Version 1.3 has been released! This update focuses on the titular Dead City and fleshes out the exploration of it. It also adds two new heroes, four new spells, and a whole slew of Quality-of-Life improvements and bug fixes - many of these suggested by the community. Thanks, community! You're the best.
The update introduces a new tier of Ruined Tower for heroes to explore. The Ruined Library contains loot that can upgrade a hero or a guild's capabilities significantly and even alter late-game strategies. There are six different loot drops that can occur when a Ruined Library is explored.
- The guild gains a random Lvl 8 hero. This hero does not take up any 'slots' at the guild.
- The hero exploring the library gains Legendary Gear. These add +10 / +10 to attack and defense, compared with +6 / +6 from gold gear.
- The hero exploring the library gains a permanent speed boost
- All future hero recruits now start off with a healing potion
- All heroes (except the merchant) can go on Support quests and tag along with each other.
- The guild gets an assortment of (new!) high-level, single-use spell scrolls
Two new heroes have arrived to explore the ruins - the Thief and the Dog (woof). The thief is a ranged marksman who places a higher priority on raiding monster lairs. They'll wait to destroy monster lairs until they are a higher level as compared to other heroes. (For instance, a Warrior will try to raze a Level 1 Sewer when they reach Level 3. A Thief will wait until they reah Level 4.) Dogs (woof) love to roam around with other heroes, and get a large priority bonus to any Support missions. Dogs also start with the Support ability, as do Clerics and Bards. However, Dogs are unable to buy any equipment upgrades at the Blacksmith. They can purchase protection rings.
There are new spells and modifications to old spells. As far as old spells go, the spell Homesickness has been ditched. Like its forgotten predecessor, Heroic Amnesia (lol), it was too unclear what the spell was meant to do. It has been replaced with a Town Portal spell, which is what everyone wanted Homesickness to be. It is an expensive spell at 200 Lore, but will get your heroes out of a bind. Next up comes Flatten Earth, which has had its cost reduced to 100 Lore, is now included in the starting set of spells, and can remove explored Ruined Towers!
Four new spells are included. The first, Summon Lair, creates a low-level monster lair at a target location. This spell costs 25 Lore and is unlocked with Advanced Spell Research. This should allow players to assist fresh recruits later on in the game by ensuring there's level-appropriate enemies to fight. The next three are one-time-use spells that can be discovered in Ruined Libraries. One, Meteor, is a 7x7 massive AoE damage spell. The next, Tax Heroes, takes 50% of the heroes' gold and gives it to the guild treasury. The final one, Supercharge Towers, gives all guard houses a temporary boost to damage, range, and speed.
The final Big Addition to the game is one that you'll never be able to see: the Danger Map(tm). Each tile on the map is given a 'danger' rating based on nearby monsters, and heroes now include this danger rating in their mission decision tree. This should prevent the classic "Low level hero tries to raid a sewer that's guarded by three cyclops" kinda of error. (Heroes don't check the danger rating on the path to the target, just at the target tile. So they might try to walk by some cyclops dens. But overall they should act much smarter.) Additionally, heroes may now take a Training mission to gain experience up to (2 * Guild Level) levels.
Other changes!
- Level 10+ heroes now no longer target low level lairs (Sewers, etc.) if they don't have a bounty placed on them. This should leave some good targets for lower-level heroes.
- Fixed a bug where Supporting heroes did not share gold and exp gains when their support target one-shot killed a monster.
- Buttons to hire Support heroes now have an icon.
- Fixed a bug where Ruined Towers gave neither gold nor lore when explored.
- Ruined Libraries may have a reward flag placed on them.
- Added an Qwerty / Azerty button under the title screen Options menu.
- Game can now be paused by lowering the game speed to x0 (replaces the x1/9). Note that the UI only updates on ticks, so if you cast a spell or build buildings you won't see the guild's gold or lore stash change until you unpause.
- Heroes may be dismissed and guild buildings may be destroyed. The button is next to the Zoom button.
- Fixed several issues with the 16:10 aspect ratio display.
- Added a button to increase bounties by a large amount (+50).
- Added the ability to reverse tab through heroes with Control + Tab.
- Extended the life of the Grave icon that pops up on hero death from 1 second to 3 seconds.
- On Chill difficulty, removed goblin stat increases on levels 3 and 5.
- Chill and Normal difficulties now start off with 100 and 50 lore, respectively.
- Fixed a bug where heroes' armor upgrades did not display properly until a weapon upgrade was purchased.
- Fixed a bug where players could build on unexplored tiles.
- Added a Replay Game button when the player loses a non-campaign game. This allows the player to restart the map with the same seed. There's a bug where it doesn't always work and there will be small variations in the map, but it's close at least.
- Mycellaneous typo fyxes
- Fixed a bug where support missions didn't properly reset their length counters after the support mission times out.
- Fixed a bug where some Ruined Towers were razed instead of raided.
- Fixed a bug where a monster would be selected and then deselected, and the Bounty button would be visible and clickable but nothing would happen.
- Bounties now display the number of heroes currently chasing the bounty.
It's been a lot of fun making Within a Dead City, but at this point the game has neither the sales or the review score to keep this as my primary game dev focus. I'll be kicking off another round of Tiny Mass Games in October and starting work on a fresh game.
I've still got ideas for what I want to add to the game! I'd like to do another content update that adds four new high-level heroes, but where the player needs to construct specific guild buildings to unlock each class. Like Majesty, these would come in mutually-exclusive pairs. (So any given game could only have 2 of the 4 new heroes.) I'd also like to play around with the magic spells, removing lore completely and moving all spells to the 'scrolls' system that the three new spells have. (Except for Flatten Earth and Summon Lair, which would now cost gold.) The player would automatically get some scrolls for completing buildings and upgrades, such as getting a Heal scroll for building an alchemist or a Town Portal scroll for upgrading the Guild Hall. They would get some for exploring Ruins too. I think this would give spells a more strategic flavor when they are a more limited resource.
The game's review score is still weighed down by a number of "not enough content" negative reviews from the game's launch. That makes it hard to justify additional dev work when Steam shoppers see that the game is below the 70% "Positive" review cutoff. For the next content update, I'll get it done in bits and pieces over the next year - it's a fun game to work on :D If the game's review scores do cross that 70% threshold, then I'd love to focus on Within a Dead City for a while longer.
If you'd like to keep up with my future game updates and progress, then my Discord server or itch page (joshuagalecki.itch.io) are the best places to follow me :)
