Hey y’all,

We are excited to bring our first post-launch content update to all Gunheart players in July! There will be a ton of new content in this one. Take a look below to see some of it. Plus, if you hop into the alphastaging build of the game today, you’ll be able to check out a lot of these features before the full update is released next week!

Not sure how to join alphastaging? It’s easy!

1. Go to your Steam library and right click on Gunheart. It’s the game you play the most so it should be easy to find.
2. Select Properties down at the bottom there
3. Go to the Betas tab even if you personally are an alpha
4. In that first dropdown, choose alphastaging.
5. Play the alphastaging build and check out cool new stuff before all your friends.
6. Potentially find that one of the guns or features is way overpowered.
7. Message me personally so that I may use it against my coworkers before Ray fixes it. Discord is a great place to tell me about this kind of stuff.

• Note: alphastaging is its own separate build of the game, so your profile in alphastaging is separate from the one in public. This means all the guns and loot you earn in one will not go to the other. Alphastaging is great for hoping in to test out new features, but you’ll want to do most of your Gunhearting in public.

What were we talking about?

Oh yeah. New stuff. Here’s some of it:

• Rig Mods. Mods aren’t just for guns anymore! Rig mods give you awesome new abilities, and like gun mods, there are multiple tiers from common to ultra. I’ve got to tell ya, some of these ultra rig mods are just ridiculous.

• Movement overhaul. We’ve changed the core player movement to get rid of all snags so you can now freely move about everywhere in the world.  We’ve also boosted air control to give you more opportunity to finesse those tricky jumps.

• Horde Mode!
• Lone Wolf difficulty. You’ll need to get 3 stars on a mission for this to pop up as an option.

• PVP updates! New weapon balances (shoot people across the map with the pistol while you still can). New health system for PVP including pickups for additional armor and shields.

• Rig paint jobs!
• Lots more!

Hey y'all,

We're excited to announce that the April update for Gunheart is now live! Take a look at the video below if you'd like see some of the latest content in action and meet a few of the folks who worked on it, or if words are more your thing, skip down to the bottom of the post where you'll find lots of them. As always, we'd love to here your feedback, so reach out to us via Reddit, Discord, Twitter, Facebook, and of course through the Gunheart page on Steam.

• 3 Star mission achievements. Users can keep track of their accomplishments. Earn up to three stars for each mission by completing specific objectives including speed runs or beating the mission on elite mode.
• You are here. A new subway map-style mission selection UI gives users a better sense of how they are progressing across Gunheart’s Planet Fortune.  No more scrolling through lists of missions guessing at how to unlock them, yay!
• New Enemy variants!  Wider variety of the hopper enemies, including winged hoppers who will fly to give themselves a better angle in combat. Keep your eyes up!
• Tougher money pumps! You asked, and we delivered! Tweaked the difficulty for the money pump missions.
• More bad guys! Adjusted enemy behaviors and spawns across multiple campaign missions. Enemies will be more aggressive, they’ll deal with fast moving players better, and when and where they spawn makes more sense.  They … just … keep … coming!
• Beating death heart! A new death screen appears upon player death including new UI and an awesome looking beating heart. It’s so pretty, you’ll want to die!
• Get your brawl on! PVP updates!
  • Brawl is much faster paced than before. Scratch that old school deathmatch itch!
  • Completely revamped how weapon pickups work in PVP. You can now strafe over weapons and grab them automatically, and then switch weapons in the quick menu.
  • Adjusted PVP weapon spawn locations and timing.
  • Adjusted PVP weapon balance and put different mods on the weapons you’ll find there. Players will also drop weapons on death now.
  • Tuned highlighting around enemies so you can more easily spot targets
  • Updated PVP spawn behavior
  • PVP health and shield behavior has been retooled
  • Iniquitous PVP map has been infected! Check out the new look, but don’t touch that stuff … it looks gross.

• Money kegs for everyone - money is now shared across all players, and new Gold money kegs can show up in later missions which give 3x the reward.
• Loot room tweaks - bring your bats for some loot smashing fun, loot eggs conveniently float up for smashing, and in-world pop-up makes it much easier to see what reward you earned.
• Elite difficulty tuned - rewards are now doubled and there are no respawns by default, so either bring a friend to revive you or hunt for those precious life kegs (or both!)
• Multi-tool is now smarter about grabbing objects quickly in a cone in front of your hand and will prioritizing what it grabs, making it much more reliable in the heat of combat as a defensive tool.
• Ongoing improvements and bug fixes to audio, enemy AI, and locomotion.

Hey Drifter fans,

I’m Hunter, and I’ve recently had the privilege of joining the team here at Drifter as lead producer. I’ll be helping out with our blog posts on the site until we find someone who is actually qualified. Be sure to stay tuned here for much more frequent updates about all of our projects. Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook are also great ways to keep in touch. Let’s jump right in and give you a sneak peek at some of the content we have planned for our Gunheart April update!

Games are fun, but they’re even more fun when you can prove to your friend that you’re better at it than them. Introducing a way to do that in Gunheart! The Job Goblin is getting a makeover, and as part of that, we’re adding a new three star system. Stars are earned three different ways:

• complete the job
• complete the job on Elite mode
• complete the speedrun

Most of you out there should be able to get that first star pretty quickly, but you’ll find Elite mode and the speedrun to be formidable (based on the sobbing we’ve heard coming from the QA department). We’re doing a few other things to make the game more punishing fun for all of you.

• You’ll find money pumps will be more difficult after the next release, so you better get in there now and take advantage. Soon you’ll have to earn that cash!
• Oh and hoppers can fly now. Those enemies that have been running around with wings … they’ll use them now to shoot you better. We’ll probably keep calling them hoppers. 

Considering all the dying you’ll be doing, we updated the death sequence. How can you call your game Gunheart if there isn’t a big, awesome beating heart prominently featured on your death screen? Well you can’t, so we have that now.

Last but not least, there is a host of changes coming to PVP this month. We’re updating maps, tuning weapons, adjusting weapon locations, and a bunch of other stuff to make shooting friends and strangers alike more satisfying.

This is only the tip of the iceberg for our April update. We’ll do our usual thing and release a video when the update goes live and tell you about all the other cool stuff.

Brian and Kenneth take minute to chat about the the multitool which allows you to grab physical objects in Gunheart. Use objects as impromptu shields, chuck explosive barrels at pesky bad guys, or even pop the heads off enemies when they get in your face.