Update 0.3.2: health comes back and every zombie has a weakness

This one comes from the first Early Access feedback thread and a long evening of my own play-testing. Thank you to everyone who wrote in. The early game was harder than I meant it to be, and a few things that looked like bugs in the moment turned out to be exactly that.

The first ten waves

I went back to how the classic round-based zombie games handled their opening rounds and borrowed the shape.

- On Normal, health comes back. Six seconds after the last hit, you regenerate to full over about four seconds. Getting hit twice in a row still kills you. Standing in a corner does not. Easy, Hard and Horde keep the old no-regen rule.

- No runners until wave 5. Runners and their speed build to full strength by wave 10.

- Fewer zombies at once in the early waves, arriving more slowly, hitting softer. Everything reaches full strength by wave 10 instead of wave 6.

- Smaller waves to start: 6 on wave 1, growing by 3 a round.

Zombies are different now

Each kind has one thing to learn about it.

- Runners: hit one in the leg while it is sprinting and it goes down. They are fast, not sturdy.

- The decayed ones are rotten. Their legs give way at half the damage and they stumble easily.

- The HazMat suit takes half of every body shot, and the sparks show it. Aim for the visor, which takes more. Kill one up close and the suit tears: step back from the gas.

- Brutes ignore leg shots completely. Only headshots and shotgun blasts make them stagger, and they take more damage from behind.

- Anything crawling dies to a shove. Stamp on it.

Fixed

- Zombies swing properly again. Since the Next Fest build each zombie could only land one hit per attack loop, which made a lone zombie almost harmless and a crowd confusing. Every swing that connects counts now, one hit per zombie every 1.25 seconds.

- Dead zombies no longer block you. A body in a doorway used to be a wall until it despawned.

- Zombies killed while crawling collapse to the floor instead of freezing in place, and one crippled and killed in the same moment no longer dies standing up.

- The crouch is back. It had been a slow walk without getting any lower since the last update.

- The lag that built up wave after wave: dead zombies from the room spawners were being kept around invisibly instead of reused. They are recycled now.

- Zombies and players no longer walk through the medical barriers, reception desks, beds and IV stands.

- "Start Generator" no longer appears on walls where nothing can be started. Prompts need a clear line of sight to the thing they belong to.

- The power room showed two prompts for one switch. One prompt now, and it tells you how many generators are still needed.

- The long hallway gate, the MRI door and the power room door asked for no nerve. They do now.

- Your body casts a shadow again when you stand in front of a light.

- Every door and elevator panel is a tap of F. No more holding.

- On a controller, the controls list scrolls back to the top properly.

New

- Zombies react to where you hit them. New animations for body hits from the front, back and sides, arm hits that knock the arm back, and leg hits that buckle the knee.

- Headshots hit hard. A killing headshot throws the zombie back and down, away from the shot. One that doesn't kill staggers it well back, and it comes on again slowly. A shotgun blast up close knocks them off their feet, and every hit shoves the body.

- Legs matter. A leg shot buckles a zombie and slows it for a moment. Keep hitting the same leg and it limps, then gives way and drops to a crawl. A crawler's body is low too, so aim down.

- A real after-death screen: how many waves you survived, a row per survivor with points, kills and headshots, your best wave for that difficulty, and your Steam global rank.

- Steam leaderboards for each difficulty, on a new Leaderboards page in the main menu and the pause menu: the top ten, your rank and the players around you.

- Grit replaces the Health Pack in the vending machines. With health regenerating, a heal was dead money. Grit raises your max health by 25 for the rest of the run, up to four times, and patches you 25 on the spot. 500 nerve, rising. Nerve buys the body that holds the will.

- The power sign behind each generator glows until that generator is running, so the generators read in the dark.

- A controller sensitivity slider (Settings, Control). The stick now turns at the same speed whatever your frame rate; it used to get faster on faster monitors.

- Optional enemy indicators (Settings, Display, off by default): a dim dot for zombies you cannot see, nothing for the ones in front of you.

- Auto reload when the magazine runs dry. Off by default, in Settings under Controls.

- Shove is in the controls list and can be rebound.

What I want to know

Wave 5 is where the runners start now. Tell me if that is the right place. If Normal feels too safe with the regen, say so. And tell me if any zombie type feels unfair; every number is easy to move.

Thanks for playing.

SizilStank