Greetings Wizards,
Lots of changes continue to work their way into Rogue Wizards.
At the end of 2014, the prototype idea for town was that we would build lots of structures, farms, landscaping, all of which would benefit your wizard in the dungeons. As the game has evolved throughout 2015 it became apparent building farms, landscaping, and material collectors was kinda boring and that the most fun part of town building was when you unlocked a new major structure such as the blacksmith, armory, jeweler. Therefore we concentrated on the most fun structures and as a result in the alpha there isn't really anything else to build except these cool structures that are unlocked as you progress though the storyline.
As we enter 2016, we decided to streamline the unlocking of new structures and build them in town for you as they are acquired. At the same time, town now has all new high resolution artwork and a hand crafted scene that expands over time as the player progresses throught the game.
We've also continued to push the spell content further in the month of January. The brand new nature spell "Swarm", summons a swarm of 5-8 pixies that flock around the player. At the start of each turn, one pixie automatically breaks off and attacks a nearby target, effectively giving you a second attack for that turn.
The new "Icicle" spell creates a stream of 2-5 ice shards that fire in rapid succession dealing cold damage to their target. If the target is frozen, these ice shards do double damage making the icicle spell the first spell that interacts with the results of another spell, in this case the freeze spell.
Finally, we're starting to see a little buzz about the game from the YouTube community. Zueljin Gaming has created 17 episode of Rogue Wizards gameplay.
Here’s the development highlights and details from the past month. Visit the Spellbind Studios January 2016 development blog post to see the full on details or talk about the changes in our Online Forums.
Major Changes
- Completely new town presentation. Structures are now auto-built as they are unlocked when returning to town.
- Town is no longer on a tiled grid.
- Town has a completely new set high resolution artwork for the structures, islands, and other decrotative elements of the scene.
- New Spell: "Swarm", summons 5-8 pixies that surround your character, each turn a pixie will break off and attack a target if one is found
- New Spell: "Icicle", launch a stream of ice shards at a target, frozen targets receive double damage
- Youtube let's play previews
Minor Changes
- Vault is now always present in town
- Ivan (Yvano) now inhabits the vault
- The Spellbook now auto open and moves a run into your shortcut bar (if there is space) when you learn a new spell at the spell tree in town.
- Town now has visual feedback when you mouse over a structure
- The town ring menu no longer comes up if there is only one possible action in the menu
- Removed the "Move" functionality from all town ring menus since it's no longer appropriate for the new fixed town (as was never implemented anyway)
- Followers are now given a ranged and a melee weapon
- Followers will no longer attack Blobs with the bow or chakram, doing so usually resulted in large amounts blobs everywhere and made the follower generally look stupid and make the battle very hard for the player. Note that secondary chakram bounces off blobs can still occur.
- Followers will now always do melee weapon attacks if the option is available instead of firing any ranged weapon they might have at the enemy standing next to them which is way not as effective as a melee attack
- The runtime now fully supports armor that visually changes the skin of your player between light, medium, and heavy looks when that armor is equipped or removed ... as the medium and light chest armor pieces are created we will trigger new character looks when equipped
Art
- All new town artowrk is now online
- Human Male and Female Avatar medium and heavy armor skins created/animated
- Female Avatar walk adjust to have a little more flow and pep!
- Guild Wizard left foot shadow fixed (affected Magic01 and the Magic01 Start, Loop, and End animations)
- Hosperak z-sorting claw issue fixed
- Gryphon die animation adjusted to have more pop!
- Fixed human female hand right closed image to be grayscale and named properly (without a trailing space)
- New town travel gate art without the stone base
Fixes
- Fixed loot not being able to be spawned when in tight quarters ... especially from a boss chest when the boss dies in a 1 square hallway block by a portal on one side and the player on the other.
- Loot will not always try to fall into the receiver cell if there is one, or gradually widen the loop drop search radius from 1 to 5
- Fixed spells being selected as secondary tooltip comparisons
- Fix check for "at inventory limit" that was off by one ... that caused the potion 4/5 to stack OK, but potion 5/5 did did not
- Fixed inventory full message not appearing when it should have when dropping a vendor potion on a stack of 5 potions in your inventory
- Fixed wrong position of damage icon on spell upgrade UI after upgrading a spell (sprite text was set as clipped with previous value)
- Fixed spell damage and effect values changing in the UI after acquiring the first level of a spell, the issue is that the spell rune used in for the UI had a different variance than the rune that was created and put into the players inventory
- Spell weapons (runes) no longer are allowed to have any variance, that was intended only for magic items.
- Fixed Z sorting on the spell rune that animates from the new spell book ui into a free slot on the shortcut bar
- Fixed Z sorting on the TravelUI and QuestUI so that they can both be displayed at the same time from the Travel Gate in town again
- Fixed the Forgestone crashes when using it in town due to the ropes not understanding Map vs MapBase
- Fixed all structure portrait size and positioning for new town art
Visit the Spellbind Studios January 2016 development blog post to see the full on details or talk about the changes in our Online Forums.