Hello everyone!
It's the 6th of the month! It's Chronicle time!
So, if you need a quick reminder of what we're currently working on, I suggest you read Slormite Chronicle #14 and Slormite Chronicle #15 because I might talk about things you're not familiar with. But basically, we're working on The Great Forge, an endgame mode, and it's looking good.
The Great Forge Gameplay
Gameplay is coming along nicely.
We now have a proper wave sytem in place and everything is playable and fun, which is a good thing.
Right now, enemies spawn in various locations and your goal is to outlast them. Every wave consists of around 75 to 300+ enemies (depending on your Wrath Level, the Challenges you're facing and the actual Wave you're facing, so it gets harder and harder over time).
It's going to be faster paced than the regular Battlefied Expedition, with a higher density of trash enemies and packed compositions.
We've tried various ways to spawn enemies inside The Great Forge and we ended up with a simplified lane system: Enemies can come from 7 different lanes all around the Forge, with usually 2 to 3 different lanes active every wave.
Every 10 waves, there is a special wave, with a much higher number of enemies coming from all 7 lanes. Once, you've dealt with it, you have the opportunity to open the War Chest (which I'll talk about a bit later) or to keep going for another 10 waves.
Cory's Challenges
After you defeat a wave, you'll get to choose among 3 Challenges of with different rewards every time.
Challenges can have numerous effects such as increasing the strength of enemies, spawning a Boss or adding new attack patterns to it, or adding a Cataclysm effect etc... And can last from various amount of time: from 1 wave to the rest of the run.
The harder and longer the Challenge is, the better the reward attached to it is.
Once you complete a Challenge, the reward goes into the War Chest.
The Siege Leader
The Siege Leader is the new boss we're adding in The Great Forge.
In here, you get to choose WHEN you want to face him (using Cory's Challenges). And since it adds various bonus effects once you defeat it to your War Chest (which I'll talk about below), you might want to wait as much as you can. But the longer you wait, the harder he'll be.
Defeating the Siege Leader will also be the only way to get your hands on the new Reaper Runes (see the previous Slormite Chronicles).
The War Chest
As I've mentioned above, rewards from completed Challenges get into the War Chest.
You can see what's inside the War Chest at any point during the game, but it can only be looted once every 10 waves.
Obviously, if you are defeated you will lose what's inside.
This is a very empty War Chest, just to give you an idea of what it looks like.
Among the possible rewards, you'll get to loot Reapersmith Spirits which are the main currency that you can use at Cory's Shop (to upgrade Reaper Affinity, Reaper Runes and purchase Slorm Reapers for your other classes). This will be the most important loot there since they can only be looted with Cory's Challenges.
Also, when the Reapersmith Spirit of the reward is the same as the Slorm Reaper you're currently using, you'll get a massive reward bonus. So you can actually farm much faster the Reapersmith Spirits you're looking for.
On top of that, you will be able to be rewarded with Goldus, Slorm, Fragments, Equipment, Slormites and Slormelines.
For Slormites, Fragments, Equipment and Slormelines, the reward is random in the sense that each reward is a "random roll" and can very well be an Epic or a Legendary item (or high tier Slormites).
Basically, you accumulate "random rolls" that are all "resolved" when you open the War Chest.
But there's a twist: there are two other types of rewards: War Chest Quality & War Chest Quantity.
The War Chest Quantity reward increases the quantity of everything that's inside the War Chest by a set percentage (depending on the difficulty of the associated challenge, works on past and future rewards).
While the War Chest Quality increases the chance to get Equipment, Fragments, Slormites or Slormelines of higher quality.
We're also thinking of rewards such as "Increases War Chest Quantity by 2% for every item type inside your War Chest" and so on.
Now about that release date...
It's a matter of weeks, but since this update is so heavy we have lots of testing to do. So unfortunately, I don't believe we can be ready for August, but only by a few days. Our goal is to get it done before the next Slormite Chronicles (so before September 6).
That being said, I feel like I have to talk about the time it's taking to release this update a bit more. Clearly we didn't anticipate that it would take so long and we should have cut the update in 2 smaller updates, just so you guys get something new to play with every month or so.
Also, we (almost) only get positive vibes when we post Slormite Chronicles and (almost) never feel pressured by our players, besides a couple of negative reviews, which is fair. But we also want you to know that the stress we put on ourselves grows day after day between two updates, just because we're dead serious about finishing this game and because we know that taking 4 to 5 months to release an update is well... not so great.
The positive part is that this update is full of changes, reworks and new mechanics so we have that going on for us which is nice.
Once this update is done, we'll rework the Road Map entirely, and work on smaller chunks of content that can be released much faster. Things that are easy to produce and that brings a lot to the game.
We'll make sure that this kind of delay between two updates never happens again.
Have a nice day everyone!