First I'd like to say thanks to everyone that has bought my game and has supported me. Life as a solo developer is not an easy one to say the least! This update brings a ton of additions, changes, fixes, and gameplay tweaks. That being said, the game is in Early Access and as such things can and will change for the better. This patch is one of those patches where some core aspects of the game has changed. Those are down below in the Core Changes section. I hope that changes like this will be welcomed as growth and forward progress on the game and not viewed as nerfs or "bad". I am open to any and all feedback in regards to any changes. Part of Early Access is taking feedback from you the players and using that to make the game the best game that it can be.
Many thanks to Boulean for doing a live play testing session on his Twitch channel, the feedback I got was invaluable and I've implemented a dozen or so changes from that session into this patch. Also thanks to the other folks who reported crashes, bugs, typos, etc. I really appreciate you sticking with me!
As always with big patches come the possibility of bugs or weirdness, so if anyone sees any problems or has any issues please let me know, either email me or find me on our Discord. Thanks!
General changes and fixes:
New Coin material and particle effect, coins should be much more visible now
New Reroll coin material and particle effect, reroll coins should be much more visible now
Adjusted colors for timed reward events to better blend together
Fixed player model not showing correct base class if an advanced class was selected and you changed characters
Added some DoTween animations to make buttons in the game "pop" when you mouse over them
Added some DoTween scaling to the wave timer when you have 5 seconds or less, the color also changes to red now
Added several new legendary items: Runeblade, EchoShredd, Exiled Wizards Staff, and Watchful Eye and epic items: Dreamblade
Massive localization pass. I have added so much stuff in the last 6 months that I got way ahead of my localization, I have almost doubled the amount of localized strings in the game, and have it all localized again.
Added new Tutorial text for kill and timer based reward chests
Fixed the description text for a bunch of achievements to have better phrasing.
Fixed Ball Lightning sometimes having a null ref under weird edge case scenarios
Options changes:
Added the ability to set your target framerate (this is a big one for you folks whos GPU was going bonkers), you can now set 30, 60, 75, 120, 140, 240, 360, and unlimited fps for your target framerate. This should help folks who run with Vsync off and not have their video card go max and run 100% power (unlimited fps) by letting them set it to their refresh rate.
Optimization Changes:
New Unity 6.3 build: New stability and performance changes in the engine. Render Graph upgrades, HTTP/2 added, better DX12 memory usage, and tons more. This build should be considerably better for performance and speed, as well as less crashes from the engine.
Changed Enemy distance checks from a NativeArray calling each frame to a simple cheaper inline squared distance check, WAY more performant and should help with late game possible lag with large groups of enemies.
Optimized enemy Navmesh SetDestination calls and fixed possible destination issue with larger enemies having trouble finding their destination.
Changed the Longsword ability to use a new EnemyManager singleton tracker to get range and distance for enemies instead of calling a Physics.OverlapSphere on every attack. This is active on just the Longsword ability, I will be transitioning all the other abilities to use this new distance check. This should be a HUGE performance increase instead of doing dozens on dozens of physics checks every second when batches of abilities go off to just simply checking for range from a list of enemies that are alive. This will be rolling out in the next update so stay tuned for that.
Core Gameplay Changes:
The Archer and Mage classes are now locked for new players until you beat a few of the levels. Beating the Eldritch Forest now will unlock the Archer, and beating the Obsidian Hills unlocks the Mage.
Advanced classes are now unlocked by completing achievements
Abilities also have the ability to be locked behind achievements, right now they are all available. I am playing around with possibly locking these behind some achievements.
My idea behind these changes is it makes the game more engaging to play through to unlock stuff. Having everything handed to you out of the gate feels like there's no challenge or sense of reward or anything to really work towards other than the meta. With the new achievement locking for classes, advanced classes, and maybe abilities I feel like this will return some sense of purpose to the game, as its more fun to unlock stuff and do playthroughs than to just have everything open.