Another big release, with lots of new stuff, and big balance changes. Because of this, a full reset will be performed with this update; we want to see how the new balance changes effect everyone’s ability to move through the game.
This is our antepenultimate update before 1.0, and with this release, we are almost feature complete. There are a couple of new things we’re working on for Update 40, but we’re planning on that update being mostly bug fixes, balance tweaks, and polish. We are aiming for Update 40 by the end of May, and 1.0 min-June.
Full list of changes for this update:
Features:
- The shoppe in the Academy behaves differently now. At the beginning of each mission, you now have the opportunity to purchase items for your recruit (including extra potions and discard runes) from your shoppe, and as you increase the level of items in the shoppe, better equipment will be available to purchase for your recruits. If you don’t like the equipment that’s presented, you can pay 50g to get another assortment of random items.
- Dungeons can now have miasmas. These are negative effects that make the dungeon harder. Seoc from the Steam forums suggested this idea, and I liked it so much, I pretty much did exactly what he suggested (mostly). Many of the Dungeon Mods he suggested have been implemented as miasmas.
- A new badge has been added for completing a dungeon with a miasma.
- The Hall of Records is finally open in the Academy, along with the Beastiary. Check out your progress in the game, learn interesting facts.
- Pets are back! I think we finally nailed the pesky bugs that were plaguing some players. Pet AI has also been tweaked to be a little better (pets shouldn’t wander off randomly now).
- A certain mission in Chapter 3 has been “happied” up. Seoc from forums point this out, and we agreed.
- A new achievement has been added for winning the game.
- The original sound track DLC has been published to Steam. All early access customers will get this for free. If you own this content, a button has been added to the main menu to open the folder that contains the album.
- A new gem has been introduced: Gem of Hunger. It steals your life gradually, but gives a huge strength bonus when used. You have been warned.
Balance Changes:
- Monster hit points, attack and defense have all been raised, and the rates at which they increase as monsters level has also been increased.
- As you progress through the campaign, monsters will become increasingly more difficult (essentially +10% harder for each chapter in the campaign).
- Combos that contain more than one card have been made more powerful (to encourage their use against harder monsters).
- Runes of Discard no longer consume a turn to use (to encourage their use to help build combos against harder monsters).
- If you fail a dungeon multiple times, the difficulty will be adjusted slightly to make that particular dungeon easier.
- Due to the changes in the way the shoppe works, new recruits will no longer come with their own items or weapons.
UI Tweaks:
- A tooltip has been added for prisoners that need rescuing or things that need doing in the dungeon (trees that need to be cut down, for example).
- A new animation has been added when keys are found in the dungeon.
- Status effect tooltips have been updated to show “per turn” damage for things that actually cause “per turn” damage (Snaked, Sticky Barf, etc).
- Added a button on the chapter intro screen to skip boring flavor text, if you want to hurt our feelings and not read our amazing story.
- Multiple bosses of the same type are now combined on the final scorecard (the gold given is the same, they are just shown once instead of multiple times).
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed a bug with the Gem of Balance (wouldn’t cause any problems, just show a red error message in the console).
- Changing sound preferences (music & SFX volume) now properly saves those settings.
- Things that are “snaked” will no longer attack pets.
- Loot pinatas are now “truly” random and wont show up in the same place if you fail a dungeon and retry that same dungeon. Sorry, loot scammers.
- Fixed some stuff around how missions were assigned to areas. This was causing problems for some players.