Hello everyone!
Version 0.9 has just been released, and I'm here to tell you a bit about it. First of all, I'm sorry this update took so long. Real life got in the way, and I simply wasn't able to dedicate as much time to Thornkeep each day as I usually do, which caused the delay.
New Blood Stones
Three new Blood Stone destinations have been added: Deep Woods, Overgrown Village, and Swamps.
These greatly expand the endgame and should keep your Blood Realm runs fresh for much longer. It took some extra time to handcraft the layouts for these maps, as I didn't want to simply reuse the default map template and populate it with assets from each biome. I hope you'll notice the extra effort.
Doctor Rework
The Camp Doctor interface has been reworked to be more intuitive and finally gives you the ability to add positive perks to your heroes.
Heroes can now receive one additional perk for every 10 levels, giving character levels even more meaning, just as many of you requested.
Other Small Tweaks
As the game moves closer to its full release, I'm focusing on quality of life improvements and visual polish, especially for the UI.
The first thing you'll notice is the redesigned main menu, but there are plenty of other small changes and improvements throughout the game. To be honest, since development of this update was spread across two months, it's hard for me to remember exactly what was added when. Fortunately, that doesn't really matter as long as each change makes Thornkeep a better and more polished game. ;-)
Near Future & 1.0 Release
I should have a bit more time to dedicate to Thornkeep now. At the same time, I want to keep my sanity and avoid burnout. Since it's also the middle of summer and I imagine most people would rather spend time at the beach than crawling through dungeons I've decided to postpone the full release from mid-summer to mid-September.
This gives me some breathing room to implement more improvements, replace ai generated music with human made(this ll be tough, hard to find ambient spooky pieces like we have now), finally rework the swamp environment sprites, and even add a bit more content to keep you entertained once version 1.0 arrives.
Thank you all for your attention, understanding, and continued support!
Tryzna