Update 1.18 Odds and Ends IV

Hello everyone! Another update in the Odds and Ends series!

For those just joining us, this is a series of updates to close off the first year of Early Access involving a lot of clean up and filling in of missing content holes. Generally speaking the goals are:

• Fix as many bugs and crashes as possible so we can enter the new year with a nice stable build of the game.
• Achieve a minimum amount of content in each of the existing zones, specifically with regards to number of unique level generators and number of unique enemy types.
• Implement a bunch of little tweaks and improvements to the games UI and Quality of Life features. The new Game-Stats system is part of this work.
• Address any glaring balance issues with either the player abilities, talents and equipment or anything on the enemy / dungeon level side. Not trying to achieve anything close to perfect balance at this point, just dealing with anything that really obviously stands out.

Level Generator Goals:

This is the current and goal number of unique level generators I'd like to have for each zone by the end of the year. I've slightly reduced what I'm aiming for in Upper-Dungeon, Fortress and Palace as I'd like to devote a bit more time in the last stretch to really debugging. Nonetheless we're getting pretty close to achieving all these numbers with only 5 more unique generators needed.

Monster Goals:

Similar story here with adding characters. We're down to just a few zones: Grove, Swamp, Ice-Caves and Arcane-Tower that still need a few more new enemies before the end of the year. The plan is that a lot of the future enemy content (and level generators) are going to be added as part of sub-zones so I think its really important to make sure that these content counts are all filled out and balanced in the base zones.

Update 1.18:

Level Generators:

• Click-Clock-Keep: Tracks-Room. Finally a train track level again!
• The-Ice-Caves: Frozen-Lake
• The-Arcane-Tower: Construct-Maze. New enemies, new interactable terrain. This one is blurring the lines between standard level-gen and a full blown sub-zone.
• The-Palace-of-Shadow: Big-Pits. Playing with a new, fairly simple generator type with this one. Big, static central vaults with a bunch of alcoves or nooks added to the edges. Basically a way to mix up what would otherwise be purely static levels.
• The-Orc-Fortress: Beast-Maze. Also edging into sub-zone territory with spawn tables consisting entirely of wolves and pigs in a big open fence maze with ballista's on the edges.

Content:

• Arcane-Tower: Speed-Floors. Currently only being used in the new Construct-Maze. These floors allow enemies to move at double speed when walking on them. The player can sprint on these floors without spending speed points. The floor is 'consumed' and recharges after a few turns.
• Arcane-Tower: Elemental-Crystals. Also part of the new Construct-Maze. These extra 'fun' stationary turrets have extended range (like a ballista) and are reflective. They also implement some new code that will have them fire slow moving projectiles at the player from across the map even when they are not agroed.
• Clock-Work-Sentry: the sentry will now deactivate when all enemies on the floor are killed.
• Spectral-Floors: reduced the 'recharge' time 15T => 10T
• Pyro-War-Engine: part of the new Track-Room levels which now that I think of it are also semi sub-zoney at this point.
• Bombomber-War-Engine: same as above except spawning bombombers.
• Bombomber-Turret: stationary version which can now appear wherever the other Click-Clock turrets appear.
• Storm-Vortex, Storm-Statue and Storm-Elemental have all had their level reduced to match the other elementals.
• Ballista has had its level reduced 8XL => 7XL so that they can appear on more levels in The-Orc-Fortress.

User Interface:

• Added outlines to numbers in ability and item slots to make them a bit more readable.
• Slow-Projectiles will now interrupt player movement the same way that agroed enemies will.

Game Stats:

Just adding a bunch of suggestions/interesting things. This page is going to definitely need to be split up in the future to make a distinction between the critical core stats and the 'everything else'.

I think I've mostly got enough data now from you guys to start setting 'Par' values on the critical stats though I'm going to need to collect some early game data as well so that we can scale these values by player level.

• View Game-Stats-Menu at any time from Game-Menu.
• Stop time ticking on the Game-Stats-Menu.
• Added the console command debug.watchGameStat(statName) to display the stat on the lower left in case you want to keep track of something. Use debug.clearWatchGameStat() to remove this.
• SP abilities now count towards the total SP points used.
• New Stat: Melee-Attacks (non-ability)
• New Stat: Range-Attacks (non-ability)
• New Stat: Auto-Melee-Attacks
• New Stat: Auto-Range-Attacks
• New Stat: Strafe-Attacks (melee + range)
• New Stat: Highest-Single-Damage-Dealt (in a single attack)
• New Stat: Highest-Turn-Damage-Dealt (across a single turn)
• New Stat: Highest-Single-Damage-Taken (in a single attack)
• New Stat: Highest-Turn-Damage-Taken (across a single turn)
• New Stat: Dungeon-Cleared (% of the dungeon cleared based on number of enemies killed).

Bugs and Crashes:

Slowly chipping away here :P

• Added a level-gen crash room. Whenever the game fails to generate a level it will instead put the player in this special room that includes stairs down (including to branches). This will allow the run to continue rather than blocking further progress. We really should have had this a long time ago.
• Monsters pulled to a new level will no longer retain their terrain status effects ex. Unstable, Wet etc.
• Stat-Shrines will now warn you if you are at the max attribute. They do not prevent you from buying the attribute as you may want to remove equipment later on. They have always prevented you buying attributes if you are actually at the cap without equipment.
• When you return to a level in which an enemy is lunging they will now show the targeting boxes correctly.
• Assassins-Bow now deals physical damage on impact and so will crit against unstable enemies.
• Assassins-Bow now correctly deals adjacent criticals with Power-Shot and Range-Mastery (Thanks Rethlit).
• Bear-Traps can now be placed on blood on the water. (Also thanks Rethlit).
• Exploding Drop-Walls will no longer mess up nearby water and pit frames.
• Traveling Crash: this one totally crazy to track down and difficult to explain how exactly it could occur but it resulted in an error message pointing to the startTraveling() function. Multiple reports of this one though so the conditions to trigger it were common despite their weirdness.
• Fixed: A tentacle or tongue pull into a blink shroom would crash the game if you then canceled the blink.
• Fixed Acquirement Rings returning Tomes instead.
• Fixed a level gen crash in Sunless-Desert:4
• Fixed a level gen crash in Upper-Dungeons Mine-Track levels
• Fixed Ice-Rooms-Caves from spawning Palace-of-Shadow rooms.

Conclusion

That's it for now! Getting pretty close to finishing up the content goals and then its just bug smashing and polishing until the new year! My wife and I are expecting our second little one to be born sometime in mid November so I'll be out for a few weeks after that but I'm fairly confident that I'm gonna be able to get everything I've got planned done by the end of December.

Starting to get the serious itch to get moving forward again on all the new sub-zones, classes, items and ranked stuff I've got planned for next year so that's always a good sign :)

Thanks as always for all your feedback and support! Its a pleasure and a blessing to be able to continue developing for such an awesome and engaged group!

Hot Fixes:

Hot-Fix 1.18.1

• Game-Stats will no longer count auto-range-attacks when out of range
• Dungeon-Cleared stat was not saving when quitting/continuing
• Dungeon-Cleared stat was setting NaN if the player entered a level with no initial monsters (many Yendor levels).
• Crypt will now use alternate floor tiles (no idea when this stopped working)
• Dropped the games Polish price by about 50% which steam had set at 20% higher than the rest of the Euro counties... for some reason...