It's been a while, Soulfallen.
What's New?
While it may have seemed like the game was abandoned due to my lack of updates over the past 3 months, I am extremely excited to announce the largest and most content-filled update I have released so far. In addition to entirely new systems such as skilling, crafting, and talent trees, many of the existing systems have been reworked from the ground up, including Abilities, Level-Up Traits, and enemy scaling. I went back to the drawing board regarding game difficulty and spent a lot of time thinking about what differentiates an unfair/overly punishing game from a difficult, challenging, but ultimately fair one. I believe that I have struck that balance and the result is by far the most fun iteration of Soulfall that has ever existed up to this point. There is really too much new content for me to write about here, so I will list everything below extensively. I strongly encourage you try it out for yourself, you are in for a surprise.
Feature List
- The Western gates of Khelos have finally opened, revealing the resource gathering area. In between your descents into Hell, you can catch fish, mine ore, and harvest plants. These resources can be used to craft weapons, armor, potions, and food that will aid you in your journey and make you more powerful.
- Fishing, Mining, Farming, Cooking, Forging, and Alchemy have been fully implemented. These systems introduce dozens of new materials, recipes, and progression mechanics.
- Level up traits have been completely re-worked to be more engaging, offer better choice, and make the game more fun with better build variety.
- Abilities gained from Ability Tomes in Hell now have their own traits that can be acquired through leveling up, for example wider Dragon's Breath, more Lightning Strikes, and more Chain Lightning bounces.
- Ultimate abilities have been "removed" and replaced with a new Talent Tree system. You gain talent points by increasing your honor rank, and can spend these talent points to unlock a new and improved version of former "Ultimate Abilities". The general philosophy was to move away from slow charging attacks that force you to stop, and integrate them into the normal gameplay loop.
- Instead of charging your Ultimate Abilities, you can choose a talent that gives each attack a percent chance of triggering the Ultimate. This is more fluid, and more fun.
- Each class has gained their own class-specific level up traits. Hunter arrows can now ricochet to new enemies, warrior sword swings can now multistrike (triggering two melee swings in rapid succession), and mage spells now have a chance to split into two new projectiles when hitting an enemy.
- All abilities have been buffed with higher damage and lower cooldown, among various other tweaks to make each one feel fun.
- Enemy damage has been reduced, and enemies have been nerfed in general. Especially formerly devastating boss attacks that could one or two hit kill players, you will find significantly more leniency and what I believe to be more "fair" mechanics.
- The character creator has been completely reworked and streamlined to remove a lot of the unnecessary bloat, and simplify the overall process.
- A new "Training Mode" has been added, where all enemies have half as much health and deal half as much damage. You cannot acquire weapons/armor, or gain marks of justice in training mode, but it can be a great way to learn a boss's mechanics in a low stress environment where dying is nearly impossible.
- You will find sneak peek "Previews" of Acts II, III, and IV, the Infernal Highlands, Frozen Wastes, and Castle of the Dark Lord. These Acts will not be playable in the demo but will be in the full game on release.
- Each Act is 20 minutes long, with a unique boss spawning every 2 minutes to challenge you and stop you in your quest to reclaim your soul, for the purposes of the free demo you will continue to have access to the first 6 minutes of gameplay for the first Act.
- Stash tabs have now been implemented, costing GP and allowing for massively increased storage space across your characters.
- Gear salvage has been implemented, allowing you to break down duplicate gear for forging materials. The purpose behind this is to remove some of the "RNG" from getting a missing piece of equipment.
- The total build size of the game has been reduced from nearly 5.5GB to under 1.5GB (Windows) and 1.08GB (Linux). Due to a complete restructuring of files and chunks you will likely have to re-download a significant portion of the game, but moving forward updates will be miniscule in comparison.
- Trees no longer block the player's vision, using some fancy material occlusion logic, you will see your player at all times, even when you are standing behind a tree.
- Gold is now automatically picked up without pressing the "E" key. I did not implement this for other items because I don't want to force the player into cluttering their inventory with items they may not want.
- Attack range now visually increases the size of the punch and sword swing visual effects to reflect the increased hitbox.
- When you choose "Quit Game" from the settings menu you can now choose to return to the previous level or quit the game entirely. Quitting from Hell will allow you to return to town, and quitting from town will allow you to return to the menu.
- Overall improved user interface to make it more clear to the player which option is selected.
- Improved visual effects, performance, sounds, as well as texture and 3D object optimizations.
What's Next?
I am hoping to collect some feedback on the relatively large number of changes I've made to the game. There is always room for improvement and iteration so I will continue to do so. In addition, I am working heavily on content development for the 2nd, 3rd, and final Acts of the game, as well as fleshing out the 6 additional class specializations. Having all 4 Acts and all 9 class specializations finished are the final hurdles to releasing the full game. As always please feel free to make a post on the discussions page, or DM me anytime with questions, thoughts, or concerns about the game. Your feedback is valuable and always appreciated. Lastly, I want to wish all of you a very happy (and late) Easter. Christ is Risen, He is King of Heaven, rejoice and be glad. Thanks again, and see you next time.
Sincerely, KCS