Great news, everyone! It’s taken us forever, but we’re finally able to tell you the first part of the Fun with Objects Update is now live on Steam!
Why only the first part? The demand for multi-level maps and roofs has been enormous over the last years, and we wanted to give our users the possibility to use both. This meant that all assets in Dungeon Alchemist needed to be reconfigured to adapt to the new height requirements, and, more importantly, that we had to come up with a sound way to generate roofs on any given shape of room you may come up with. The algorithm for this simply didn’t exist. We had to write it ourselves. No easy task given the insane complexity, and it took a long time to get it absolutely right.
To bring you the features we promised in the Fun with Objects update, we then had a choice: develop those extra features, and delay the update for several more months, or give you access to the current features, and add the remaining ones over the next update. We chose the latter, which brings us where we are now. The next part will not be nearly as fundamental as this one, so we’re confident we can release much sooner. And that part will contain most of the object-related improvements.
But we managed to cram quite a few long-requested in this update as well, so check out the trailer below for an overview.
So, without further ado: What are those new features?
Multi-level Buildings
First off: Multi-level! You can now draw any room anywhere, and move up or down a floor with the menu on the right side, or the + and - key on your keypad. This will allow you to draw another room right on top or below. And another one. We didn’t cap the amount of rooms you can stack on top of each other. Yet. 🙂
You can choose to build a regular room on top of another and remove the floors between them to create a higher room: perfect for a cathedral. Columns will automatically adapt to the new heightened ceiling. If you want to change the style of a roof, you can easily do so with the new Roof Menu in the left sidebar.
The multi-level thing also brought a fundamental change to the stairs: they now connect automatically between floors, and remove the floor in the room above. They’re not as flexible as before, but that is something we’ll try to address in the next update. Hatches, pits and holes also received a complete makeover for them to function correctly in this update.
Underground Terrain
Going up was the easy part, and to enable you to go down we needed to provide you with an underground terrain. That terrain had to accommodate rooms above ground at different heights, rooms below ground at various depths, and an editable terrain for you to make caves.
Realistic Interior Lighting
This one has been requested from the very start: a way to hide the sun from shining over the walls inside rooms. Because we added roofs, this was now possible to implement, and you can toggle this on in the Settings menu. You can now finally have realistic indoor lighting!
Abstract Lights
You can now place Abstract Lights in your scene. These are invisible lights that are not exported, but can be used to improve the lighting. Please use them sparingly, as they can be cause performance issues when you place a lot of them.
Object Improvements
We didn’t abandon the Fun with Objects theme completely, by the way: this update contains the the following improvements related to having actual fun with objects:
Added a new tab to the object menu that will only appear when certain objects are selected. This Modular Objects Menu allows you to easily select related objects, and will also allow you to easily connect these objects together with a new UI. Currently, this is only used for rails, pipes and the alchemical pipes, but this will be extended in the future to allow you, for example, to build modular ships (spoiler alert!)
Added a Custom Objects Brush, allowing you to turn any object into a brush. You can access this feature from the "Paint Objects" tab in the Objects menu.
Added a global scale modifier for objects to its advanced menu in the top right.
As usual, there’s a ton of new assets for you to play around with. Most notably an inhabited coffee pot, an enormous church organ, a demonic roulette and a war table.
Other Improvements
We made some other quality-of-life improvements as well:
Added "Recent Maps" submenu to the File menu to easily access all the maps you recently edited.
Added Batch Export functionality, allowing you to configure different export formats for your map and export them all with one click of a button. You can find this option in the File menu.
Added a setting to render the grid on top of everything, instead of under some objects.
The Future
We’d like to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your patience, during what felt to us as an update that was taking forever, and we sincerely hope you enjoy what we think is an entirely new Dungeon Alchemist!