Hello everyone! Hope you're all doing well!
This update ended up getting a little bit out of hand. I started off planning to do two new sub-zones one of which was going to be for The-Iron-Forge but as I started to get into it I realized that this zone was really quite primitive. From what I can remember it had barely been touched since RFIII and so the enemies, the generators and the vaults were all still in the older style.
So what began with me tweaking a few things and adding a bit of extra content ended up evolving into what is essentially a total zone rework of The-Iron-Forge. There are a bunch of new enemies, reworked old enemies, new level objects, a totally different set of generators with new vaults as well as some clean up with the art assets.
Click Clock Keep:
I've decided to rename the zone Click-Clock-Keep as I want to restrict the heavy fire theme to sub-zones. So The-Iron-Forge with its fire focused enemies and terrain will eventually become a sub-zone, possibly on a branching path and only appearing in some versions of Click-Clock-Keep. As a more general theme I'm planning on adding a lot more moving bits and pieces to the levels to make the whole zone feel as if your inside of some kind of giant mechanism.
Rough Draft:
This zone rework should probably be considered an initial rough draft as I didn't have time to really polish everything up. So there are still some placeholder art assets and a ton of stuff that really should be implemented in these basic generators that isn't. There are also a lot of old generators and level types that I still need to convert to the new style and move over.
Monsters:
I've generally removed the fire resistance from all enemies except the explicitly fire themed ones. As mentioned above, at some future point I'll add a number of new fire themed enemies and spin of 'The-Iron-Forge' as a sub-zone. Given the nature of the zone, there is a pretty heavy melee and tank focus to the enemy roster.
- Clockwork-Shredder: fast, flying enemies with a simple melee attack and damage shield.
- Bombomber: same as before though they are now 'normal' speed. I'm intending to add a new 'ability' in which they ignite when within a certain range which causes them to move 'fast' for 5 turns or so at which point they explode.
- Clockwork-Brawler: Basic melee unit with Rocket-Punch a 3 range orthogonal only attack that deals high damage and knockback. Fighting these guys is quite interesting as you really need to keep yourself positioned at an angle.
- Clockwork-Pogo-Lancer: Light melee unit that can rapidly jump, lunge and attack with a 2 range spear type attack.
- Clockwork-Pogo-Gunner: Basic ranged unit with simple projectile attack, rapid jumps and a slow moving rocket projectile.
- Clockwork-Knight: Same as before except his Shields-Up which provides reflection and protection is now triggered even at range. He essentially goes back in forth between a shielded and non-shielded state throughout combat.
- Clockwork-Clamper: a slow moving heavy tank that can Clamp (constrict) you and has a hook attack to drag you in.
- Clockwork-Rhino: same as before
- Clockwork-Bomber: fires lobbing shots that pass over the heads of his allies. Throws a slow burning bomb as before.
- Clockwork-Pyro: same as before except he now explodes when killed.
- Clockwork-Armorer: First attempt at implemented a class of enemies that TealKnight had suggested on Discord. He 'summons' a shield when agroed which has 100HP and high protection. He then moves with this shield positioned between him and the player. The shield itself can bash you and the Armorer will toss Armor Packs (overheals) on his clockwork allies.
- Cannon-Turret: has had its range increased to 9.0 same as ballista.
- Pyro-Turret: has had its range increased to 9.0 same as ballista. I'm intending to add a new ability to turrets in which they retract and repair themselves every 5 turns or so. This would force the player to actually burst them down quickly.
Environment:
Planning on a bunch more stuff like this for Click-Clock-Keep in the future but this is a decent start.
- Windup-Gizmo: clockwork enemies passing over it will gain 'haste' for 5T.
- Repair-Gizmo: clockwork enemies passing over it will be healed.
Level Generators:
Except for the Clockwork-Sentry, I don't consider any of these to be proper sub-zones rather they are just replacing the standard generic generators used by the zone. All of these still need work and have a bunch of planned new features and assets that I just didn't have enough time for. Nonetheless this is where a huge bulk of the work in this update went as these are all generally completely new.
- Engine-Room
- Production-Line
- Warehouse
- Conveyor-Belt-Rooms (got totally remade)
- Clockwork-Sentry: the original sub-zone that started this whole zone rework. A central sentry marks 1/4 of the main room and will spawn Shredders if the player is in its view. It slowly rotates in different directions as the player fights his way around the level. There is a single tile wide 'safe zone' between the view quadrants. A central clock dial type thing indicates the direction of turning and how long until the view changes. Art assets here are very placeholder (was a pain to just get working correctly).
That's it for this update. I seem to have more stuff on my TODO list now for this zone then when I started but that just means plenty of stuff to keep me busy in the future. I'll probably fix up the obvious missing art assets and maybe update some of the older content in the next update but mostly I'll be moving on to tackle another 2 sub-zones somewhere else in the dungeon.
This big content push is likely going to meander about like this for quite a while, revisiting stuff periodically to polish it up or expand upon it. Right now I generally just want to maintain some forward momentum and keep expanding the game as quickly as possible so I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of polish in the short term in order to achieve this. I'll definitely switch gears at some point and go back and clean everything up.
Thank you everyone for your continued support and feedback! Please let me know what you think about all the changes!
Hot-Fix 1.6.1
Fixed some spawn tags I messed up in Vault-of-Yendor that was causing half the monsters to not spawn.