While we can’t prevent glitching in all cases, we’ve gone through the whole game to make sure the player will auto-reset in case this happens.
We’re continuing to improve on this behavior to handle all edge cases. Expect further improvements.
Unstuck Button
Tied with the previous improvement, we’ve also added an “Unstuck” button to help you for those occasions where you glitched out or got stuck in an object and couldn’t move out.
This should hopefully address a second source of frustration: getting physically stuck and being forced to end a run.
Improved Bug Reporting Tool
We’ve improved our in-game bug reporting system, to make it easier for you to let us know about specific issues like framerate drops, broken AI, lost weapons, etc. This sends us a log of your run (stripped of any identifiable data). Please reach out to us on Discord so we can look further into specific issues and understand the context of your experience.
Dozens of Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements
We’ve made dozens of other smaller improvements and bug fixes, with an aim of adding a layer of polish and quality that should improve the overall experience.
We were also able to optimize many assets with zero impact on visual quality (what we call “free wins”, they are so tasty). This cleared even more room for these extra visual post-processing effects and particles.
We also spent some time tuning and balancing the new visual effects on various platforms, to try to give a solid (comfortable) experience by default.
So to summarize, this release is more beautiful, more performant (smoother framerate) and more stable. Without a doubt there are still issues to address and/or to improve but we hope in the meantime you’ll enjoy this update.
These details are listed in the full release notes below.
End of Early Access
For the dev team, this release represents our “spiritual” graduation from early access to the 1.0 release state. We’ll continue to make improvements, but we feel we finally reached the visual aspiration we originally had when we first prototyped and pitched this game.
Not many people know this, but the original development of Sweet Surrender was done from start to initial release in 14 months, with 6 weeks on the initial prototype. Update 10 represents the visual quality and polish level we wish we could have included at the original launch. But one has to ship…
What’s incredible with the new visuals is how it comes close to matching some of our initial renders in our original pitch deck.
We’re incredibly proud of the reception to the game and to all our fans who have stuck around as we’ve evolved the game. Thank you for your love and support.
Give Us Feedback!
Do you love it? Please tell your friends.
Did you find some issues? Let us know! The most helpful way to give us feedback is in our Discord https://discord.gg/salmigames
What’s Next?
We’re continuing to iterate on improvements to the game while listening to player feedback.
Would you like to see more updates? Please share the game with your VR friends.
Thank you, The Salmi Games team
Full Release Notes
New Features and Improvements:
New Graphic Options supporting Post-Processing Effects and increased render scale
Custom graphic settings on PC
New Bloom Intensity and Effects Intensity sliders. Bloom Intensity controls the baseline "static" bloom strength. Effects Intensity adjusts the visual 'strength' of explosions and any other animated or dynamic effects.
Reworked visual assets to support bloom glow effects
Improved texture quality
Improved look of sewers area
Improved visuals of Lunatic end sequence and win screen (space flight scene with credits)
Polished particle and material animation assets (bullets, shot reactions, smoke effects, explosions, sparks and numerous other details)
Added material animations to all explosions
New bullets and hit/impact particles for player and most enemies
New enemy particles (Bulky Melee Bot, Security Bots, Final Boss)
New muzzle flashes for shotguns, revolver and grenade launchers
Improved performance for all particle effects (should result in more particle systems being shown at the same time on Quest 1/2)
Lowered polycount on all enemies and weapons without loss in visual quality (should result in better performance)
Reworked part of the industrial tileset and props (lower polycount, cleaner geometry/outlines, added more glow elements)
Fixed texture bleed on endless walls and lowered their polycount
Lowered polycount of skyscrapers and fixed some wrong materials on them
Added glow elements to room connectors and lowered their polycount
Added horizontal weapon recoil and balanced all weapons
Players are now reset if they fall out of the map. This should hopefully fix a large source of frustrations.
New "Unstuck" button in pause menu, which will reset you to the start of the level
Improved chip and weapon tooltips in homebase
Extra visual indicator for undiscovered chips
Increased Render Scale to 1.35 on default settings for Quest 2
Boss fight improved by fixing broken attack phases, balancing cooldowns, improving visuals contrast and various smaller visual improvements.
Boss fight rocket attacks are easier to read now (rockets were extremely small before)
New Holster Settings Menu, unifying previously disparate options. Minor cleanups of other smaller inconsistencies. Does anyone use the horizontal offset setting?
Improved pump shotgun to prevent pumping when fully loaded, but still allow pumping if the secondary hand trigger is held.
Improved the description of various weapons
Adjusted blaster chip explosions (less harsh now)
Adjusted revolver muzzle flash to avoid blocking sight lines
Improved readability of holo map with bloom active
Toned down glow of class hands
Balanced bloom on several environment assets
Performance improvements of certain rooms
Adjusted menu text outlines
Improved logging and bug reporting system
Improved and updated Credit screens with new team members
Improved Lunatic end sequence
Improved and fixed some decoration assets
Bug Fixes
Fixed list of chips in home base
Security bots no longer run out of ammo with certain weapons after one magazine (Grenade Launcher, Burst Handgun, Heavy Submachine Gun)
Fixed error when destroying an EMP'd turret
Fixed some chips (Speed Boost II/III, Overload, Overheating) not spawning in levels and unlocking properly when picked up
Fixed interaction of Blaster Chip with other chips that change bullet types (Firepower, Heavy Ammo, Acid, Mobile Malware)
Fixed already defeated (and exploded) turrets "respawning" inactive when revisiting a room
Fixed missing particles when shooting decoration assets (prefab link was missing)
Fixed inconsistent player bullet impact behavior (handgun bullets had 30 times the force than shotgun/sniper/other bullets)
Fixed wrong materials on drones
Fixed weak points on scanner bot, bulky melee bot and all drone variants
Fixed weak points (explosive tank on back) not being removed after being hit for all guardian and drill bot variants
Fixed damage multiplicators on gunner bot and spider bot soldiers
Fixed wrong weapon on improved grenade launcher bot (spawned with Shotgun)
Fixed wrong weapon on improved burst shotgun bot (spawned with Precision Shotgun)
Fixed healing ray of drones (had high impact force that could potentially bounce around other enemies when hit
still has problems with aiming though)
Fixed door animation (some door types would still stick out of walls on one side after opening)
Fixed a number of null reference exception errors that had adverse side effects
Fixed various typos and text layout issues
Fixed crash on startup due to bluetooth permission changes in latest Android version
Fixed some edge cases when glitching out of the map
Fixed issue with burst shotgun bot
Boss fight: fixed drone mouth attack (drones often were immediately killed after being spawned)
Boss fight: removed overseer laser attack (was completely broken)
Boss fight: fixed collider for mouth (was gigantic
