Our current focus is working towards a more polished Steam demo, we recently added a tutorial so we decided that we wanted to add localization next.
For our fifth monthly update we included the localization system. We also made wide spread balance changes to the game.
Localization
You can now select the language for all in-game text from the title screen, starting with spanish since we speak it ourselves, but we will add a lot more in the future.
Corpses
A big part of Underboard is progressively building your team during a run, you do this by getting rewards from killing monsters, and this means that you get to make a lot of decisions.
One of our design pillars is that decisions should matter, otherwise they are irrelevant or an illusion, and for decisions to matter they must have meaningful consequences.
If you fail a combat, it should be because you made some wrong decisions, and you should have opportunities to correct them before failing your run.
We have experimented a lot with this since our early demo Omen where we had the Life dice. Now we have the Life heart and have made some iterations on it, so we've learned a lot about what feels good and why, but the key thing is allowing players to make progress even if they fail a combat.
Whenever you have a situation where the player has the chance to retry a combat, but they will always lose again no matter what they change in their team due to the intrinsic randomness of the game, you have effectively allowed for an impenetrable wall to spawn in the player's way. They can keep bashing their heads against the wall, but it won't break so they might as well quit.
Sometimes players aren't aware of some change they could do that would give them the victory, so even if they can win, they feel like they can't. This could be improved with better tutorialization or making the game more intuitive and we want to make changes in that direction, but we also shouldn't expect new players to understand every little detail about our game.
To improve on this, we've made the following changes about combat failure:
- When a character dies, they leave a corpse.
- Killed enemies now always revive for combat retrys (from only reviving on boss combats).
- Revived enemies now receive 1 stack of Remnant per death.
- Remnant is a new negative status effect that increases Health Loss by 25% per stack, stacking up to 3.
- Remnant enemies die if all their alive allies are also Remnants.
- Life loss on combat fail is now 20 for normal combats and 30 for boss combats (from 5 + (5 * map))
Now you can keep making progress even if you fail because killing an enemy means they will be easier to kill in the retry, making victory more likely each time you lose Life.
Another issue we wanted to solve was that previously if you failed a combat but you killed enough enemies, the retry victory was guaranteed without changing anything in your team because you only had to fight the remaining ones.
Now that all killed enemies revive, even if some are easier to kill, you may need to make changes to not fail the same combat again, incentivizing learning the game.
Damage Over Time Changes
We felt that Poison was in a good state, but the other DoT's lacked identity.
- Bleed now deals Deadly Attack Damage over 5 seconds, increasing Health Loss 3 times faster.
- Chill now deals Skill Damage and Poise Damage over 5 seconds.
- Burn now deals Skill Damage over 3 seconds, with the damage also being dealt to adjacent allies.
Character Skills Changes
The DoT changes also affect characters that apply them, but we also wanted to change some problematic skills more directly.
- The Rebel Assault skill is no longer split between doing a Skill Hit and applying Bleed, it now uses all its Skill Power scaling to apply Bleed. In addition, it also grants Defiance instead of applying Weak.
- Defiance is a new positive status effect that grants Health Steal for 5 seconds (gain Health equal to Health Loss inflicted).
- The Nun Intervention skill now applies Exposed from level 1 instead of Slow at level 3.
- The Scout Fireworks skill now applies Slow instead of Exposed. Lowered its Energy Cost by 20 and Skill Power scaling by 20%.
- Increased the Energy Cost of the Scout Treats skill by 20.
Player Spells Changes
We liked how a previous change about giving active spells a way to scale their effect magnitudes made active spell casting more strategic. We wanted to expand on that to include other ways of scaling since having everything scale off of Spell Radius feels restrictive.
- Active Spells now scale in 6 different ways (extra effect in radius, targets in radius, Active Spells used, available Mana, missing Life and character corpses).
- Extra effect in radius applies a an additional effect to all targets in radius if there is a center target.
- Targets in radius increases the effect applied to the center target per additional target in radius.
- Active Spells used increases an effect per Active Spell used in the current combat (a new counter in the Mana brain tracks the current amount).
- Available Mana increases an effect by a percentage of current Mana usable to pay Mana Costs.
- Missing Life increases an effect by a percentage of lost Life.
- Character corpses increases an effect per character corpse in the current combat.
- Removed the additional Mana from the Moon Passive Spell.
- Changed the Sun Passive Spell to remove the additional Life and increase the Missing Life recovered to 50% (from 25%).
- Changed the Eclipse Reservation Spell to apply Blind to both teams and lower its Mana Reservation to 20% (from 30%).
- Changed the Sleight of Hands Passive Spell to grant "Using an Active Spell fully recovers all other Active Spell Cooldowns" (from granting +25% Cooldown Recovery and "Active Spells share their lowest Cooldown").
- Changed the Proliferation Passive Spell to grant "Active Spell effects applied to center targets spread to adjacent allies" (from granting +1 Spell Radius and "Active Spell effects applied to center targets also apply to all targets in radius).
- Changed the Wrath Active Spell to scale the damage of each hit with Maximum Mana (from 100). In addition, we gave it "Spell Radius ignores modifires".
- Changed the Cooking Time Active Spell to now have 1 Combat Use (from 0 Mana Cost and 30s Cooldown), and it now grants Mana equal to Unreserved Mana (from granting 30s of Mana Regeneration and +1 Mana Regeneration)
Traits Changes
There were some trait stats that had relatively low synergy in their pairing, making some traits feel lackluster against others of similar role. In addition, having to search for a specific trait to get anything out of it feels too restrictive. We want to increase the chances of getting a usable trait, while maintaining some opportunity cost in characters benefiting from traits.
- All traits now grant one of their stat bonuses to other characters with a trait of the same attribute, unlocked on reaching the middle bonus.
- Changed ~25% of trait stats moving them to other traits to make better stat pairs. This change also affects some items and their attributes.
- Removed Movement Speed from the core trait stats.
- Added "Energy Reserve" to the core trait stats (stores an amount of Energy equal to Skill Power, pulling from the stored Energy to fill Skill Energy Cost on receiving an enemy skill).
- Lowered the Maximum Health bonuses from Vitality, Armor On Wounded bonuses from Endurance and Shield On Start bonuses from Anticipation by ~20%. This change also affects items and reservation spells similarly.
Balance Changes
- Increased the base Maximum Health range for characters to 210 -> 350 (from 240 -> 320) to make character differences in this stat more significant.
- Increased Exposed and Reinforced Additinal Damage Reduction modifiers to 20% (from 15%).
- Increased Additional Damage Reduction granted by Block to 50% (from 30%).
- Changed Suppression to "Suppression Charges". Instead of providing the Additional Damage Reduction against a single Skill Hit, a Suppression Charge is consumed to apply Suppression as a positive status effect that provides its bonus against all Skill Hits for 2 seconds.
- Changed Crushing Hit Chance to apply Crush instead of ignoring damage mitigation. Crush is a new negative status effect applying -10% Additional Damage Reduction for 10 seconds, stacks up to 5.
- Barriers now absorb received damage from hits (from absorbing any incoming damage),
- Energy Charges now grant Energy equal to 1 second of Enery Regeneration (from 15).
- Renamed Energy Refill to "Energy Recharge" (flavor change).
- Changed Silver Bullet to grant +15% Damage Reduction Penetration and "Damage From Hits Is Deadly", increasing Health Loss 3 times faster (from "Damage ignores Damage Reduction from Resistances").
- Map Difficulty now increases on completing any Map Area (from only areas with rewards).
- Map layouts now have a bias towards creating paths instead of blobs, increasing on higher Maps.
Misc Changes
- Added animations for the Life heart and Mana brain, changing with their remaining values.
- All non-combat animations play at the same speed (from playing at combat speed)
- Added combat log tab tooltips stating what they track.
- Changed the damage taken combat log tab (the shield icon one) to now track incoming damage instead. This shows how much damage a character would take before reducing it with their defences.
Fixes
- Fixed Map Portal options being able to have a repeated collection of traits.
- Fixed the "Incoming Damage Ignores Additional Damage Reduction" stat from Cornucopia not being applied for ADR granted by Block and Suppression.
- Fixed not being able to scroll the trait and combat logs with mouse wheel if your cursor was inside a gap in their contents.
- Fixed tooltip jitter when appearing
- Fixed tooltip appearing after casting a spell even if you were holding the hide key