Hello Sinners! In this update, I’ve done a complete overhaul of the skill system to encourage impactful decision making and greater build variety. Other highlights include the addition of sprinting, damage numbers, and more!
Overall, I am pretty happy with the core combat of Mortal Sin, but I felt like it was lacking a little bit as an action-rpg and roguelike in terms of the character building component. I did some reflection and came to the conclusion that the skills did not feel impactful enough, and were too easy to acquire. Additionally, I wanted there to be more of a risk-reward component in balancing greedy play versus safer decision making. Sort of like gradually removing pieces from a jenga tower, seeing just how close you can get to the edge before it collapses.
I realized that the risk-reward factor was mostly already built in the game, but just wasn’t being utilized effectively enough: I’m talking about durability, of course. Item skills and passive skills have now been unified, leading to direct synergy between your equipment choices and skill orb choices. However, nearly every skill is tied to durability usage, either from the equipment you got the skill from, or from an equipment slot tied to the passive skill you selected.
Passive skills are now tied to a particular equipment slot, i.e Melee Weapon, Staff, Helmet etc. This means you need something in that slot for the skill to be active, and it will also consume the durability of whatever is in that slot. You must strategically consider your skill selections, as stacking too many skills in the same slot may be powerful, but unsustainable for your durability unless you invest in other durability damage mitigating skills. Generally it's best to stack a smaller set of skills, since the durability cost stays the same, and they get super powerful bonuses you can truly feel. For example, increasing your Waveblade stacks increases not only damage, but the number of projectiles as well. Increasing Inner Fire stacks will make your fireballs pierce enemies, etc.
But how do you measure how well your build is doing? Well other than clear speed, you can now see exactly how hard each combo and skill is hitting with these handy damage numbers! You can toggle them in the settings, but you probably won’t want to because they are pretty addicting.
Oh yeah, there’s also sprinting now! To perform a sprint, simply hold the bash button. This opens up a lot of new tactical options that weren’t available before, such as running away to make space to drink your potions. Beware though, enemies will run after you too!
A note about saves: Because I removed the old passive skills, and made a new skill system, your skills on items will be removed along with your passives if you load up an old session. Your character will still be intact otherwise though, and the progression will normalize by the time you hit the next round. Here are the rest of the patch notes, excluding individual specific skill changes that are too numerous to list.
Content
- Added a brand new skill system! Passive skills and item skills have been combined into the same pool of skills, so you can now synergize and stack skills either with items or skill orbs. Every single skill in the game is stackable now up to a maximum of 5 stacks, with compelling rewards for investing heavily into one skill.
- Added 50 new skills! Although some share the same name and icon as before, they’ve all been reworked in some way, with different behaviors and scaling properties. Choose them wisely!
- Passive skills now are tied to a particular equipment slot, i.e Melee Weapon, Staff, Helmet etc. This means you need something in that slot for the skill to be active, and it will also consume the durability of whatever is in that slot. Reworked and updated the UI in many places to better communicate these changes.
- Reworked the starting area to be more compact and convenient. All of the points of interest are closer to the player, there’s less empty space, and it’s more decorated than before.
- You can now hold bash to immediately go into a sprint once the animation is complete. No more shift spamming!
- Reworked durability. Every item now has 100% durability across the board, but consumes different amounts depending on its weight. Fast, light weapons consume less durability per hit, but take more durability damage on block and parry. Slow, heavy weapons consume more durability per hit, but take less durability damage on block and parry. Skills will now consume fixed amounts of durability for the appropriate slots, rather than a random range of durability like before. Generally, you will take way less durability damage when you get hit now, but you will spend more for powerful skills.
- Added damage numbers! I wanted to communicate damage intuitively for all the numerous attacks that had no UI otherwise, such as kicks, punches, fireballs, explosions, etc. Critical hits will show as large yellow numbers. You can toggle damage numbers in the gameplay settings.
- Enigma now has random combos!
Balance
- Struggler has been slightly reworked and buffed greatly. His combos now flow more smoothly, and he is incentivized to switch between melee weapons and staves with the newly added Spellblade combo for a true hybrid playstyle. He also starts with +5 to all starting stats, which makes sin level stat boosts much more meaningful.
- Reduced level size scaling overall from 1x, 1.5x, 2x for A, B and C areas respectively, to 1x, 1.25x, 1.5x.
- Base crit percentage starts at 0%, down from 5%.
- Attack stat no longer adds to your base damage, but instead increases your global damage by up to 200%. Attack was basically the number one source of damage before, which hurt build diversity and meaningful decision making. Now it’s still good, but it doesn’t have to be your main source of damage increase.
- Punches and kicks now scale with your current level, rather than not scaling at all. I felt this was necessary to compensate for the fact that weapons scale with item level and unarmed attacks didn’t have anything similar so they fell behind a lot later in the game.
- Fist weapons now have varying attack speed, in addition to the different damage and hitboxes they already had before, to make them feel more different.
- Elite enemies no longer drop skill crates, but rather sinful essence. This improves the pacing of the game, and ensures that skill choices remain meaningful, rather than being flooded with skills like before. Added a new in-game sin level UI to better show the sinful essence gains since they happen more frequently now.
- Some of the skills ported to the new system will only trigger with direct melee hits now, such as Shared Misery, Chains of Ice, Volatility and Headhunter. I want these effects to reward skillful aim, rather than being triggered automatically by all the different projectiles and explosion effects.
- Portal rooms are always the smallest size now, instead of increasing in size over the course of the run. Empty portal exits are guaranteed to have a sinful essence now so they aren’t just rewardless dead ends. I don’t want portal rooms to ever feel like a drag, particularly when multiple portals spawn in the same room.
- All trials reward a Skill Orb selection now, which is a lot more valuable because skills are not as plentiful as before.
- Rerolling Skill Orbs doubles the price each time.
- Reduced all enemy health by 20%
- Curse item bonuses now scale multiplicatively with each round, so they are way more impactful in later rounds.
- Reworked quest weapon / armor upgrade formula to be more linear rather than exponential scaling
- Tweaked item rarity drop rates so the best items are less common
- Rare (purple) items now have +2 skill level, which makes them unique since every other item can only give +1. Upgrading a rare item with the helena quest reward will give you a godlike (pink) item, with +2 instead of +1, making it the best type of equipment in the game.
- Removed drop chests for now. I don’t think there’s really a good place for these in the game at the moment, as they slow down the tempo and make the rewards less meaningful, but I may bring them back if I find another use for them.
Polish
- The delay after a hit cancel which then allows you to perform your next action now behaves consistently regardless of your frame rate. Increased the delay from roughly .1 seconds (5 frames), to .2 seconds, so attacks have to follow through a little bit rather than having their animation cancelled before the hit is even visible. This does make the game a little less spam friendly, so sometimes it’s best to wait just a beat before inputting your next action to decide if you should block or continue attacking.
- Helena has her own crafting sockets now so crafting at the anvil doesn’t stomp on her rewards.
- It’s now a little more difficult to get out of bounds in the starting area, but if you do, there is an endless void to look at in the horizon. Whatever you do though, don’t touch it!
- Removed the cooldown from buying Sinful Offerings, and added an option to buy Sinful Offerings in batches of 10 for convenience.
- Increased head bob amount, and doubled it while sprinting.
- Hitstop won’t trigger again until the last hitstop is finished
- Hunter’s Mark curse no longer makes the player’s light go dark
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug where jumping straight out of a dash in portal rooms would sometimes kill your upwards momentum
- Fixed a bug where it was possible to endlessly dash jump in portal rooms
- Fixed UI bug where sell button prompt sometimes was in the wrong position
- Other minor bug fixes
This is my last planned systemic rework for Mortal Sin. From here on out, I want to focus on fleshing the game out with additional content and polish for the 1.0 release. I spent a lot of time on the tool sets for levels and enemies, did numerous code rewrites, and I want to fully utilize all the work I did to make the game really shine. Thank you for supporting my game for 2 years now. I will do my best to make the full release the fullest execution of my vision, which you have all given me the opportunity to do!
