Firstly I want to thank everyone so much who played the demo and provided feedback!

I was happy to see a lot of people reaching the end of the demo and enjoying their time with the game. The response has been great and I'm so grateful to everyone who has played!

With this release of the demo, a lot of feedback regarding the movement/controls has also been brought up. While The Cave Diver is meant to be a frustrating rage style game with challenging controls, I do recognize that some of the physics of the demo are too unpredictable, unrealistic, and unfair.

With this said, I have been working over the past few weeks on revamping the physics and movement slightly to address these issues and create a more predictable and controllable character that remains uniquely challenging to control.

This new movement system addresses the following:

1. The head, spine, legs, and knees all have more realistic angle constraints. They will try to stay within these constraints and not move unrealistically, unless forced to squeeze through a tight passage.

2. In open situations where your body can stretch out fully, your limbs will move towards their natural realistic position.

3. The cursor now has a weak and a strong radius which give you more hand control in small areas, and greater pushing/pulling strength when forced to the strong radius.

4. The cursor will move towards the weak radius unless it is actively being moved outside of it. This creates a sense of feedback by actively pushing the mouse/analog stick to move the player with force.

5. Pulling strength and direction has been tweaked to give more control.

6. One armed grabbing strength has been improved to allow for great ability to climb while switching hands.

7. A watch has been added to the left wrist to help distinguish which hand is which..

8. Cursor follow speed of the hands has been scaled up based on distance to the center. This allows for greater control in tight spots but more responsiveness when moving fast.

9. Options to adjust cursor sensitivity have been added.

I genuinely think these movement improvements make the character much more intuitive and fun to navigate with and result in less unfairly frustrating positions. I'm sure this wont be the last time I alter the movement as I continue to build the full game, but this is a large step in how I want the character to feel so let me know what you think!

The other update to the demo is the addition of new languages!

You can now play the Cave Diver Demo in Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese.

The option to change the language is in the settings menu.

The Demo of The Cave Diver is now available to play!

About the Demo

The Cave Diver Demo introduces you to a segment of the cave that has been unexplored for decades. Here you will learn to maneuver throughout this claustrophobic maze of rock using only your two hands. Learn to perfect these punishing controls, and discover the remnants of old caving journals left by explorers who failed to navigate these unforgiving caverns.

Experience the unconventional controls, twisted caverns, and claustrophobic horror for yourself in this demo of The Cave Diver.

This demo is a completely unique cave level and narrative story separate from the main game. The content in here will is exclusive to the demo and will feature a sample of the the game mechanics and claustrophobic horror that you can expect from the full release.

How You Can Help

I'm very excited for you all to give the game a try and experience The Cave Diver for the first time. If you have any issues or come across bugs in the demo please don't hesitate to post in the steam community and I will do my best to keep up-to-date with the issues.

If you enjoy the demo, I ask that you please leave a positive review when you have the time! It really helps me out as a solo developer self publishing this game.

Big thanks to The Cave Diver Discord Community for helping playtest this and provide amazing feedback on the demo. If you would like to join the discord to share feedback, ideas, or join future playtests you can join below:

Join The Discord[discord.gg]

If you're a Streamer/YouTuber/Journalist who would like access to a media package please get in contact with me via twitter.