After the first big play-test with friends and also the first youtube content creators, I had a lot of things to fix and tweak.
I want to get into the habit of noting down my changes and then making patch notes, that's how real game developer do it, right?
Balance changes:
- "Paperbomb Kunai" secondary action now has a cooldown of 4 seconds.
- Weapons that use ammo now "unload" when unequipped.
- Nerf "Halberd" weapon attack speed and damage slightly.
- Nerf the strength of "Colossal Might" trait, now granting 50% more damage and 30% less attack speed.
- "Spinner weapons" such as Flails or Bibles now "charge" their damage value in an exponential curve from 0% to 100% depending on extended range in order to avoid the playstyle of spam-clicking to deal massive amounts of damage.
Visual tweaks and bug fixes:
- Some weapon descriptions have been reformatted to reduce width of item panels
- To reduce UI clutter, now when you compare items on the ground and then hover the weapon in your inventory, The compared item panel on the ground gets hidden.
- Adjusted radius and expansion speed of sweep attacks from "Halberd" and "Energysaber" because they were a bit visually jarring to look at.
- Fixed the status effect indicator for the passive skill / blessing "Ambush" not being applied.
- Fixed a bug where the character panel tab buttons would glitch out, being confused about their supposed visual state.
- Fixed a bug where when closing the character panel tab buttons label could disappear completely if the "flicker animation" on click has not finished playing yet.
- Fixed that the option "Small Mouse Cursor" was enabled by default.
- Fixed a bug where the "disabled image" (red X) would be behind disabled offhand slot and not in front of it when wearing a 2-handed weapon.
- Fixed a bug where "Stage Progression Conditions" for example used to unlock the "Pyromancer", "Warrior" and "Cleric" classes, would require to progress 1 floor beyond what was specified.
- Fixed multiple exceptions that would sometimes occur in character selection when selecting gifts.
- Fixed some spelling mistakes and phrasing issues of the tutorial.
- Adapted the "Random Dice Reward" description to say "Random Dice Item" instead of "Random Dice" in an attempt to trigger less people about grammar.
- Reduced volume of "Bow Attack Sound" and "Crossbow Attack Sound" to make it less obnoxious to play with fast attacking weapons.
- Changed the project settings so that the game now "runs in background".
- Fixed a major bug where souls gained recently (which are internally not "applied" yet at that point) would respawn if tabbing in and out of the game. Also added a fail-save for souls applying when finishing "flying towards the bonfire".
- Applied a fix to the movement behaviour of "Neptune" boss in his "bounce around arena" phase.
- Slightly increased the health of these bosses: Neptune, Kraken, Phoenix, Red Dragon, Cerberus, Succubus, Mind Flamer and King Ooze.
- Moved the camera options to the top of the "gameplay"-tab of the options menu.
- Reduced default value of "Camera Aim Strength" to 25%.
- Fixed that non-revealed and locked doors were interactable before being revealed (meaning, before room completion), this means you now only gain the information "is a door locked" or not after completing the room.
- Fixed indicator radius of "Storm Enchanted" enemies not being the same size as the actual damage from the lightning strikes.
- The version number display is now hidden while the options menu is open in the title screen.
- You can now close Inventory and Character Panel with ESC key. This means at first, ESC will close all menus and only Pause the game when all menus are closed, requiring now 2 key pressed to pause the game if you have the Inventory or Character Panel open.
- Adjusted dual-wield crossbows aim direction alignment with actual aim direction (again).
- Made cursed shrines less common.
- Tweaked the expansion speed and ease of "Cave Troll" enemy slam attack a bit.
- Buffed "Flying Brain" enemy, they shoot lasers more often, move faster and have more health.
- Reduced passive skill / blessing (meta progression) costs by a lot to make it less "grindy". Also reduce the cost of some weaker starting gifts a bit.
- Fixed a bug where the collection button of the "Deprived Class" wouldn't update visually when the class got unlocked
- Fixed a bug where the number of how many times "Death" has been defeated was not submitted to Steam to track achievement progress.
- Darkened the color of equipment slot background icons to make it easier to see if an item is already equipped or not.
- Fixed a spelling mistake in the description of "Poison Filled Jar" consumable.
- Fix a bug where the dialogue boxes would not reset when being hidden, appearing in full size for 1 frame when a new message came up.
Changes to death effects:
I was not happy with how death effects treated players pretty unfairly. I reworked all but 1 enemy with inherent death effects to be more fair to play against.
- Reworked "Wisp" enemy death effect, now spawns a mortar on death, similar to how "Zombie" enemies in floor 4 work.
- Reworked "Blaze" enemy death effect (previously spawned a nova of fire projectiles), now spawns an exploding area of effect similar to the "Molten" elite enchantment.
- Reworked "Ooze" enemy death effect (previously spawned some random projectiles in nova on death), now spawns 3 slimy mortars that explode into more projectiles on impact.
- Reworked "Snake" enemy, removing the death effect (previously spawned poisonous projectiles on death), now instead leaves a short trail of normal small projectiles while moving.
New features:
- Added a little skull indicator icon above doors that lead into boss rooms.
- Added a panel which lists credits and acknowledgements in title menu.
- Add a new small feature, "Tips for adventurers" which are signs that spawn in Spawn Rooms of floors and tell you about weird game mechanics. There are 10 signs, they are randomly shuffled but cycled through, so they don't repeat.