Greetings Dredgers! For anyone not following on the discord, this update probably seems quite out of place. After all, I did say crafting was going to be the next big update, so what gives? Well, in short, I decided to have a 'small' break from working on item systems, and decided to 'quickly' polish up one of the most broken/buggy things in the game, that being undead and the necro class.
Unfortunately this took much longer than expected, due to a few reasons: The update required far more work than expected, I got side-tracked a lot, and simply put, I was lazy for 2-3 weeks in which no work was accomplished. I am not trying to excuse my negligence, but I just wish to be transparent with you all.
But hey, we actually get to be a Lich now, so that's something!
Necro I, II and III
Necro is the first class to reach rank 3! Which was probably inevitable in all honesty, I originally thought Pyro would be, but seeing as Necro was the only class other than shiner to be rank 2, it makes sense it'd be the first.
The main goal for Necro is to make it stick to it's theme more, and base each rank off a different state of undeath.
Necro I is the least changed of the first two ranks, with it's theme already being corpses mostly.
Imbue: Corpse functions mostly the same as before, with second rank giving a chance to auto-dominate raised corpses.
Dominate now shatters the mind of the living for the first two ranks, but dominates them on third.
Corpse Explosion is a 'new' skill, though mechanically it's similar to explosive rot, since that incantation was removed from Necro II. However, Corpse Explosion is far more powerful and useful compared to the previous explosive rot.
Necro II is far different compared to what it used to be, with it's theme now being based off skeletons and bones, with the ghost stuff being moved to rank 3.
Imbue: Skeleton still functions mostly the same as before.
Rip Bone is part-offensive part-defensive skill. You rip bones from enemies and corpses, which float around you blocking damage. Ripping bones from enemies permanently reduces their defence.
Calcium-collector is a butcher type skill, allowing you to rip up corpses for bones. The skill also allows you to repair and fortify skeletal allies, including yourself if you happen to be of the boned variety.
Necro III is the 'final' rank of Necro, with it's theme being based on Ghosts, Souls and the general mastery of necromancy.
Imbue: Soul is the ability you can use as a ghost to possess bodies, whether undead or allies. Once you get Rank 2, it allows you to leave your body as well. Rank 3 allows you to possess enemies if you pass an INT check.
Soul Steal allows you to steal energy from enemies, and at rank 3 you can consume ghosts to permanently raise your INT.
Afterlife is a passive that continuously raises creatures around you. Upon death, Living become zombies, zombies become skeletons, and skeletons become ghosts.
And finally, Afterlife rank 4, the first rank 4 ability in the game, allows you to transform into a Lich!
The Lich
The Lich is designed to be the ultimate form of necromancy in Dredgers. A Lich technically counts both as a living and animated being. It doesn't need to eat, and has much greater stats than most races. Upon getting Afterlife rank 4, you lose your race as it is replaced by Lich.
Lich has about 8 passives in total, majority of them coming from other undead.
It's primary passive is it's phylactery. As long as it's phylactery exists, it's body shall be rebuilt upon destruction. While the phylactery is destroyable by enemies if they find it, you're basically immortal if you keep it out of harm's way.
On balance:
Now you might be wondering "Wait a second, that sounds broken as hell." And yes, you'd be correct. This race/class pretty much makes it possible to never die. I've been thinking more about he game's balance and feel I need to take more liberties with how strong I make things. After all, it's a single player game with resetting progress, being able to become obscenely powerful is fun, and being undying is a huge part of the Lich's theme. So going forwards you may see me take this stance more when it comes to balancing things, or unbalance rather.
The Undead
So as I mentioned previously, a big part of this update was working on the undead side of necromancy.
The biggest change here being that the 'Corpse' (aka zombie) and 'Skeleton' races no longer overwrite your original race. So if you're a human, you won't suddenly lose the ability to sprint upon becoming a corpse. However, certain abilities do get disabled, such as Gloomp's 'Useless body' becoming disabled while undead.
Corpse
Corpses are mostly the same after the update, the most notable change being that they can now have their racial abilities levelled up, and eventually become wights, which are simply the 'used to being dead' version of corpses.
Skeletons
Similarly, skeletons are mostly the same, with their notable change being their 'cold bones' passive now makes them more resilient against projectiles, since this is a big part of skeleton thematics. Similar to corpses, they can level up their skills, but don't have another form to transform into, since in theory that's the lich.
Ghosts
Ghosts have the largest changes of undead, while still mostly retaining what they were before. Instead of manually firing soul burn orbs, they automatically spawn homing versions of these that damage and drain energy from enemies. 'Boo' now stuns enemies that have energy drained from them.
Unlike the other forms of undead, ghosts no longer turn your body into a ghost, rather a ghost is spawned on top of it, and the corpse stays intact. This means your race is not transferred to the ghost, so all racial abilities are lost. Fair warning, if you vacate the body of your lich as a ghost, and you die, you'll be dead forever, as your phylactery only guarantees the reconstruction of your body.
Other Significant Changes
While getting sidetracked is partially the reason this update took so long to come out, it has resulted in some nice things for the game:
Explosion rework/fancy shockwaves
Explosions were reworked due to 'corpse explosion' requiring new effects.
First thing you'll notice is that the explosion doesn't damage it's zone instantly, rather travels outward, pushing back stuff as it reaches it.
Second is the fancy new sprites and effects, showing the precise location of the explosion, rather than vague particle effects.
Third is that doors can now be destroyed, same as all other furniture! (Not locked doors, sorry)
Fourth and last: there's a huge distortion shockwave going out! I bought this effect from a developer called "K.Blank" on Itch.io, so I can't take much credit for it, but I love this effect so much, you'll see I've used it it one or two more places in-game. I don't trust myself not to use it more either, where appropriate of course.
Discord Integration
The game now tells discord all about the terrible build you're currently attempting!
GUI tweaking
Some of the GUI has been tweaked, mostly around classes to make them easier to read:
The colours for different ranks now more accurately reflects the game's tier order (Copper, Silver, Gold, Gem), with small markers underneath for even easier reading. The class 'pips' at the bottom have also been adjusted to be far clearer!
Performance Issues
During the patch, I identified that stat calculations were running particularly slow. This was particularly apparent after the item update, where the calculations for equipment stats became more complicated. As a result, I've gotten the game to cache the results of stat calculations, which has vastly improved FPS in the castle/lab regions, and in theory should help swarms of summons and enemies process faster. The drawback is that enemy stats only update about every 2 seconds, this shouldn't have too many gameplay implications, outside of cultist and gloomp builds, though I've gotten some ideas on how to fix this in future patches.
Changelog
As per usual, changelog is just a compilation of my #dev_logs on the discord, so it will not contain every single change unfortunately, but most of the major ones at least:
- A new type of 'internal' damage has been added, this allows certain damages to bypass external defences like armour. (So poison and being on fire are internal, while acid and fireball damage are external)
- Electricity no longer strips armour points, but still bypasses and adds the armour points to it's damage value.
- Armour now blocks fire attacks and doesn't give fire stacks.
- King's health has been halved since he's a thick boy who takes ages to defeat.
- Herbs now stack better and more intuitively.
- Dash will no longer get stopped by furniture it destroyed (probably)
- Enemy crits have been disabled on floor 1 and 2. Not really happy with how enemy crits work so expect changes in the future.
- Explosions now knock you back even if you are the owner/creator of the explosion.
- Projectiles now pass through furniture without being destroyed, but the furniture still takes damage.
- Doors and Grates can now be destroyed same as other furniture if unlocked.
- Grates are now 'see-through' so enemies can see through them, and you can shoot through them if you wish.
- Energy now regens 100% of the bar per 1 food (previously it was 100% for 5 food)
- If your race does not have a hunger bar, you have a half speed penalty on regenerating energy.
- Skeletons and Ghosts now lose energy at a set rate, and don't regen energy at all by ENG values. So having high ENG means you'll stay alive longer, but you'll always be losing energy outside of your passives.
- ENG now gives 10 max energy per point instead of 5.
- Rune Hat now gives 5 max energy per ENG rather than 1.
- Zombies no longer automatically destroy corpses, Grave Hunger is now a skill which can be used to eat corpses.
- Gloomps actually have a skeleton sprite now, whoops.
- Running out of energy as a Skeleton now means you die, same as enemies.
- Enemies now longer die if they run out of energy as a corpse.
- Every race now has a 'skeleton' sprite that's used when they become a Lich, some of these are temporary.
- Summons can now only drop EXP the first time you kill them.
- The chance for green EXP to drop after enough has been collected has been changed to 20% from 50%
- Blue EXP always drops even if the threshold is reached.
- Magus robe now prevents Energy regeneration upon taking damage for 1 second, to prevent Seemujhs being immune and to make magus robe enemies more bearable.
- Grappler can now be accessed from the fighter tree.
- Enemies no longer level SPD unless it's important to their class. Sort of an experimental change.
Phew, quite an update again, but we're one step further into the game's gradual improvement!
As stated before, I've sort of grown adverse to discussing my long-term plans, but I do feel it's fine for the semi-immediate future. Current idea is to do one more unplanned patch, where I just clean up bugs and do QoL changes. After that, I'm thinking of starting the first part of crafting changes, that being the combination side of things. Beyond that point it's a bit of a toss up to what I'll work on after, either more crafting or switch over to translation system before there's too much text in the crafting menus.
Thanks for reading, I'm glad you made it this far, dedicated fans like you are the best :)
Hopefully the next patch will be done far quicker than two months, hope to see you then!
