Version 4 - THE GRAND KING'S VALIANT CHALLENGES - Patch notes
Triple Swap Tower's third major update is here, adding new heroes and a Challenge Mode for the TST veterans looking for new ways to play the game.
NEW HEROES
Hoplite
A warrior trained with spears. His attack takes a bit of getting used to, but is quite powerful if you can master it! They can hit a single enemy multiple times with good positioning. Once during the initial wind up, and a second time when the spear is thrown. A very high risk, high reward hero, with his base ability rewarding you for being near enemies and enemy projectiles.
Alchemist
She uses alchemy and throws bottles full of powerful arcane acid. Her attacks are split between a Blunt type bottle and a Magic type pool. The pool attack has two timed damage instances, meaning you can hit an enemy three separate times with a single attack! Both attack parts count as "primary attacks" so something like the golden ring item will power up all three hit instances.
Lasermage
A character that has no special attack type, but instead attacks in "pure" type lasers, always hitting for normal damage regardless of the target's weakness, resistance, or immunity. Their attacks are a near-instant laser that can dispatch enemies quickly with a few well aimed bursts.
THE GRAND KING'S VALIANT CHALLENGES
The Grand King has called upon the brave heroes of the City to complete challenges for him to prove their worth-- and in return, he'll grant them Valiance.
This update brings in a challenge mode where you can do special runs that increase the difficulty and/or modify the game rules. If you've beaten the game at least once, you'll have the challenge screen unlocked. Initially, I designed challenges to be similar to a heat rating in something like Hades, but landed on more of a "challenge run" style, where each run is specifically designed to give you new ways to play the game and build new team.
The challenges reward your creativity on team building and exploiting the modified game rules through your knowledge of your team's skill pools. I had a blast testing and beating them, putting together parties I would probably have never considered otherwise.
Completing a challenge on a character grants them the Valiance trophy, which is viewable when assembling a party. It appears in the same row as the boss-completion trophies.
Doing a challenge run disables any difficulty settings you may have turned on in the settings menu, as these were designed and tested around the base difficulty of the game.
Other Additions and Changes
The tutorial in the game could be better. I want to make changes, such as making the information boxes more clear in their language, making the text boxes advance when the player hits a button instead of being tied to actions that the player does. I am working on an update to the tutorial, and I hope to have it in the following update. In the mean time, I increased the time it takes for the automatic text boxes to advance, so hopefully players don't miss things by it switching too fast.
I am working on adding Steam Rich Presence support to the game, so you can display to all your friends what your current party and levels are.
Assassin's "BEAUTY KILL" skill has been reworked and renamed to "BEAUTY KILLER". Refer to the skill description in game for exact changes. You can see this information if you go to the Vault and view the hero's abilities by pressing the CONFIRM button while viewing a specific hero.
Reworked how the Cleric attack works behind the scenes. More often than not, items and skills were not applying consistently to the attack.
Adjusted the Valkyrie's attack hitbox to be a tiny bit larger. This should make it feel more consistent.
Three new achievements have been added to the game.
Increased the Boomeranger's base damage by 1.
As always, thank you for playing Triple Swap Tower! I have more stuff to add to the game in the future, as well as a new project in the works. Keep an eye out!