0.87 - Endgame and Crafting
End-Game Mode: Freelancer added!
- After finishing the campaign, new Quests unlock at all regions which you can complete to receive a special Ingredient reward.
- Mix and match ingredients and items at the new Science Station to rebuild the Titan in the Basement.
- Defeat the Titan to receive the rewards, including the new Crafting Items!
End-Game Mode: The Waves added.
- From the Hub, jump into the Waves portal on the Left path!
- Earn exp, loot, and Rewards that scale up with your Wave #
- Leaderboard and Achievements!
End-Game Mode: The Gates added!
- Acquire a Gates Key and proceed through the Gates in the Hub. (Left path then Up path)
- Leaderboard and Achievements!
Crafting System Implementation:
- New Crafting Items added that can improve all your Augments and Gear.
- Choose your desired Crafting Items from the Science Station and receive them when you defeat the Titan.
- The Trader in the hub can exchange various Crafting Items
- And you have a chance to get Crafting Items from the Reward panels of all Endgame modes
Other Various Improvements
- Damage Number Popups - Despite having these internally for testing purposes, I thought that if I could render them unnecessary via other feedback systems that it would be a better experience overall. Surprisingly up to this point not a single player had mentioned missing them to me despite every other ARPG having them. Even so I decided to add them as a feature for more informative feedback to players.
- The majority of the UI has received a complete overhaul and facelift with custom textures, panels, buttons, and bars! I'm sure it will go through further iterations, but for now I hope you dig it!
- Tooltips added when mousing over items on the ground.
- Fixed pathing issue where if enemies or summons couldn’t reach a destination it would cause the player to not be able to move for a second or two.
- Fixed focuspanel HUD from not showing up or not showing the proper buffs/debuffs.
- Smoothed out player jittering while jumping/freefalling
- Adjusted loot beams to be smaller and less obtrusive
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed Augment Maximizers and Removers that were acquired from the trader.
- Fixed Augments not saving their new values after using a Reroller/Maximizer.
- Fixed finicky Interactable in Region 7.
Balance:
- Changed lots of Gear stats: how many stats the various colors can roll, what type of stats, their value ranges, etc. If you see stats on an old piece of Gear that don’t make sense or aren’t in the right value range, it's likely an error when the item tried to load with the new stats. I tried to account for all the different scenarios but it's probable I missed some stuff.
- Changed a few augments to different shapes to try and tune down their power a bit. If the Augment no longer fits in your inventory it will throw it to the ground when you first load into the hub.
Performance:
Added two new systems to help increase performance:
- A shadow manager that caps the maximum amount of lights/shadows visible in frame.
- A more aggressive object Culling system that prevents objects that aren’t in frame from rendering.
- Went through each region and optimized various environment assets/effects.
- Environment Objects/Buildings optimizations (lower poly count, lower batch count, better LoDs)
- Still much more that can be improved on.
AI:
- Improved Summon AI to keep within player range better
- Improved enemy healing and kiting AI
- Changed Summon’s AI to now target the closest Enemies, instead of the Lowest Health Enemies. In the future I’m going to try to add an option for the player to be able to choose the AI style on the fly (closest, lowest health, farthest, strongest, weakest, etc). And perhaps more importantly, I’d like to add a way to command the AI to change targets.
Visuals:
- Replaced Spell Indicator visuals with new system that should be more accurate and track uneven ground better.
- Improved player spell indicator intuitiveness and mechanics. E.g. queuing up an ability and then changing it to a new ability now cancels the old spell indicator and brings up the new one or fires off the new ability instantly if it doesn’t use spell indicators.
- A dozen new hair styles for male and female!
- Several Regions have had their environments improved with better pathing, foliage, etc
Known Issues:
- Gear ability hotbar icons can get out of order
- Some players have reported jumping random directions off plateaus in the Basement. I’ve added more code to try to fix the issue but I was never able to replicate the problem in the first place so I can’t be sure my solution will help. Please let me know if this is still happening in the new patch!
- Added some more placeholder and test Voice Overs, and iterated on dialogue. Work on the story and lore has always taken a back seat to my focus on progression systems and combat, but with more time and (mostly) money I'll polish up those aspects to a respectable state.