Hi everyone. As promised, we are updating you again at the end of the month with our progress on Septaroad Voyager.
In July we released the prologues to all seven characters in the main campaign. In August we took your feedback (and there was a lot of it!) and we have been trying to improve and balance the game. We also added treasure chests and resource nodes for mining and herbalism, and we integrated resource-related quests into the main campaign. And the biggest new addition to the content in Septaroad Voyager is new music by Jenny O'Connor, whom you might know as The Hot Violinist.
You can hear Jenny's music at https://www.jennyoconnor.com/music/ and throughout the desert areas of Septaroad Voyager.
We've had the functionality for mining ore and picking herbs for a while now. But with the first world levels in place, we finally started implementing them into the game. Bringing herbs to the magic shops and ore to the weapon shops will unlock lots of new equipment.
And some of the many balance-related and bug-fixing changes we made include the following:
- Enemies with weapons were doing a lot more damage than unarmed enemies. You might expect that in reality. But in a video game, it's really annoying when a level-1 tortoise bites you for 5 damage, and it's right next to a level-1 Scrapper with a chainsaw who hits you for 1000 damage. We have moved all enemy damage--for both armed and unarmed enemies--closer to an average for each level so there's not quite so much variation.
- Abilities that attract an enemy's aggro weren't working very well. Tanks were losing aggro quickly, and casters were getting knocked out too quickly. We changed the effect of a few abilities to guarantee that a tank that takes aggro will stay at the top of an enemy's target list longer, and that other abilities (healing especially) don't generate as much aggro.
- Alchemy abilities were vastly underpowered. We found the cause of this unintended weakness and fixed it. Now alchemy abilities--like using healing potions--heal a lot more HP. This change should put Alchemists on par with Clerics as healers. Using potions is faster than casting a healing spell, and potions have a higher base healing but lower multiplier, so which ability heals the most will still depend on the individual circumstance.
- The lowest-tier paladin helmet was mistakenly left out of shops. We have added it to all shops where you can buy armor for your warrior classes. We also made the second-tier paladin helmet easier to access through the quests that provide ore to armor vendors.
- We had a perplexing problem causing loot drops and resources to seem to spawn in the wrong location in South Pass. We discovered that the problem was due to a physics simulation issue, and narrowed it down to a defective blocking volume--the invisible walls preventing the player from jumping off cliffs. We deleted and replaced the defective volume and now loot drops are functioning in South Pass.
- Characters progressed unevenly through skill-point and experience-point acquisition. Characters were reaching level 20 and above through XP before mastering a single character class through SP. We redid the XP and SP calculations and readjusted the cost of all skill tiles. Now you should be able to get skills through the skill board much faster, while getting fewer but larger bonuses through slower level-ups.
- Turkeys were doing much more damage than intended to some characters. This was because the turkey's default attack was dealing sword damage, and some armors are weak against swords. We instead gave the turkeys untyped damage and reduced their damage overall. Beginning characters should no longer need to fear the turkeys.
- Players were not taking advantage of the water-freeze-shatter attack cycle because there was no simple entry point to the apply the Soaked status to enemies. We have added a new Water Balloon attack to the Adventurer skill board, allowing you to start using this synergy must sooner.
- Players reported that area-of-effect attacks were not worth the time and mana to cast them. We have improved AoE attacks, making them faster and more damaging. AoE attacks should now be worthwhile if they hit two or more enemies.
- We added randomly placed elite enemies into the game. Elites have more hit points, do more damage, and give more experience and better loot when defeated. Hopefully these elites will add a little more variety to the game's combat.
We made all of these changes based on player feedback. The game is better because of your feedback. Thank you for helping us with the game. We hope that you'll continue providing feedback as early access continues.
We expect to spend September working on new areas and new story developments for the main campaign. We'll be back next month to let you know how things are progressing.