Hello everyone! A pretty straight forward update this week. Two new sub-zones for The-Core and The-Arcane-Tower. The plan is for the next few updates to follow this pattern of 2 new sub-zones plus whatever misc stuff If feel like tackling. Sometime in the next month or so I'd also like to get the first draft of the new Bard class implemented.

I'm planning on spending the last few months of the year on a big, mid project, clean-up and try to really fix up and polish everything that's currently in game. This would include revisiting Ranked-Mode, getting all the existing races reworked, reworking the new classes, spending a few months tweaking, expanding or even trimming the talent upgrades etc. Really just trying to go into the new year with as few loose ends and sketchy features as possible. So until then as mentioned above I'm going to just keep adding new content via sub-zones as few weeks.

The two sub-zones this week are much more mechanics focused as opposed to content focused. Some sub-zones are really based around adding a whole new special class or type of enemy while others (like this weeks) are more about using existing content with the addition of some novel mechanic. The-Dark-Temple in last update would fall into this category.

The Caldera:
The heart of The Core. The most volatile, explosive, and fire focused region of the game. The Caldera adds a new Obsidian tile type that is placed around the edges of lava pools or forms bridges across the lava. The lava level will periodically rise covering the obsidian tiles before then receding back to the original level. There are also several free floating clouds of 'Flaming-Cloud', think the old dust storms from The Sunless Desert.

A new enemy type has been added: Magma Cube that spawns in the lava. Its a basic, slow moving melee enemy with a pretty major fire damage shield. It heals itself quickly when in lava and so must be pulled up onto the land in order to kill it unless you have some serious burst damage. I can definitely see adding additional enemy types to this sub-zone in the future as it may end up growing larger in future dungeon expansions. The main idea will be to make this region even more totally fire focused than the rest of The Core in which there is a mix of fire and physical damage types.

Spectral Floors:
On the floor preceding The Nexus of Conjuration (summoner boss) is a level made up almost entirely of pits. Over these pits are Spectral-Floors which disappear as characters move over them only to reappear several turns later. This means that if the player is moving across a narrow bridge he will be unable to immediately retrace his steps. I wanted to go with a summoning theme on this level to tie it into the associated boss and so a few turns after entering, portals will begin to open randomly across the level which will summon a variety of Spectral-Weapons. After several waves of these portals opening, the stairs will become unlocked and the player can proceed.

I think there is a lot more that could be done with this zone to really tie it into the theme of summoning. I'll be returning to many of these sub-zones in the future to make a second pass of polish, content and theming.

Crypt Fence Maze:
On a whim I ended up adding a new simple generator to The Crypt that can appear on any of the standard levels. I'm hoping to do more quick one off stuff like this in the future as it only takes an hour or two and is a nice break from the larger, more focused work.

Enemy Balance:

• Lava Eel, Electric Eel, and Tentacle Spitter: Range: 7 => 6
• All eel types will move off of dry ground if they are 1 tile away from liquid.
• Lavosa (Boss): now has homing fire orbs instead of the basic slow moving ones.

Talents:

• Disengage (Kill-Reset): removed the cool-down penalty (sort of moving away from having penalties on upgrades unless its something really crazy).
• Lunge (Kill-Reset): removed the cool-down penalty.
• Disengage (No-Cool-Down): a new upgrade that allows the duelist to perform the old infinite disengage trick (limited by SP of course).

User Interface:

• Lava and Toxic-Waste now shows damage on mouse over.
• Damage-Shields now have a little red shield graphic when triggering.
• E (default) will now auto equip the item on the mouse when in the character screen.
• Switched to slightly larger target boxes that better align with the game tiles. I'm planning on adding additional little arrows and indicators to these for some player/npc abilities where appropriate and having a bit more space will help with this.

Bugs and Crashes:

• Fixe eels on spawning on bridges (I swear this was fixed at some point already)
• Fixed: Staff-of-Shielding was raising a shield on every shot, even those not hitting enemies.

That's it for this update. Majority of the work ended up going into the sub-zones. Struggled a lot getting the obsidian to double tile with the ground and lava. There are still a few places where it messes up that I need to fix. Going camping at the start of next week but will be spending the remainder of the week doing the usual hot-fixes and clean up before moving onto another 2 sub-zones. I've mostly got the Bard class worked out on paper so I might end up just implementing it as well so we can see how it plays.

Justin