New Slay the Princess Test Build (Wow it's here, RIGHT NOW)

Hey folks!

We've got a new Slay the Princess test build ready for y'all for a patch we're dropping soon.

This content was originally intended to be part of the Pristine Cut, but because of ~secret reasons~ we're expecting a significant influx of new players next week, so we wanted to get a smaller update with some important polishes out before then. This update as a whole is a surprise release, so keep it secret, keep it safe ;)

A list of changes:

1. The final encounter with the Shifting Mound has been heavily reworked. It now has dynamic animations, some of the wordier poems have been refined, player responses have been greatly expanded, and those responses are now restructured to differentiate between argumentative threads aimed directly at the shifting mound vs direct responses to a given vessel.

2. The conversation with the Princess before the "Unknown Together" ending has been significantly expanded.

3. The tracks Transformation, The Apotheosis, and The Shifting Mound (Movements 1-5) have been reworked to feature a live orchestral performance by the Czech National Symphony. On top of this, all of the music in the game has been moved over to FLAC, an uncompressed format, so it should have much higher fidelity overall.

4. We've switch the quick menu over to by icon-based rather than text based, and have moved it to the top left of the screen. This should both help with visual fidelity, and it should also fix the majority of controller support issues players have been running into.

5. I caught up on like 3 months of bug reports

You can access this build on the alpha branch on Steam by using the password "theshiftingmound"

If you need help figuring out how to download the alpha build, happy to help if you ask on Discord (but you can also probably find a guide on "Steam beta branches" if you google it!)

Please report any bugs you find on the alpha bugs channel on our Discord! If you haven't joined yet, there's a handy-dandy Patreon integration that will get you set up on our server with the proper permissions for our secret alpha channels!

Things that are particularly helpful:

1. Bugs in the new content.
2. Since music was remixed, please let us know if a given track is much louder than the others.
3. Typos (especially in the new content)
4. Does controller support function better for you?

Thank you so much, as always, for your support, and we can't wait to share more with you!

Best,
Tony (Abby is taking a much earned break)