Hey Adventurers, time for a new Black Dragon Mage development update!
Time flies when you're a solo indie and hard at work to make your game happen, it feels like it has only been a week or two since I've last posted an update, but it's flips through notes been 1.5 months plus already! I've returned from the depths of my arcane library with a long scroll of update notes for you.
A lot has happened and the game is under intense development, still on track to come out sometime later this year. The changes since the last update are way too many to list, so here's a quick pick of some of the highlights.
🌟 Curator resonance
More and more Steam Curators are posting their preview-reviews of Black Dragon Mage and I'm glad that they enjoy the demo so far:
🛠️From the Forge of the Magi: Latest Dev News
The previous dev update can be found here, by the way.
The focus on boss fights is still strong, with the first boss being live and testable on the playtest of Black Dragon Mage now! In playtest[staging] v0.5.2, the following changes went live this weekend, for private testers.
✨ Playtest (staging branch) updated!
- preview of Boss Fight against LUMINOR, THE SHROUDED is finally playable!
- new area damage spell ❄️ ICE FORTRESS - casting ice spike mines in the shape of a snowflake, giving you more space to escape from sticky situations. Lower health mobs are killed by contact, higher health mobs can either freeze or get pushed away.
- all attribute upgrades get unique rolls and thus rarities/values now!
- reduced the round duration to snappy 15 minutes. At the end of a round, the massive stage boss appears. If you defeat a stage boss, you can continue your conquest for another round and keep growing your powers for as long as you want to (or survive!). The level progress bar indicates when you will encounter elites and bosses.
- experimental: spells now have a new underlying tree hierarchy, where certain spells become unlocked in a run if you own multiple prerequisite conditions (such as owning Spell A and Spell B and perhaps a certain main weapon), adding depth. This is mostly under the hood as of yet, waiting to be properly used with the next content update.
- preview your resulting stat changes when hovering over an upgrade! Players frequently requested more clarity and this is a nicer inline preview than having to look at the stats screen (which you can still do, btw).
👁️ Testers might notice
- countless bugs squashed (and probably some new ones to find)
- various UI changes, including integrating the mana bar with the dragon area at the bottom right for clarity
- accept upgrades with SPACE BAR (or mouse/A), so you can now play the game with one hand, particularly if you...
- toggle auto-fire with TAB key (or middle mouse)
- better game feel and super responsive inputs through reduced latency! You can now disable VSYNC in the settings and the frame limiter will take over, so that your GPU doesn't have to render extra frames. Borderless mode is now the default also. Cursor is not locked to game view.
- tons of stuff has changed under the hood, too much to list here, but game should feel even more responsive and smooth with even better battery life on Steam Deck
- player logs can be set to verbose for debugging & attached to bug reports in a privacy-friendly (sanitized) and opt-in way
Currently🚧 WIP
- world difficulty does not increase after beating a round, that will change soon (enemies and bosses will scale with each round you beat)
- there's no "ok, I'd like to exit this run now that I've beat x rounds" mechanic yet, but I have something planned to make every run feel more like an expedition with increasing stakes
- boss sequencing (of its many different behaviours) is still being iterated on, expect changes very soon, it's more of a quick demo of how the boss moves and operates, but all of the bits and pieces are there now
- new ❄️ area spell will likely move to becoming passive mastery that doesn't take up an ability slot
- ❄️ area spell only has a dummy cooldown of 1s for demoing
🔭 What's next?
Once the current testing build passes a bit of private playtesting on my Discord, I will update the public demo with the new content and changes.
Initially I had planned to not maintain the demo in parallel (since that takes additional effort and I'm only one guy), but I understand that it's ultimately better for the game to receive on-going player feedback and added exposure through frequent updates. That means: The demo will as of then be kept updated until release, so that you get a little taste of where the game is moving.
Stay tuned for more updates, coming soon!
And thanks for all the kind words and support, you keep me going on this journey! 🧙♂️💖
