Greetings Wizards,
With a few waves of players now getting into the beta we've been getting a lot of awesome feedback.
We're also starting to see a little buzz from the larger gaming community! John Walker with Rock Paper Shotgun wrote a hands on preview article covering Rogue Wizards and had a lot of great things to say.
" ... a very lovely, well designed dungeon crawling RPG." - Rock Paper Shotgun
Read the full hands on preview article on Rock Paper Shotgun.
Also added this month is the new cosmic enemy called the "Disturbling". These guys can cloak themselves and other enemies turning them completely invisible, so watch out!
One of the most requested features from beta players is that sometimes it's tedious to have to walk all they way back across an already explored map just to open that last chest or get to the exit. We hear you and agree! Now there are waypoint markers distributed through every level, and you can open the map UI at anytime and teleport to any waypoint, entrance, and exit to get back to the action quickly.
Finally, here are some of the development highlights from April or read the full list of changes the Spellbind Studios website.
Major Changes
- Disturblings now appear in the game and can now cloak themselves and others. Cloaked enemies have a light source and no other visuals, don't make footstep noise, and don't put the game into stepped combat mode. A cloaked enemy that does any action or is attacked is revealed. Items that detect hidden have a chance to reveal cloaked enemies
- You can now teleport to any previously discovered exit or waypoint via the full map UI
- Upgrading the Blacksmith, Armory, and Jewler now require an item resource found in the world in addition to a gold payment
- Followers can now die, when they died they turn into a ball of light that followers the player. After a certain number of turns or using a healing shrine they will be revived automatically.
- Mouse hovering over enemies and objects is now done with polygon accuracy and ignores when over transparent pixels in those triangles
- New more stylized in game fonts for everything
- Gold, keys, and materials are now auto picked up by the player and any followers
Minor Changes
- Detect hidden is now done with a radius of 3 instead of 1
- Secondary tooltips now come up a fraction of a second after the primary tooltip, this visual cue helps your brain quickly understand which tooltip is for the target item and which tooltip is the comparison tooltip
- Secondary tooltip inventory slots are now outlined using the color of the secondary tooltip border to help visually connect the two
- New artwork for freeze crystals
- Exploding barrels now do effects at all possible target locations
- Fixed exploding barrels being ultra deadly to players
- Thieflings can no longer steal from your equipped weapons
- Theiflings now have less extra actions per turn (1 extra now) when have stolen goods in their bag
- Yeti's will no longer try to freeze you if you've been frozen with 4 turns
- Harpies will no longer try to silence you if you've been silenced within 2 turns
- Malevolence damage reduced
- Followers are now healed when the player drinks a health potion
- Added in world text for healing via potion
- Added tutorial with dialog when the first follower heal occurs
- Shield now protects you from yeti freeze
- Lowered xp and defense modifier boots from 50% to 20%
- Overseer now casts wall a lot less
- Better enemy selection so that you see less repeats and instead see stuff you haven't seen in a while
- Champions now summon one less wave of monsters
- Tweaked champion scared health thresholds
- Blob replication chanced reduced to 50% from 75% on damaged
- All healing shrines now refill over time
- Health potions can now drop, they have a very low chance to drop most of the time, but if you are low on health and have no more health potions left they chance increased a small amount to try and help you out
- Reduced the ceiling drop rate of vendor upgrade resources
- New game trailer with updated content