Phew, this was a long haul, thanks everyone for your patience, I really hope I never have to do this large patch again. I just wanted to add the new Map-Editor, and it affected A, B and C, and A affected X, Y & Z, and B affected F & G and on and on and on. But finally got it finished.
This patch is on the Experimental branch, so to try out this new version, you have to start steam, go to your library, right click on the game/Properties/Betas and select "Experimental - Latest version arrive on this" Now you should see "SELECTED VERSION experimental" right next to the play-button in the library. (Or if you right click on steam in the system-tray, it says Myriad Mayhem [experimental]).
So I haven’t finished more maps, or added new/unique behaviour to units yet, But!
A “map editor” so I can make more maps much faster / easier. It was the main-culprit for this big patch. Sadly not a Tool usable for players (yet), as it is so dependent on the GameEngine’s Editor.
A new map-generating system - The map can look different every run.
The game now has difficulties and other configurations to play different playstyles.
The current map is 2x larger and remade a bit
However, a big headsup, I have barely touched balancing difficulties or map-settings, so you might get completely whacky games with new difficulties (Challenging is the default tested diff. with “Medium Unveiled Map”). But that's what the experimental branch is for! So you can test it with me as well :).
Also your allies are trying to clear regions as fast they can at the moment, so if you boost your allies strength too much, then they can awaken more enemies then they or you can handle, which is something I’m working to find a solution for atm.
New map-generating system
I Couldn't stop myself from implementing this system when I added the new MapEditor, as I had to remake it anyway to work with the new MapEditor. And as it gives so much replayability. So every new match will have an algorithm to determine how the map will look like.
- There is now a setting/Slider in the game lobby to determine how much of the selected map will be open (How many regions will be reachable), it will most likely be something like interval 25-75%. So players can decide how long a playthrough will be. e.g. you take lowest, then only 25% of the map will be opened, or you want to dive into a long game, you max it.
- Reason for not 0-100% (well 0% is kinda obvious) but for 100%, so is my idea to make maps "larger than intended" and then you only use a portion of it for each playthrough. Instead of having all regions unlocked & you know which regions you want to aim for / less surprising replay.
- A second setting in the game lobby to determine where you will start, my initial thought was to bake this into the difficulty-setting, but then thought it was more fun to separate this setting, so you can play on a more secure starting location, but also face toughest difficulty. So the values are now:
- The default / most secure pos.
- One of the most secure
- Full random
- Full random excluding the secure ones.
- And yeah you read that right! You can now start in almost any region on the map! (Not all, as I want some regions to be so small they can't support a castle).
- And this new MapEditor made it easier to add even more randomness to the map, things I’m working on as you read this.
Difficulties!
You can set game-difficulty in the game lobby, which rewards with more progress xp (meta-xp) for each run. I tried to avoid modifying stats (e.g. on units, player) and instead modify other settings that affect the difficulty.
Which will affect things like:
- How strong presence enemies have in your starting region.
- How far out enemies are alerted.
- How early you face tougher enemies.
- Difficulty Tenacious will penalize the player upon dying, Unyielding even more (reduce the character’s stats permanently that round)..
Game mechanics
- Updated burning & poison so they are more unique.
- Burning: More stacks will increase the potency of the damage.
- Poison: More stacks will add to the duration.
- And to avoid spamming damage-numbers so have their mechanic been remade, they now both stack, but don't "tick" separately, e.g.:
- Burning: An enemy is hit by two burning abilities, dealing 3 and 5 dmg, so each tick will then deal 8 dmg. But then lets say the 3-dmg dot dissipates, so each remaining ticks will then deal 5 dmg.
- It felt boring for them to have same "effect" (Damage = Dmg * stacks), and the only difference was the visuals. So their attributes are also remade. The idea is burning-effects are "candle burning brighter, but burns out faster" e.g. shorter duration than poison, but also deal more damage per tick, while poison deals more damage overall, but on a much longer duration. So burn has better burst, poison trades burst for more damage per "appliance".
- Armour is only ignored by poison and true damage damage now, will have sources down the road that will ignore it as well (ethereal, Spirit, etc.)
- Now lose all stacks with abilities when dying (abilities that have stacks).
- Abilities will now always have talent "path" that enhance the efficiency of the "core-style" of the ability, rather then always "twist it into something different", so if you really like the initial ability, it will now always be possible to have talents that "remains true to its style" If that makes any sense? That will also make me put more love into each ability, rather than "ehh, it might be boring at start, but you will always replace it with talents to make it interesting down the road", and instead be fun/satisfying to use from the start (maybe weak, but still fun).
- Reworked Magic Missile:
- I didn't like it to be "shoot 3 magic missiles instantly at each cast", and at max level you shoot them insanely fast with some builds, which I didn't like the feel of it, so now it instead shoot slower, but with more chaotic projectiles in a burst and within a bigger radius (more unpredictable). I might even add more missiles with even more chaotic flight-path to further add to their wild style.
- No longer affected by piercing, but instead of quantity
- Will also gain more projectiles when being leveled
- Shoot all projectiles in a "semi-auto"/burst, instead of "all at exactly the same time", making it feel more satisfying, especially now when affected by quantity. It retains the same dps, it just "enhances" the effect so you now hear each being shot.
- Stacks recharge are no longer affected by Cooldown reduction but by MagicMissile's Quantity.
- Homing talent will now have a weaker "homing strength" that will be increased with higher level in the talent, but also a much larger detection-radius, so it feels and look much better, e.g. they will try to home in on targets much further away, but with less strength. Previously they almost instantly went straight towards their target (IF they had detected them, in their small detection-radius, especially at low levels), which made them more rigid / controllable, which isn't my idea of them. So even at max level with the Homing-talent, so will they still retain their wild flight pattern.
- Replaced ChainLightning Discharge with a new talent - It was way to OP to be able to be strong vs mass units AND the strongest single-target spell, (boiling it down, so do damage-abilities have strength & weaknesses, e.g. ChainLightning strong vs multiple-targets but weak vs single-target)
- Flash Surge of speed is a little bit changed - Instead of only moving 2-3x faster during its time, you also slow down the time by its strength amount (This was a fun to make & see! Let me know if you know any fun/interesting time-speed you would like to see (no go back in time, that would take months to implement xD!) But something that touches time-speed. Was thinking maybe a talent to MagicCircle with a "slowdown everything on the map, except that within its bubble or something :P))
- Also added a feature to make the revert of slowdown not being instant in the end. But it felt weird with SurgeOfSpeed
It felt like you accelerated a lot, then at the very end, insta-lose it all. Because you always have 100% effect of the bonus speed, but the time dilation (time-scale) slowly returned to normal at the last part of the duration, so more and more the "world returned to its normal game-speed". Maybe I'll later add a feature to make the +speed stay coherent with its effect on the time, as it felt more natural then to instant gain it / instant lose it (plus can make some nice colour gradient & sound pitching on top of it as well!). but that will be a future thing.
Content
- New map-generating system! - (More info near top of patch-log)
- Added Difficulties! - (More info above)
- Updated the whole original map - It is now twice as big
- Replaced Magic Circle Duration talent with Linger-talent, first one might be stronger, but it was so dull, plus I'm having plans for making enemies force the player to move around more, so Linger will be a big help with that.
- Added Reduce-Mana-Cost talent.
- Added Ricochet Talent.
- Added Area Size talent - Some abilities had both size and Area size attributes (coming new abilities that have it, but Beam have size increase its width and Area-size increases the Blast-talent area of effect), and it kept on growing more complex when only having a Size-talent to update both those stats, e.g. with beam, how much will size increase its width compared to the area-effect?. So now it is much simpler to balance & read 1:1 value:effect of their stats.
- Added Area Size “Progression Attribute" (those out in main-menu (Meta-progress-attributes-lasting-between-rounds?), where you progress your characters in between matches)
- Removed Armour from Meta-progression - Mainly because it was way too strong early game, similar thing with equipment giving armour, but equipment on the other hand will give the player a choice to take equipment with armour vs something that could boost another attribute.
Quality of Life
- Made a simple "loading-screen", sadly I can't get any fancy animation just yet (Will see if I can fix that later), but for now a loading-text at least :P.
- CriticalDamage in ability attributes is now shown as "150%" = if you would do 20 dmg, and crit, you now deal 20 * 1.5 => 30 dmg (imo, felt more natural to say "how much will your critical hits deal" instead of "how much more damage will a crit deal". E.g. with critical hits that deals 150%, was previously shown as "+50%"
- Fixed so you can also hover over talent in talent-tree and see the "lock-chains-icon" on the talents it will lock.
Balancing
- Enemies now have much lower bounty (you were practically financially independent endgame)
- All Multipliers are now Multiplicative (they were additive before) - The issue was multiplicative ones don't have as clean numbers and grow exponentially, but additive ones have a diminishing return. E.g. say we have 11 different dmg-modifiers, when we take 10 -> 11 we have +500% => +550% => 5.5/5.0 => we get a 10% dmg buff from that last +50%, but multiplicative will always give +50% dmg every step, which is more straightforward. I just need to tone down their effect. (Additive multiplication behaves similarly to flat modifiers, so feel better to have different ones. But nothing is stopping us from having BOTH additive and multiplicative multipliers added in the future).
- Rebalanced everything in the game to work with the multiplicative "system" mention on point above, and gave up on documenting it after it filled more then two pages, but here are the bigger points:
- Everything is scaling much less, to avoid facing enemies with 75hp at start, but 4’500’000 hp at the end to "be of any challenge" (Which didn't work well at all with most stuff, e.g. your units or buildings don't nearly scale in same strength)
- Reduced all stats to be more friendly numbers, feels like numbers (like damage, currency, armour, health, etc.) feel more like a sci-fi game when you have 750'000 health on a building. Or if you face an enemy with 276 armour, how much will he hit? It goes lightyear away from the "3 armour is much at start".
- I still need to come up with an even better solution to making "early units & buildings still helpful, if so only as cannon-fodder" in the end-game. Rather than being a little fly, more than just having 100x upgrades for each unit.
- Remade so you no longer gain meta-progression xp per kill, but instead per cleared region & finished quest. (more info in previous dev-log), but summary: Want the player to "complete" the level to give the most xp, not afk-farming as many camps you can hold out against.
- Rebalanced Equipment - They give more, let me know if you think they should be stronger or weaker (I like them to be more stronger, to have a larger impact on which one to choose.
- Rebalanced Units & buildings xp-worth (after new map, as it is a different pace and layout, so had to rebalance to avoid getting huge spikes and other times a standstill).
- Moved around loads of talent’s positions in their respective tree. Mainly for balancing and so they work better with new planned talents.
- Almost all buildings and ability-modifier talents are now unlocked by meta-progression, if not unlocked from start
- Working on updating units to be less bland, so now Barbarians Axethrowers will have half the range but attack much faster.
- Consumables drop rate reduced
- Decimal values like 12.23 will now round to nearest (e.g. 12.23 => 12, and 1.6 => 2 IF we have decimal-precision = 0 digits, e.g. Movement Speed is shown with 2 decimal precisions = 5.05, Homing Strength with 1= 0.5 (with Magic Missile), smaller decimal-digits will be rounded), and at the middle point (e.g. 0.5) will round down.
- This is to make the numbers more “clean”.
- This not only affects visuals, even if the actual value will still retain their value, so will some things like damage done will never be in decimals (e.g. say you have 10 dmg, get a +43% damage, 10*1.43 => 14.3, so is the damage shown 14, and you only deal 14 damage (when hitting something with 0 armour and resistance).
- but say you get another damage buff, +20%, then:
- The calculation is 14.3 * 1.3 => 18.59 => 19 damage,
- NOT 14 * 1.3 => 18.2 => 18 damage
- Same with "Resource cost" (atm. only Mana-cost) of abilities, e.g. can't get 2.43 ManaCost, will be "Mana Cost: 2" in this example.
- This also means ChainLightning Split On Hit needs +2 Ricochet to get +1 Ricochets on Chain Lightning (as Split On Hit have a -50% Ricochet on ChainLightning)
- Now (almost) always round down at midpoint (before there were a nasty midpoint-rounding error, which is a known C# math-”problem”).
- Went back again so upgrades now have a long cooldown, it didn't fit the “fantasy-style” of the game, more like an Arcade-game. So now you want to place buildings like blacksmiths in more "easier to reach" places / at the front.
- Upgrades now play a sound effect when completed, so you don't have to keep checking it. Not 100% happy with the sounds, but best I could get on short notice.
- Not all buildings are available from the start anymore, e.g. Mage Tower and Stables require a higher meta-level on character.
- Blacksmith is no longer unique, so you can have multiple at same time, thus upgrading different things at same time.
Other
- Changed game-version “number”, before i had say, 0.7.0.27, but is now 0.7.27.0, so the last two changed spot, my initial thought was to have the smaller number to reflect the stage in the process, so I add new experimental things in 4th number (e.g. .27 in this example). But that would look a bit weird when we push the experimental-branch into the balancing-branch, and keep adding balancing-updates that increase the third number. E.g. 0.7.0.27 -> 0.7.1.27 -> 0.7.2.27 and so on. Balancing-stuff feels more natural to be the smallest changes = smallest number. So with the same example: 0.7.27.0 -> 0.7.27.1 -> 0.7.27.2. It translates like “we got the second balance update on the 27:th experimental-version.
- Updated Visuals on some abilities.
- Updated Talents icons: Speed, Size to match the "style" of AreaSize, to have more coherency.
- Changed the "Colour Space" of the game, so it is based on Linear instead of Gamma.
- Updated clouds visuals.
- Increased magnet item pull speed by 50%.
- Adjusted items/chests visual effects (looked like a xmas tree when you have multiple mana/hp pots lying in an area).
- Changed color on upgrade-bars, I think I'm gonna make it a variable people can adjust to their liking, including health bars on different types (player, enemies and allies).
- Updated some texts.
- ChainLightning number of jumps is now affected by Ricochet instead of Quantity.
- Something I should had from the beginning - Meta-progress (the progress you keep between matches, found in main-menu) has been remade how it is interpreted, it now uses "skill points", which you gain when leveling up your character "meta-level" instead of "credits or wealth". And instead of getting 100 credits, you get 3 skill points per level, and an upgrade cost goes from 40 -> 1. I.e. you need less levels to have enough skill points to buy all upgrades. This should be much more intuitive. Sorry for the previous confusion!
- Changed icons on Talents Pervasive & Devastation for Beam (I think they match their style better now).
- Made the tooltip window a little prettier.
- Cooldown now shows as -10% in the attribute-window (top right window when paused), previously +10%. And a -x% cooldown is positive, so it is also in green now, both these were a bit misleading.
- Had the wrong "scale" on some props (Large boulders, bushes, etc), which are now corrected, so they now match the map-grid (e.g. Tree now takes up two "whole" tiles), and they also match the terrains "pixels per inch". However, had to go over all environment objects on the map, to correct the offset "on the map", so let me know if you see a stone, tree, bush that is out of place, hopefully I got them all :D ).
- I always had a pretty title in "game-engine editor" for a long time, but never got it to work in the game, but now I did! However, Unity is a bit whacky, so it also applied the effect to the whole game. Though, I liked it! A happy little accident. But in case if someone prefers the previous color palette, so can you turn it off in Settings/Graphics/Vibrant Colors.
- For the curious - I had to put it on a new sub-overlay-rendering-camera using a new post-processing volume, but in URP, it seems the Overlay-camera-stack (in Camera settings), applies its effects on things already added. And if you know a solution to only apply to specific parts, let me know (tried a lot with having it on different layers, Culling masks, volume masks, etc. with little luck).
- Updated "Resource Bars" (Health, mana, progress, etc.) visuals, is a hassle to work with low pixels when using worldspace-GUI, so maybe I'll fix that down the road. At least a little prettier now :P.
- Progress-bar (when researching), now update the UI when they reach a 2.5% increase, which makes it look more symmetrical (OCD warning here :P).
- Updated XP orb visuals
Bug fixes
Regarding all these bugs, I have found at least one place where a bug enters. But in the worst case, can there be even more places the bug sneaks in that I have missed, so maybe a bit misleading with "Bug fixes" (Bug-hole-patches?)
- The Quests GUI had a weird bug with disappearing on starting a new match, but also the texts having weird sizes.
- Was possible to get duplicate equipment dropped (e.g. two identical mana-regen rings & able to equip both at same round).
- Could interact with buildings / buildsite etc, when you were dead.
- If you died while interacting with a building / buildsite, the Interact-GUI got stuck on that site/building until going to the same one and moving away (manually reset it).
- Was possible to get permanent speed boost/debuff from slowing-enemies. not 100% sure it is gone, as it was really hard to replicate the bug, but fixed one location which could be the culprit (a rare race-condition with threads (each status-effect is its own thread)).
- Not sure "a bug", more a Unity "feature", but now added so you never can walk on "unwalkable-terrain" (e.g. out at sea), Issue only happen when you got a buggy-fast movement-speed / super-laggy, but I suppose down the road, that something can do such wacky (without being a bug, like a strong speed-buff).
- Buildings HP bar become visible when finishing an upgrade that increases their health when they have max health.
- When leveling up MagicMissile Accretion from zero to max in one go, and you then could get a negative stack forever. == unusable.
- You saw your health-bar while being revived
- MagicMissile stacks: the "cooldown" started before the whole stack was emptied, which was only visible if you cast before max stack.
- MagicCircle Aegis - working as intended again
- Fixed text typos.
- Talents description was not always showing the right data.
- Cooldown appeared inverted positive & negative in ingame-stats-window.
- "Next-level talent-description" was not reset properly between runs.
- Magic Circle Aegis was not working correctly.
- CriticalDamage had incorrect value compared to actual bonus-damage.
- Some talents like Chronopistos did not receive modifiers from progression or gear (e.g. -10% Cooldown from character's progression)
- ChainLightning did not always hit max-targets, even when there were valid targets nearby.
- You won't get stuck inside a building anymore If you place it while standing on its designated spot.
Known & Remaining bugs
These are bugs I've experienced or are reported but that I have not been able to replicate or fix, with at least a couple hours per bug (even when trying all known scenarios, so usually a race condition for threads == happens rarely & much harder to replicate scenario creating same result). So I'm sorry you have to face these for a while longer, but as they are minor issues, so have I put them to the side, and instead in future playthroughs, have my eyes open for them and try to identify the correct environment for them to be replicated.
But I take all the help I can get, so if you experience a bug, if so only once, so would I love to hear the scenario/case when it happened. E.g. you die & won't respawn (non-hardcore-mode). What was happening when the bug came? What did you do, what happened around you? etc.
- When you are chilled (slowed) by the Harpooners, and the slow never disappear.