Hey guys, long time no see! Sorry for the long delay between posts, these months were pretty challenging for the development and we had no time to spare.
That only means that the game’s becoming even better than it was. Now, for the updates.
Stances passive effects
Remember the Knight puppet having different stances tied to the main stats? Well, guess what – they now have passive effects that work when you activate a specific stance.
- Shield stance - blocks one attack per 3 (or maybe 4? not sure) seconds. In the future, we might rework ability cards in a way that will further reduce the blocking cooldown, allowing you to potentially negate EVERYTHING that comes at you.
- Spear stance - gives you bonus damage based on your speed. That doesn’t really sound that impressive, but hear me out - it also accelerates you while you’re moving. So your first attack will basically be a charge that sometimes one-shots enemies (the feebler ones, anyway). It should also have a good synergy with Break Distance and Charge abilities, since they affect your mobility on the battlefield.
- Sword stance - deals splash damage to surrounding enemies and boosts your damage based on missing health. So positioning yourself right in the heart of the battle and always being on the brink of death is a winning strategy for this stance. Not ready yet, but will be added soon.
In-run progression
As you probably already noticed, we’ve added a progression system within the dungeon run. You develop your stats and get new cards that are generally tied to their respective stats. The Pulse cards will be implemented later as they have special mechanics.
And as for progression between runs, aside from the fact that you unlock new NPCs of course, we have quite the pool of options to test and find out what suits the game most of all. "Cross-run" progression will be a part of what we call the "Big Changes" list we'll be presenting to our publisher. Which leads us to...
The publisher
So we figured that in order to elevate Crawlyard to a different level and keep making games after that, we’d need financial and marketing support from a publisher. And we found one, or should I say they found us.
We will be partnering with Crunching Koalas to update visuals of the game, deepen the gameplay, create more characters and flesh out their stories, and also implement all those numerous features we had to painfully archive before. We'll probably move the release date further, but not too much. Besides, having stable salaries will help us avoid relying on Early Access, so we will be able to actually deliver the full game earlier than we initially planned.
Afterword
That will be all for today. Keep an eye out for other devlogs – we might drop another one soon where we explore the ways to bring our characters to life, and maybe one more dedicated to the game's visual design. And then we'll finally be able to share the Big Chances with you, and the pipeline for improving the game, widening its scope and polishing it further.
Your regular "horny and depressed" indie game developer, signing out.
By the way, we have TikTok now!
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