Hi!
It's been a couple of weeks without any significant update and we wanted to let you know what we've been working on.
We're sticking to the update roadmap we announced some time ago. Here's an updated status:
As you can see, roughly half of the updates scheduled for the November/December period have been released.
Hero Variants
What we've been working on for the past weeks is the announced "Hero Variants". While thinking of possible character variants, we soon noted that just changing the starter weapon of a character would feel kind of weak, so we thought of new skills for each character. This pretty much means every hero variant is a new character using the same model as the original one. However, this means lots of FX work is needed for the new weapons and skills, which is why it's going to take a while until it's ready.
In the first release of the hero variants we'll be adding one for each character, ranging from a pyromancer to a Lizardman, each one with its own skill and passives, and a completely new starter weapon.
The way to unlock them will be by performing a specific task using a new unlockable feature, that for now we've called "Special Bosses"
Special Bosses
Many people has let us know that an issue they felt while playing was that they didn't feel the need to move in a specific direction, other than going for the occasional chest (from the "Exploration Rewards" feature), but these aren't spawned that often. We didn't want players to move non-stop in a specific direction for too long, however some goal to move to is interesting.
"Special Bosses" is a new feature we're working on, where an optional boss will spawn in a far away point (2-3 minutes walk). This boss is a fast and tough enemy that will drop a chest when killed, as usual. If you do it quick enough, a second one will spawn elsewhere, and so on (total number of bosses depends on the stage being played). Once all bosses are defeated, a Big Chest will be dropped, with a guaranteed 3 item rewards.
The unlock conditions for the new characters require players to defeat all special bosses in a specific stage/character combination in Ruin 2 difficulty, so it's not an easy task!
Quality of Life changes
We've also been working on plenty of quality of life improvements. Just to name a few, we've added boss health bars, trinket and player skill data on the post-mission screen, more detailed information on item unlock conditions, or visual indicators of how the selected trinket affects current equipment in the level up screen.
Future updates
Sure, we feel all these features we're working on are really interesting and will give players lots of new things to play with/aim for, but we understand one thing everybody wants is more stages to play on! So while our FX artists and programmers are working on December updates, the art team is working hard on the next stage, creating a new scenario and new creatures to fight! Here are some screenshots and concepts of what we have so far (please note that this is a work in progress screenshot, and the lighting hasn't been done yet)!
Balance changes
While we haven't done any big balance changes lately (from the data we have, we think the game is fine in regards to difficulty), there's a couple things we want to address soon:
First of all, the game speed/pacing. There's been a lot of discussion on this, and while some players have explicitly said they like the gentle pace of the game, many others have expressed their preference for a quicker experience. We tackled this with the addition of Turbo Mode, which we think feels at the proper spot, however now the question arises. If Turbo Mode is more interesting, should it be the default option?
However, we don't want to commit to such a big change without asking you first, so we're doing it.
The poll results will have a strong weight on our decision, but we'll be also hearing your thoughts in the forums or the Discord!
Second point, damage. Currently, the game pretty much requires you to pick at least one +Damage trinket in order to have any chance of success in most stages, and if you pick even more, you're probably having an easier time. This is something we want to change to make defensive trinkets a valid option. We feel the best way to address this is to reduce the power of +Damage / +Firerate trinkets, so other options remain valid, however this needs to be done carefully to avoid accidentally increasing game difficulty beyond what's intended.
So we'll probably want to tackle this at some point in the future, once we have some time free once the new features are finished.
So, when is the next update coming?
While most of the work needed to finish the features is already done, next week is full of holidays here in Spain, so we'll probably finish the update by December 12-16th is probably the time where we'll have the update ready.