Hi folks,
DemonCrawl's new update is finally here! v1.69 introduces new items, avatars, balance changes, and more. Full patch notes available below!
Special Avatar
We have worked with the excellent Wanderbot to create a new avatar for DemonCrawl:
Wanderbot showcases a wide variety of games, including your favorite little minesweeper RPG. His commentary is always on point, and he's really good at delivering constructive feedback for game devs.
Many players have personally reached out to us and let us know that they discovered DemonCrawl through Wanderbot's channel, for which we are tremendously grateful. We hope we can show our appreciation with this custom avatar! (Note - Wanderbot will provide the unlock code through his channels. We may eventually include it in this post, with his permission. We let content creators decide how they would like to distribute their avatars.)
Check out Wanderbot on YouTube and Twitch today!
New Features
- New Patreon rewards Den of Dragons
- New passive item: Book of Gold - "Pick up hearts at full life to gain 10 coins."
- New passive item: Book of Maps - "Pick up hearts at full life to gain 1% pathfinding."
- New consumable item: Perfume - "Every 20 turns, spawn a heart."
- Added "Book" as a Library research subject
- Added "Pathfinding" as a Library research subject
- Added "Morality" as a Library research subject
- Overhauled a number of backend systems in preparation for Arena mode
- New streamer avatar: "Wanderbot" (https://twitch.tv/wanderbot)
- New avatar: "Archbishop" by Sam Caron
- New community avatar: "Worm" by TEAM WORM
- New community avatar: "The Goat" by Vospi and Cubear
- Mobile: Redesigned the "Full Game Unlock" screen
Balance Changes
- Book of Combat rework: "Pick up hearts at full life to kill a random monster, revealing it if necessary."
- Book of Necromancy rework: "Pick up hearts at full life to gain Bones."
- The old Book of Necromancy effect has been moved to another item called Zombie Charm: "When you bury Bones, spawn a familiar in the same cell."
- Book of Truth cost reduced from 18 to 14
- Snake Skin can now drop items into hidden cells
- Toxic mod aura density reduced from 15% to 10%
- Illusory mod difficulty tier increased from 1 to 2
- The autosolver now takes obscured cell values into account
- The autosolver now takes Frozen cells into account
- The autosolver will somewhat take gleaned cells into account
- Mobile: significantly reduced prices of token microtransactions
- Mobile: you can now purchase an instant respawn after your first Game Over in a quest (only available in Normal difficulty)
Bug Fixes
- Fixed Appetizer toast showing up even when you spend less than 5 coins
- Improved logic for horizontal scroll UI
- Bosses can no longer spawn over immutable landmarks like stairwells
- Fixed Third Eye destroying objects on 0-value cells
- Fixed an issue where a low amount of pathfinding could prevent end-of-stage autoflagging
- Using the open cell keybind on an empty burning cell will no longer burn you twice
- Sacrificing an object with cursed aura no longer cancels attempt to collect loot from a burning cell
- Implemented workaround for rare crash related to orb mutations
- Fixed a rare crash related to Nemes
- Entering a Mystic Statue will now correctly activate "stage leave effects" such as Doctor payment
- Divine Blood Magic no longer activates Warlock II when there are no visible monsters
- Fixed a crash related to using Snowglobe on a boss
- Added failsafe for familiar movement to prevent rare crash
- Mutant can no longer apply mutations to more than 3 Cankers at the start of the quest, for example through a Hero Trial
- Mobile: fixed return button on virtual keyboard not working for certain devices
- Fixed activation issue with Burnt Marshmallow
- Fixed memory leak related to Rainbow Rope
- Fixed possible memory leaks related to Makeshift Weapon, Rainbow Trout, Chaos Portal, Dark Ink, Quest for Sin, Anvil, Mirror, and Global Warming emblem
- Speculative fix for a rare crash related to the Pure boss mod
- Fixed a rare crash related to spawning certain strangers in bubbles and passing a turn in the same step
Hotfix #1 @ 6:00 PM EST - Fixed a crash related to the "ETC" tab of the Codex. Linux build now available, Mac to follow.
iOS Delay Pt. 2
Despite our best efforts to have the iOS port ready, we ran into a major setback in Apple's approval process. Unfortunately, we have no choice but to postpone the iOS release once again. We don't make this decision lightly.
While we won't announce another release date at this time, we feel that we owe our players an apology as well as a full explanation for the delay.
The following is a technical recap of the situation. Please keep in mind that we are not trying to shift the blame here - we take full responsibility for failing to meet our deadline. That said, we feel it is important to keep our players in the loop when things don't go as planned.
DemonCrawl's iOS port was finished well before the original launch date. The game ran great on our test devices, and we felt confident that we would be able to pass Apple's review for quality control.
To the contrary, Apple declined our submission on the grounds that microtransactions were not working properly. It turned out that DemonCrawl could not retrieve a list of MTX products from Apple's servers. We assumed that we must have made a mistake in our implementation somewhere and spent the next several days reviewing our code.
Our investigation turned up short.
After several more days of going back and forth with Apple's support team, the microtransactions suddenly began working. This was great news, but it cost us a lot of time and we still aren't sure what exactly fixed the problem - our best guess is that there is some undocumented verification process for new iOS microtransactions.
After thoroughly testing our MTX, we re-submitted our iOS build to Apple and announced the one-week delay. We figured this would give Apple enough time to conduct their second review (this usually takes around 24 hours) and give us enough time to address any other problems that came up.
DemonCrawl was declined again. The review team stated that our microtransactions were causing a crash, which we could not reproduce.
We eventually discovered a probable cause - the GameMaker IAP (in-app purchase) extension was known to be buggy on very particular setups. An update for the extension was released a few months ago, but we cannot install it because it is only available for the cutting-edge GameMaker v2.3, which would require complete DemonCrawl project conversion. This is no small task.
TL;DR We are in a tricky situation because we just learned that it is probably impossible to publish an iOS app made with a version of GameMaker older than v2.3. DemonCrawl is made with v2.2. Upgrading to v2.3 requires a significant overhaul of DemonCrawl's codebase.
Curiously, GameMaker's iOS documentation does not mention the v2.3 requirement, so it caught us off guard at the very last minute. Still, we hold ourselves responsible for the delay as we should not have announced the iOS launch date as early as we did.
What's next?
We are now beginning the process of upgrading DemonCrawl to GameMaker v2.3. Thousands of lines of code need to be rewritten, but we are making good progress. We hope to have it ready for beta testing by the start of next week.
Once our beta testers have had some time with it, we will prepare another submission for Apple and keep you apprised of any developments. We will not announce a new iOS launch date until we are 100% sure there will be no further obstacles in the review process. Thank you for understanding.