Hey everyone, a few days ago we pushed a new version of the demo live. In it, we’ve changed a lot and I wanted to give some details.
Handplaced Enemy Spawns
Previously the number and type of enemies in each stage was randomized. Now each stage’s enemies have been handpicked. It’s kind of an attempt to better manage the difficulty scaling as you progress through the Unknown Lands. We’ve also introduced new Elite Enemies. Most stages have one or two, and you can identify them by the cursemark icon floating over their heads. These guys have more health and hit way harder than their normie counterparts. We like the variety this brings to combat encounters.
Reworking the Cursemark System
Those Elites are part of how we’ve reworked difficulty scaling as well. Instead of increasing enemy health and damage after every stage, increasing the grip of your curse now spawns more Elites than in previous stages. This makes the Elites really dangerous and challenging the further you progress.
Introducing Elemental Interactions and Environmental Puzzles
Super excited about this one. We’ve added elemental interactions and environmental puzzles to a lot of stages. Braziers you need to light, brambles to burn away, rocks you need to blast for instance - all solved by specific elemental / spell types. We don’t want to spoil it, experimentation is part of the goal here. Hopefully this makes the Unknown Lands more interesting and interactable, plus it adds a cool new layer to progression and unlocking new zones and rewards and such.
More Open World Structure
We’ve changed up the map a good bit, in an attempt to make the Unknown Lands more open and less linear. Stages have more entrances and exits, for instance. We think that one of the results of this will be more incentive to explore, and less of an instinct to follow the same path on each run.
New Intro Stage with Better Tutorialization
We’ve wanted to revamp your first steps in the Unknown Lands for a while now, giving first time players a better tutorial on how the game plays, how spells work, and how systems like Runes function. There’s more to come here, but we think this new initial stage is a big step in the right direction.
Blessing Shrines Are Out…For Now
This is a big one. We’ve removed Blessing Shrines from this build. We were feeling like the rewards they gave weren’t as impactful as we wanted them to be. While they’re out for now, we’re experimenting more with this and may bring them back as rarer points of interest with bigger rewards.
A Slew of New Polish and UI changes.
You’ll also find a new layer of visual polish on a bunch of stuff. New enemy art and animations, new art on runes and talismans that we think looks really nice. We’ve also changed up the way the game’s menus work to be D-pad based on controller. There’s some bugs here that we’re still ironing out, but overall we’re trying to improve the UI across the board.
As you can see, we’re testing out a lot of new things and changing up the game in some significant ways. And there’s definitely bugs in there - the more you change the more you tend to break, after all.
Your feedback is hugely valuable to us and we’d love to hear your thoughts - what you like, what you love, what you wish we’d revert back, and any bugs you find. Feel free to hop in the Discord and let us know!
CLYDE