Hello exorcists! Welcome to 0.4 of Malys!
v0.4 Beta feedback
Feeback and bug reports from the beta have been SUPER useful - thank you to everyone who has taken the time to submit through our forms. We've handled the vast majority of reported bugs,
We're glad Mammon has improved a little in Expel, but like with many demons, expect more updates to come.
One important thing to note that has come up in feedback is that there WILL be a mechanic to re-draw rewards, which will with any luck make its way into the next update. We've received several notes about this, so we wanted to make sure it was called out.
Early Access Update v0.4 - New Content
CURIO UPDATES
Balance updates to a variety of curios
Reworks of several curios that weren't quite working
A bunch of new curios that allow for some more interesting synergies
21 total curios now implemented and accessible out of a planned 30
CARD & MECHANIC UPDATES
While we didn't get QUITE as many cards done as we wanted, we made some great progress.
Updates to many cards, from cost to function
Quite a few ground-up redesigns
A chunk of new cards for a total of over 80 in-game of a planned 100*
A new status effect, Spark
There are now several ways to gain more than 3 Candles
* There were a couple of features we weren't quite able to get to on the back-end that the rest of the cards relied on, so we opted to leave them for now and include them in next update in favor of getting the demon intent changes in.
DEMON UPDATES
We’re slowly continuing to refine demons - several have had significant updates, but most important is a change you will never notice when playing, which is we’ve now moved all demons over to a new behaviour system - most of them still function almost identically right now, but this will make future changes significantly easier and allow us to make them more interesting and reactive.
Shame now has a full behaviour set with working minions
Some major big fixes to several demons
Mammon is a little less punishing in Expel
Less curse card spam across the board
SHOP UPGRADES
You can now upgrade shops! Or, well, we've got the start of our shop upgrade system in there, which is focused on discounts.
This is the first part of meta-progression in Malys: you can purchase shop upgrades that will give you permanent discounts. In the final game, there will be other mechanical benefits, as well as story benefits, to unlocking a shop all the way and having that character become a Patron.
Big thanks to Alissa for taking on this feature and nailing it.
ARTIFACTS FOR TESTING
We've refreshed the Artifacts, with two new ones - one focused on Light and Glow, and another on Defense. These are concepts, and we haven't done extensive testing with them yet - so let us know what you think! Are they overpowered, underpowered? Do you have a favourite? Are they fun? We'd love to hear.
Early Access Update v0.4 - Demon intent and damage display
We've reworked how damage displays as well as how demon intent displays, to give you a better sense of what is coming and to whom, thanks to our new targeting system.
Card damage and Ward number display should now be accurate, inclusive of both owned statuses (such as Wrath or Shackle) as well as target statuses (like Vulnerable) where possible. To discover exactly what the final damage amount is on a target, select the card and hover over your target - the damage amount should update to include any statuses the target may have.
We still have a bit more to go on this system - accurate demon damage/Ward numbers are still on their way, and the current plan is that we will be moving projected damage amounts to the demon intent target indicators so you can see exactly what will happen to each target.
In the meantime, we hope these updates help to improve your experience!
Early Access Update v0.4 - Accessibility Options
We've been hard at work to respond to your feedback about things like motion options and text size, and the fruits of that labor make their debut in this update. Huge props to Andrew who spearheaded these features and made them possible.
Early Access Update v0.4 - Bugfixes/General
UI/UX & TEXT FIXES
Lesser Demon exorcisms are now less intense visually and aurally
Many tooltips have been updated for clarity
Status effects now expire correctly on all entities
Many minor updates to tooltip scaling, positioning and behaviour
Ward icons should now fade out correctly when Ward expires at the end of a turn
Minion spawn positions have been adjusted slightly so there should no longer be able to overlap information like status effect icons
Minion tooltips should no longer be able to appear behind other minions, or be cut off by the edge of screen
Elements in the candle area on the bottom-right of screen should now be positioned more consistently on 21:9 (Ultrawide) monitors
Longer card names are no longer obscured
Curios have now been scaled up in exorcisms and are larger on the screen
GAMEPLAY FIXES
Baalzebuth's Verse will now correctly be added by Baalzebuth's Curse cards
Arm minions should behave correctly
Demons will no longer take actions that would reduce their Will to 0 and end the exorcism
Minions should no longer take an action after the demon has been defeated
The Arm and Puppet minions will correctly play VFX again when they perform an action
Fixed a possible crash when fighting Iaison the Devourer (it shouldn't devour the game)
Puppet Fury no longer continues to work after the exorcism it is used in
Duplicated cards should now properly include changes and Upgrade status
QUALITY OF LIFE IMPROVEMENTS
The demon intent tooltip now provides specific information about what the demon will do, and to whom, on it's next turn. Noah still cannot divine what an unexposed demon will do, but will have more information in Endure and Expel
An indicator has been added that will appear over Noah or Allies when they are the target (or a potential target) of an attack or debuff in the next demon action
The way damage and Ward numbers are shown in the demon intent area of the UI has been reworked to be clearer and more easily readable
Timing has been updated to play out faster for several Minion actions. In particular, when a demon summons multiple minions in a turn, this should take around half the time as it did previously. Less waiting around!
Status effects and curios now have activation VFX where relevant
Accessibility option: Disable Exorcism Motion. This setting allows the user to turn off repeating/looping movement seen during exorcisms, such as the moving smoke during the Expose phase, the panning sky in the background during Endure and Expel, and several others. Some users have reported these types of continuous motion can cause eye strain or potentially motion sickness
Accessibility option: Large Storylet Text. Increases the text size in storylets, useful for users who find the default text size difficult to read
Accessibility option: Large Tooltips. This option increases the size of the tooltip boxes and their text on all tooltips in the game!
OTHER CHANGES
The Shame demon now summons two minions when it is revealed, and has more intelligent behaviour
Card reward numbers have significantly rebalanced - Lesser Demons give you 1 of 2 cards, Greater Demons give you 1 of 3 cards, Region Bosses give you 2 of 4 cards
Assorted cards and status effects have been updated to apply to all candles, to support when Noah has more than 3
Doubt now only affects damage
Pocket has changed to only occur on discard, moving the card it is on to the top of the draw pile
Dysthymia will use more intelligent behaviour, like not using an ability that would defeat itself
Various demons' behaviour has been tweaked and updated for better fight experiences
Updates to and redesigns of many cards and curios
Haunting Song has been renamed Haunting Chorus
Light the Candles has been renamed to Illumination to prevent confusion about its behaviour (it does not, in fact, light the candles)
Current known issues:
It's likely demon intent isn't 100% correct yet - let us know where there are weirdnesses!
Some of the new curios don't have their own art yet, as well as some of the new cards
The Center Must Hold card is broken and its effects are persistent
If you abandon a run inside an exorcism mid-run (rather than waiting to finish the exorcism), return to the main menu and start a new run, occasionally the loading screen will remain forever - just restart the game if this occurs and it will work fine
Some cards have the wrong art in Gideon's shop
Storylet skip doesn't work consistently the same way, and the Continue button is too far away from the final line for comfort
Damage rounding being inconsistent is causing minor variances in some damage numbers
If you spam-click in shops, you can gain extra healing etc.
THE PATHWAY TO v1
We said during Malys' Kickstarter campaign that we intended to hit v1 before the end of the year, and we are on track for that.
More on that in our update next week, but the long and the short of it is we are planning one more big update after this before v1. V1 will itself will come with a lot of new content - region 3, more demons, lots of story content, end-game, post-end-game and more.
Hitting v1 just means we've done the base of our planned content -- we'll continue to support and update the game afterwards! The scope of those updates will depend on how the game does at v1 launch, but we're pretty committed to this project (as you might have noticed by making sure we found a way to reach this point even without a successful Kickstarter), so no matter what you'll continue to see updates from our side, though they will be slower.
What We Need From You
Please continue submitting feedback, and if you haven't already - please consider leaving a review!
You can submit all your feedback on exorcisms (and the new content we've added, and bugs we've hopefully fixed) via bit (dot) ly / malysfeedback. If you run into a new bug, you can submit it at bit (dot) ly / malysbugreport
This week, we'd love to hear feedback on builds and progression changes.
Stay Up To Date
We’ll be in touch next week with a new devlog to talk about the pathway to v1 and what that looks like, as well as responding to feedback on the v0.4 update and a little about what v0.5, our last big update before we hit v1 will look lke.
We'll also be posting on our socials when the devlog goes live, so stay in touch via Bluesky or sign up to our mailing list.
Speak soon, exorcists!