Hey everyone! I'm pretty excited to bring you this update inspired by my conversations with many of you who've long been asking for an "endless mode" style challenge.
Fair warning: The new survival game mode is not for the feint of heart. It's intended to be brutal and horrific, and I'm sure you'll be cursing my name in frustration the first few goes at it. Expect to die quite a bit until you discover how to make the best use of your resources and optimal placement for your defenses. After that, I think it'll grow on you. And, I'm quite certain a few of you are going to find ingenious ways to break this that I couldn't possibly anticipate. So, have fun with that!
As always, I'm very open to hearing your feedback - but do please try and give it a day after your first couple runs before you tell me it's totally broken ;)
Onto the official feature description!
Can you survive against the horde?
As Halloween approaches, a dark horde of withered beings, vampires, and scavenging horrors gathers in the world of Abalon. You must carefully choose your team of heroes and arsenal of magical spells to make your final stand. Abalon's all-new survival game mode combines turn-based tactical combat with a layer of strategic defense where players can place walls, traps and units to thwart the advancing waves of enemies.
- A full run of Horde Survival (8 waves) lasts about 45 minutes (Many of you have requested shorter runs and more cut-to-the-chase on strategic planning, so this is for you <3 )
- Build your entire team and 20 card deck before the battle begins or choose amongst 20 different all-star teams.
- Your heroes also begin the fight with a small supply of satchel cards including health potions, recovery vials and traps that can be played anytime during battle.
- There's no exploration, camping or shops in survival mode. Instead, you'll need to make use of your satchel card supplies to recover and build defenses.
- Enemies can drop additional satchel cards, but supplies are limited. Use them wisely.
- Your traps and summoned units persist on the board between waves.
- Enemy waves always spawn on the board side opposite of your Summoner.
- Buffs and debuffs do not persist between waves.
- Players who beat survival mode by completing the first 8 waves may choose to continue to "Endless" mode and face even more terrifying combinations of enemies.
- The environment and all of the waves of horde survival are handcrafted (including the endless waves). I wanted to ensure a consistent experience for all players and provide a fair opportunity to exploit your knowledge of the enemy.
- New satchel cards include walls, barricades, traps, and explosives.
Abalon Horde Survival to be Featured on Kormakrtv
Our dear friend, Kormakrtv, will be pitting his resolve and viking warriors against the horde this coming Wednesday, October 18th, so be sure to follow his Twitch channel and mark your calendar:
https://www.twitch.tv/kormakrtv
The stream block will be starting 10am CEST - 4pm CEST with a 2-4PM spotlight on Abalon.
Additional Fixes in v1.26.0
- Balance: Largely considered the most difficult boss in the game, Nithsrot Gerr has been configured to only (and always) appear in chapter 3 of the Dungeon Biome. I have reflected this in the Dungeon Biome description that when played on Chapter 3, the Difficulty is 5. I'm hoping this helps both new players from rage quitting (when previously encountered on the first chapter) as well as hardcore veterans who specifically want the challenge of hunting this beast down.
- Fixed bug where switching between custom and all-star decks would sometimes result in the deck list being invisible until a deck on that page is selected.
- Fixed bug where loyal characters in shops (such as the Ironclad Soldier) could appear at the camp as if they were a guardian after being hired. Attempting to add them to the party could then cause an exception error. (Thanks The Grand Mugwump, Realm Imp and others).
- AI: Enemies will now attack summoned spore pods and obstacles.
- Fixed bug where Celestial Barrier didn't block all forms of ranged attacks and sometimes resulted in animation soft locks. Additionally, the spell no longer counters the attack if the triggering unit is the primary target.
- AI: Optimized algorithm for calculating lightning bolt targets to improve AI turn calculation speed.
- New Keyword: Flexible allows select satchel cards (such as traps) to be played during battle without the Pyramid Vault. To play these cards, access your deck, then switch to the satchel tab.
- Guardian Revival: The new Scroll of Resurrection, Bonfire Elixir, and the existing Revive spell can now bring guardians back to life, even if they were defeated in previous battles and even if playing with the Lost Guardians challenge.
- New Card: Bonfire Elixir
- New Card: Scroll of Resurrection
- New Card: Neuk's Scorch Trap
- New Card: Caltrops
- New Card: Cryonic Chrysalis
- New Card: Ghost in a Jar
- New Card: Spiked Block
- New Card: Brick Block
- New Card: Wooden Barricade
- New Card: Powder Keg
- New Card: Wall of Brambles
Your Feedback Matters
Just another friendly reminder that I really care about your feedback - it's what drives me to do better with each update. Here's how you can get involved:
- Write a Steam review for Abalon - Your reviews help immeasurably with our game discoverability and motivate me to keep developing and improving. I greatly appreciate your reviews, so please take a moment to share one if you haven't yet :)
- Submit feedback (especially bugs) directly in-game via Settings -> Share Feedback. This makes it really easy for me to reproduce your bugs and nicely organizes your requests into my "to do" list so I don't forget.
- Post a message on our Steam discussion board.
- Join our Discord community
- Instant message me directly on Discord (Username: RossD20Studios)
Thanks so much!
~Ross