Hi there investigative gamers,
We hope you’re doing well and, if you’re a northern hemisphere dweller, enjoying summer! Southerners among you should of course still be having a great winter time ♥
We’ve spent a lot of time working on necessary admin tasks and continuing the upgrade work that’d been started on the Desolate Nightmares biome, so there might not be as much novelty as usual.
Nonetheless, here’s some of what we’ve been doing!
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The Desolate Nightmares
[NEW] Lesser envy
A support variant for the sniper enemies. They shoot doping rounds that cause enemies to grow stronger, and crippling bullets that silence you.
“Hatred often takes a less direct, more insidious form. Self-centered worldviews can fuel silently hateful friendships, and deeply resentful love.”
The Hive Driver Regret
The swarm-themed boss. Regret herds forsaken thoughts and ideas, strengthening them and making them ever more noxious. This fight is about controlling summons and keeping damage over time effects in check.
“At times, the immeasurable mass of abandoned thoughts and lost potentials makes itself manifest. Panic ensues, what else could you have been, what splendors have you missed out on?”
The Bubonic Behemoth Acrimony
Core gameplay identity for these guys hasn’t changed much from before: they’re tanky, deal quite a bit of area of effect damage, and cover the battlefield with Foul ground - a tile effect that slows you down and inflicts damage on contact, while healing enemies instead.
“Part of yourself doesn't want to see the world thrive. Being miserable wouldn't feel so bad if misery was all there ever was. You detach your conscious self from this toxic persona, but you can always feel it crawling up the back of your mind, oozing resentment.”
The environment
We’ve made progress on enhancing the environment as well, with new assets and level design.
We'll keep working hard to make it ever nicer and more immersive, but we've arguably come a long way from just a few months ago:
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Difficulty tiers
While it’s not a new implementation, I thought it’d be relevant to mention that all minds have a difficulty tier that determines what enemies you could face inside and how powerful they are.
All bosses have upgraded forms depending on that difficulty tier, each with an enhanced skillset and stats.
Regret, for example, goes from Lesser Regret at Tier I to Deepest Regret at Tier III.
Lesser Regret summoning
Deepest Regret summoning
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Innar, the merchant
When exploring your patient's mind, there's a chance you'll bump into Innar, a dissociated projection of Eiris.
He’ll present you with a random set of trades, all requiring you to spend Awareness or a % of your health. Possible offers include:
- Obtaining a specific gear or crafting item
- Gaining a buff for the rest of transposition (health regeneration, haste, the ability to debuff your enemies on hit)
- Earning rare currency
We intend to add a vaster array of unique tradeoffs to make each encounter with Innar special.
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Back to the Twisted Dreams
We’re now back to working on Wantless’ 2nd mind biome: the Twisted Dreams.
Visuals are still coming together, but since this “Alice in Wonderland”-inspired biome is set to explore themes such as addiction and mourning, we’re implementing fitting gameplay effects such as:
- Haze: some tiles are covered with dense fog, causing the enemies inside to become invisible. Lure them out, or blast the area like a madman, but keep your distance, as your Action Points are reduced inside the haze.
- Tearpool: some tiles are covered with a sap-like substance that inflicts a stacking damage and resistance debuff to most allies or enemies. Certain types of plant-like enemies will instead consume the sap on contact and leave a pool of Clear water in its place. Clear water cleanses some of that same debuff’s stacks.
- Replicate: certain creatures in the Dreams can create exact replicas of themselves, indistinguishable from the original until damaged.
Can’t wait to show you visuals for these effects and many, many more! I think this biome is going to raise the stakes for strategic gameplay, with a lot new, less straight-forward, enemy behavior.
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That’s it for today!
Thank you for reading, and we’d be happy to welcome you on Discord if you ever want to chat!
Smile, enjoy the weather, take care of yourself ♥