Mezztik's Marvels is OUT!
The first of three roadmap updates is finally here, bringing along major QoL changes, new content, new and better visuals, and much much more! As stated in past announcements and the roadmap, Mezztik's Marvels is an update focused on gameplay and systems polish. While that does mean there's no new story chapter, there's still plenty of new content to cover, so let's dive in!
The Quick Rundown:
- A staggering 29 new items, very nearly doubling the total item pool
- 5 new Chakras to unlock, featuring some much-requested additions to spend those Pact Coins on, along with some changes to a few existing chakras
- Over 30 new room layouts!
- You can loop runs after beating Scarlett now, if the relevant Chakra is unlocked
- A map screen, complete with "fog of war" and fast travel to any room you've visited!
- All Chakras can be optionally disabled for more customizability!
- A new legacy tree, unlock it's Chakra to wield forbidden magicks!
- A new Artifact, freshly refurbished from the early beta days!
- A new type of item to find: Cursed items! These are typically not stackable, but provide powerful effects both positive and negative, for a price.
- A new character, who deals in Cursed items
- A new dialogue system!
- Cleaner interface, with better visuals for things like Artifact charge
- Enemy pathfinding! They're less stupid now!
- Redesigned Geogems! Find them in special rooms called Gem Vaults, and use them to focus your build! There's several new ones, and many of them have been reworked entirely.
- Achievements! There's 16 in total, each one unlocking a new item! In the future, these will be one of the primary ways to unlock new content along with Chakras.
- Many, many reworks to everything from items to enemies to status effects to legacies; nearly everything got a balance and design pass, to list them all would probably take up the whole character limit.
And for those wanting some more details...
The Nitty Gritty:
UI/Interface:
- Dialogue is now handled with a proper, choice-select menu rather than a simple sequence based on story flags. This means you can revisit special dialogue, as well as see new dialogue highlighted in yellow.
- Artifact display tweaked, and will glow when the Artifact is fully charged
- A new map screen, that can be accessed whenever you're not in combat. You can click on any room you've visited (highlighted in green) to warp there.
- Stats display in the pause menu simplified; Vampirism, Perseverence, Recovery, and Dash Distance removed as they aren't modified by anything anymore.
- Fixed a number of issues with UI & camera scaling; all resolutions should have roughly the same vision range now.
- Refactored all input handling and control display for better readability and options. You will need to reset your keybinds!
- Screenshake is toggleable now, I think the game feels weird without it though
Items & Artifacts:
- Artifact charging reworked; all artifacts now charge on room clear, but instead charge over time during timed survival and boss fights
- Artifact XP removed, it was mostly a vestigial system from older versions of the game
- 1 New Artifact: Greedy Claw
- 3 New Common Items: Brass Knuckle, Cockatrice Feather, Overdue Library Book
- 2 New Uncommon Items: Red Pistachio, Blue Pistachio
- 1 New Rare Item: Attractive Powder
- 1 New Ultrarare Item: Gem-Forger Rod
- 3 Unlockable Common Items: Worm Weave, Azta's Amplifier, Tack Warts
- 4 Unlockable Uncommon Items: Broken Snout Extender, Gream Powder, Rewards Card, Hexplates
- 4 Unlockable Rare Items: Valiant, Thunder Tome, Drippy Snowman, Twisted Timer
- 2 Unlockable Ultrarare Items: Baphomet Horn, Sunsetter
- 3 Unlockable Legendary Items: Stoneheart Bone Smasher, Thumper Boot, Sanctified Concoction
- 6 Cursed Items: Doomed Signal (converted from Legendary), Encrusted Dice, Dreamskate, Lucidity, Berserker Rage, Wretched Clown Nose
- Redesigned Cursed Blade of Grudges: now marks enemies that damage you, use to slash between all marked enemies.
- Redesigned Wave Blaster: Now fires 2 wide projectiles perpendicular to the punch direction on hit.
- Redesigned 621-Volt Battery: Charges artifact when a certain number of enemies are destroyed
- Redesigned Friendly Leech: Now heals every 10 kills, based on STR
- Redesigned Funky Mushroom: Affects fewer stats, but with greater effect.
- Many items had damage scaling changed (INT in particular is a bit less centralizing now)
Chakras:
- All Chakras can now be disabled by clicking on them again once unlocked. Some effects won't be reset until the next run (starting gold, etc)
- Artifact XP Chakras have been replaced, as Artifact XP doesn't exist any more. They now charge your Artifact at specific times.
- 5 New Chakras: Donation, Shady Deals, Valued Customer, Recall Self: Warp, Destiny Rejection
- Pact Coin drop rate now scales down on a per-room basis, starting at 100% and decreasing by 20% multiplicatively for each Demon-Pact enemy killed (10% during survival phase). This is primarily to prevent items like Doomed Signal from effortlessly snapping the progression over it's knee, it shouldn't make too much of a difference for normal gameplay, and never reaches 0%.
Enemies:
- New Enemies: Shotgun Golem, Darkworm, Proto, Architect
- Refactored all enemy behaviors, most things should be more consistent now
- Enemies will pathfind around walls if they can't see you!
- Worm Golem no longer has the Sting property
- A few enemies that didn't have attack tells, do now
- Stoneheart Tank attack reworked: now lobs a Stoneheart Bomber directly to your location, exploding on impact.
- Fixed several inconsisitency issues with angled rectangular hitboxes, primarily affecting Atlas' punches and Wisewood's beams
- Atlas' lightning towers are now destructible by hand and don't block movement
- Atlas' Thunder Shield damage reduction significantly reduced per tower
- Combat rooms will now randomly have "Incursions", spawning a few strong enemies around the room as part of a wave. The chance of this happening increases with Curse.
- Redesigned enemy spawn portal visuals to be less obtrusive.
- New SFX for a number of enemies.
Geogems:
- New Geogems: Power, Mind, Agility, Phantom
- Geogem of the Cornerstone buffed: Now gives 1 legendary item for every 5 items lost to its effect
- Geogem of Blood effect changed: Sacrifice 50% current HP for +1 STR, DEX, INT
- Geogem of the Collective changed: +1 STR if you have 20 or more items, +1 DEX if you have 5 different rarities of items, +1 INT if you have 5 duplicates. Cannot spawn on floor 1.
- Geogem of the Soul changed: Now called Geogem of Soulfire, trades 1 INT for full barrier
- Geogem of Straights removed
- Geogem of Flushes removed
- Some Geogems now have a gold price to activate.
- Geogem reward distribution slightly tweaked.
- Geogems are now tagged based on what aspect of the game they affect; Stats, Items, Buffs, and Funny. The game tries to spawn a relatively even number of each, ensuring that there's always a variety of opportunities available.
Player Character:
- All primary stats (STR, DEX, INT) now start at 10. Damage values across the board have been rebalanced to compensate; this prevents an issue where lower starting stats were fundamentally more valuable to increase, because multipliers on them had to be higher.
- Vampirism, Perseverence, Recovery, and Dash Distance stats removed, as they were either useless or too difficult to balance.
- New Legacy Tree: Warp. Unlocked via Chakra
Miscellaneous Tweaks and Other Things:
- A new NPC, who only shows up rarely...
- Small ground objects very rarely drop loot when broken
- Internally refactored almost all the data in the game, to significantly ease the development of future content.
- Renamed the save data file to "PlayerData1.json", from "PlayerData.json" (don't worry, existing data should transfer just fine). This should prevent potential data loss if for some reason you try to play the Demo version after the release version, as well as potentially allowing for multiple files in the future.
- Fixed a ton of bugs
- Created a ton of bugs (probably)
What's Next For DASHPUNCH?
As I mentioned in the last announcement, I'm taking a slight detour away from the roadmap to get some tweaks and content in that were secretly planned for Mezztik's Marvels but didn't quite make the cut. This should be done sometime next month along with an updated roadmap, and after that I'll be off to start development on EA 1.2, which is still currently unnamed. As always, more to come! And if you made it this far down the notes, just know yours and everyone else's interest is what keeps me going, so a huge thanks for that!
Have fun finding all the new stuff in Mezztik's Marvels!
-DoubleV