🎄⚔️ Bullet Heaven Fest Sale! ⚔️🎄
First of all, you can get Black Dragon Mage at 33% off for Bullet Heaven Fest 3.0!
Be sure to check out the bundles too. :)
🎄⚔️ Black Dragon Mage - Content Update ⚔️🎄
Finally, it took far longer than anticipated and you have my sincere apologies (several unexpected circumstances this year have led to significant delays) but now I'm proud to present the first update from our content roadmap!
Black Dragon Mage is in Early Access and in active development.
To better reflect this, I have updated the version number to v0.6.4 and added a label to the title screen - the game is still a work-in-progress, but steadily shaping up to meet the final vision!
The past few months have been full of intense development, here's what I can ship to you today:
Map Events
During your run, small circular icons will appear. These shall lead you to new challenges and rewards.
Simply walk towards the marker until you discover one of the new events!
Elite Enemies - beefy but slow, they drop Spell Tomes for Evolutions (read below)
Paid Chests - purchase a key with gold to unlock powerful Mutator items
Shrines of Blessing - obtain a temporary buff by visiting
Spell Evolutions
One of the new map event types allows you to combat a new elite enemy type (one per map for now) with exciting drops. I wrote more about Spell Evolutions in the last Preview post.
The spell tomes dropped by these enemies allow you to change the behaviour of your equipped spells, with three different evolutions per spell to choose from. You can upgrade multiple of your spells this way.
Spell evolutions can lead to extremely powerful chain effects, such as sparking additional lightning zaps from every hit enemy, charging your mana (so you can summon your dragon more frequently) and other mutated behaviours.
I think they're a lot of fun, make sure not to miss them! Chase the icon with the 🏹 to find them.
Bugfixes
Added missing translations
Fixed: Mineable rocks were disappearing too frequently due to culling
Fixed: Vacuum scroll was sometimes wonky
Fixed: Various small combat inconsistencies
Fixed: Various spawn rate issues
Many more, too many to list here
Quality of Life
Enemies die faster
Gems drop quicker when enemies die (immediately)
Gems are collected quicker
Feel has been adjusted in various areas to be more snappy and pleasant
Quest System UI has been improved dramatically, completed quests are auto-claimed when selected and icons visualize the state of quests (locked / available / collectable / collected) more clearly
Quest System does not rely on Steam Achievements data anymore, which should resolve all related sync issues some players were experiencing
Experience Bar has been reworked to give better feedback and work more reliably
Vacuum Scroll has been reworked to work more reliably
Save backup system: Whenever the save data is migrated to a new version, or there is an issue, you should see some backup save files in the save directory to help recovery.
Many more, too many to list here
Under the Hood
I made some sweeping changes to accommodate the planned items on the current roadmap, plus some unpublished ideas I have for the future of the game.
That included reworking parts of most systems for better performance when the action gets intense on the battlefield. More mobs, more damage, more explosions, but also the complexity of supporting "On Hit" and "On Kill" and other triggers for additional attack side-effects and chain-effects.
Balance is a continual effort and will take some adjustments based on your feedback, let me know what you think after you've had a couple of runs.
Preparations have been made to support control remapping, which will come in a future update.
Reworked Tutorial
The tutorial now takes you through the basic controls and gives you more time to acclimate. No more fighting mobs while trying to learn how to dash!
What's Next?
Check out the roadmap for an idea of what's planned, but also feel free to drop me a comment or forum post on what you want to see next.