Heya Wizards!
I'm glad to announce that our first content update is live! We've decided to name this update "The Groundwork Update." First of all, lemme' tell you about all the new features that we've put into Wizard Boy!
The Missions
We've added the first batch of Spy Missions! These are a variety of tasks that will either be completed naturally over gameplay or will take a bit more planning to complete. Some basic examples are things like "perish x amount of times" or "collect x amount of biscuits," whereas some of the more interesting ones are things like "eat 10 rocks without dying," "reach a height of 20,000," or "have the game run below 10 FPS." All of these missions are totally optional, but if you do complete them, they each reward you with a Spy Emblem. What are Spy Emblems, though? Well, let's talk about the next big addition.
Upgrades
You can now upgrade Wizard Boy however you see fit! Wizard Boy can use his collection of Spy Emblems to equip or un-equip a choice selection of different skills that will allow him to tackle different obstacles better. You can now get extra health pips, more jumps, fall damage reduction. . . or the ability to eat any item you can grab, the ability to flatten like a pancake. . . you know, the necessities. These abilities are meant to be changed in and out depending on what goals you're currently going for, so don't feel bad if you're not able to equip all of them at once. (These will be especially fun next content update). We've also spread lots of Spy Emblems around the castle as one-time collectibles, so you'll get a reward for being curious and looking around.
Inventory
One upgrade deals with another new addition - the inventory! We've added a scalable inventory that can hold items for you to use at any time, even over perishing. Wizard Boy only starts with one inventory slot, but you can use the upgrade station to have up to four. This might seem like a minor system, but HOO BOY this one was hard to get together. As a reminder, since any object in the game can be shrunk, that means any item can also be grabbed and stashed. . . which brings a host of things for us devs to figure out. We hope you get a lot of use out of this one (and stash a lot of explosives).
The Spy Lair
Our next content addition is the Spy Lair. This is meant as the chill spot that you (and your friends if you're playing multiplayer) spawn into at the beginning of every day. This area is great for messing around, but notably holds the machine that Wizard Boy uses to change his upgrades. We've got more plans for this area in the future as well, so this one allows us a space to add in cool stuff down the line.
HUD, UI, and Effects
We've also gone through almost all of the HUD and remade it from scratch. We needed more flexibility and polish on what we had already made to accommodate the new ideas we've got coming down the pipeline, and we also wanted to give new players coming in from the Summer Sale a smoother first-time experience. You'll see a lot of UI changes, new spell effects for all the spells, redone explosion effects, new potion effects, particles on spellbooks, and a lot of other visual changes. We're also pretty happy to have added rebind-able controls (for M&K) and have done a lot of work to make gamepad a better experience in general.
Bugs and Fixes
We've also done lots of fixing (especially on the new content) over this update cycle. If you're interested in that sort of thing, you can check out the change log here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/3111080/discussions/0/595142333640513858/
What's Next?
If you've been following along with the dev posts, you'll know the content included in this update is only about half of what we've been working on. We realized that we wanted to get this content done first before diving into the Spider Dungeon, as how upgrades, missions, and to an extent the UI worked was going to influence how we wanted to do the dungeon's design. Since all of this ended up coming together as one satisfying chunk of content, we decided to wrap it into our first content update instead of waiting for another several months to also have the Spider Dungeon finished. But that's going to be our immediate focus once we get any hotfixes that need to happen from this update out into the world.
Thanks for being here with us! Wizard Boy is doing great in sales and we're super motivated to keep the ball rolling! Make sure to join the Discord if you want to chat with other Wizard Boy players. :)
https://discord.com/invite/TPNFGCd
See ya soon!
John