Greetings Wildkeepers,
These are exciting times: on Monday we're participating in Steam's Creature Collection Fest, with our largest discount ever, 20% off - make sure to let your friends know!
And this is the absolute best time to play Wildkeepers Rising, as we just released an update that adds a new mode, some necessary accessibility features and a bunch of bug and balance fixes. Let's dig in.
Endless Mode
Did you finish the campaign and hunger for a new challenge? This new mode is for you.
After beating the boss in each environment, a new mission will unlock, that lets you play for as long as you can stay alive. And the rules are a bit different:
- Monsters get stronger over time, receiving periodic upgrades to both their health and damage.
- After a warm up period of 3 minutes, you play a 10 minute run, then fight the boss, and the cycle repeats, indefinitely.
- The max level cap of 10 is gone, you can continue to level up and upgrade your Wildkeeper and your Guardians as much as you want. Keep in mind though that some specific upgrades do have limits.
- You can equip 3 sigils per character, so all of the sigils you collect (at levels 1, 5 and 10) can be equipped simultaneously.
- Chests also replenish after beating the boss, so you can keep piling up team upgrades.
A side effect of working on Endless mode has been a redesign for how Block and Dodge work internally, so we can scale them infinitely. Previously, the game would simply add the % for block/dodge, as you got upgrades. The issue is that once you reach 100%, you become invulnerable - no good. Now, there is a block value that is not a percentage, but is used by the game, with a non-linear transformation, to calculate a % that keeps increasing, but never quite reaches 100%. We're also using the same logic for other stats, like chance to freeze.
You'll see both numbers in the pause screen and in any upgrades, so hopefully it's both clear and detailed enough.
As part of our testing we also found that certain status effects become too powerful when faced against monsters with large damage and health, so we scaled them down a bit, as enemies get stronger:
- Freeze chance is lower
- Stun and hypnosis duration is also lower
In practice, we've found that in Endless mode you can end up with an extremely powerful team - but the monsters also become more and more challenging, providing an interesting back and forth. As usual though, as we play more and we hear from you guys, you can expect many more balance changes and tweaks.
And of course, this mode also supports harder difficulties, that you can unlock by reaching 24 minutes in normal difficulty (which will also award you an achievement per environment).
We feel Endless mode is perfect for experimenting with team compositions and synergies, and also for challenging yourself not only to see how long you can survive, but also to do it under weird circumstances (we know some of you want to try solo runs, so I'm curious to find out how those will turn out).
Accessibility
Just as important as a new mode (and for some people even more) is making the game accessible, so that as many players as possible can enjoy it.
Already in version 0.1 we added some basic options for remapping controls, but we've taken it to the next level with 0.3. That said, we haven't been able to implement every accessibility feature that we considered, so this is a topic we might revisit in the future (do let us know if there is something we missed).
First, if you just want to enter a zen state while monsters fight in an explosion of color, but don't want to worry about challenge, we have added "Accessible Difficulty". Once selected, all other difficulty options disappear, and monsters get severe health and damage handicaps, letting you enjoy the game without worrying about losing.
Visually, we realize the game is extremely fast and busy, and that might make it unplayable for some people. So we added some options to try to tame down what's going on:
- Camera shake can now be completely disabled.
- White Guardian outlines can be enabled to make it easier to keep track of your Guardians
- Monsters flash white when hit - this can be toned down or disabled.
- The screen also flashes red when the player receives damage - you can control the intensity now.
- The big one is all the visual effects: explosions, beams, magic indicators, etc. We spent a lot of time adding controls so you can adjust the opacity to make them much fainter, improving the visibility of everything else. We didn't go as far as disabling them completely, because some of them are used to indicate critical information (like sigils auras) - this is something we may revisit in the future.
The last accessibility area we touched in 0.3 is color. Let me start by saying that we designed Wildkeepers Rising from the ground up to not rely on color exclusively for any of the information you need. Even so, some things might blend too much for people with color blindness, so we took advantage of the excellent support that Unreal Engine provides to adjust the colors of the game. You select a type of color correction and then you can adjust the intensity to match your preference. We don't have the bandwidth to create bespoke versions of each of the items that might be hard to see for each type of color blindness, so we hope this solution can provide enough of a benefit to include most people - especially on top of our initial design to avoid color information in critical areas.
There is one area that we didn't have time to include in 0.3, but has been frequently requested: automatically triggering supers. We consider this an accessibility issue, and one we'll deliver in a future update - together with a longer post with a comprehensive explanation of our rationale for this feature.
Lastly, all of the accessibility features are available as well in the demo.
Others
Well, that was a lot of stuff, but wait, there's more.
Here's a long list of fixes and tweaks in 0.3:
- Double Super fills Volcoy to 1, instead of 3 (so you can wait a bit longer if you want a stronger pack member)
- Increased Wally's super cooldown from 15s to 24s
- Maximum area bonus increased from 100% to 150% for all Wildkeepers
- Ophelia's base damage reduced from 12 to 10, dash cooldown increased from 2s to 3s
- Ophelia's Critically Active crit chance reduced
- Double Super chance lowered from 50% to 25%
- Fix bosses taking advantage of meta-upgrades like Block and Dodge %
- Fix how aura's size bonuses are applied
- Fix Shiver's aggro max value
- Carn's damage increased from 30 to 35
- Fix Volcoy's pack count after teleporting to the boss
The final update I want to mention is visual improvements to the results screen. We've also added information about the mission you just played, so you can get a screengrab and brag to your friends about your epic run in Endless mode:
The Road to 0.4
I'm going to let you in on a secret. What's in 0.3 is not everything we've been working on since 0.2. The truth is that a lot of the work has gone towards our upcoming "gear" feature, that we hope will give you with a lot more options and variety for the meta-game. Stay tuned, as we're continuing to develop it at a rapid pace and we hope to release it for 0.4.
In the meantime, let us know what you think about 0.3, what you'd like to see in 0.4 or anything else in our Discord channel.
See you all there.
Sergio.