Alrighty! So while there were not too many major changes to gameplay, this was a fairly significant update! The back-end of how the levels and waves are managed has changed significantly in order to make way for the split system! 

======= Gameplay Changes ======

• Reflector Cooldown Increased

A reflector cooldown time has been implemented to prevent people from constantly reflecting and making themselves effectively impervious to taking bullet damage. A short cooldown period has been added if you miss to prevent that. 

However to counteract this, if you successfully reflect the bullet, all cooldowns are reset so you can immediately reflect again. This makes kiji and kari reflecting much easier to pull off now.

• Boot Cooldown Increased

In playtesting, the boots relic was still stronger than intended so the cooldown has been increased from 5 to 6 seconds.

• Kiji Reflect Velocity

The bonus velocity given on a successful kiji reflect has been increased. Hopefully with this technique's execution being made easier this update and with the increased bonus velocity, Kiji reflecting will have more utility in game.

Additionally, when the Kiji reflect bonus is at max (currently +2) the next Kiji reflect will give even more bonus velocity.

======= Split System =======

The game will keep track of your times for every wave and should you beat the game, those times will be saved as "splits". Features have been added so that you can now race against your past splits as well as view you first ever run which will always be available for posterity. These split logs should transfer to new and future updates should anything need tweaking. 

In the settings menu there is now a section titled "speedrunning" which has different options to customize how you'd like the splits to work. 

• Splits Enabled

Pretty self explanatory, will toggle on and off whether or not the game will display your splits in game.

• Live Split Time

====== Miscellaneous ======

When enabled this will let you see a second timer which will give you live data on how close you are to surpassing your previous best split. 

• No Rng

The "No Rng" toggle has also been added under the speedrun section of the settings menu. This when toggled on will make the game use a consistent number generator so that each run should be identical in terms of enemy spawn locations, gold spawn locations, and item sales. This is for those who might prefer to do a consistent speedrun and enjoy memorizing strategies.

• Hardcore Mode

Hardcore Mode has been added in the upper right of the trial select screen. When enabled, you will only have 1 hp and are not able to gain anymore so essentially you must beat the game without getting hit. Additionally, no retries will be allowed so if you die, you must start from the very beginning. 

• Tutorial Video

With the controls and specifics of this game being quite uncommon, the tutorial video has been made mandatory for first time players.  (Pressing S and K simultaneously will skip the tutorial video)

• Window Scaling

This one has been surprisingly tricky to implement but is working (for the most part). So if you want to scale down the window size you can now do that. Though beware that it may still be a bit buggy.

So that's it for now! This should be the last or next to last update of the closed beta! Big thanks to everyone who has helped with early play testing!