Hi Necromancers!
Right, time for a proper catch up. We have been quiet for a bit and there is a good reason for that, because we are getting the game ready for full release and a lot of things got torn apart and put back together in the meantime.
Here is what has been going on in the crypt.
The whole game is isometric now
This is the big one and it is the reason everything else took as long as it did. We moved CODEX MORTIS from the old top down view to an isometric perspective.
Every character sprite in the game is new. While we were there we also grew the playable roster to 31 characters.
200 skills, 10 schools
Harvest, Death Knight, Spiritism, Desolation and Apothecary are alongside the original five. Feedback from the last beta round was that too many skills were still on placeholder visuals; every skill now has its final art implemented.
Cast time on every skill.
This one needs a little explanation, because on paper it looks like a nerf.
Some of you got a cooldown reduction all the way down to zero, and at that point a skill could fire on literally every frame. It looked ridiculous, it made fights impossible to read, and it quietly ate the balance of everything around it. So every skill now has a cast time stat, which is its own thing and separate from cooldown.
In practice: your fast build is still a fast build. A cast just has to finish before the next one starts. We would rather you see what is happening on screen than watch one skill turn the entire level into slopfest.
New levels, work in progress
There are new levels coming for full release. One of them already has its complete art in the build plus a first draft of its mechanics. The others are still at the scribbles and rough concepts stage, so we are not showing them yet, and nothing there is locked in.
Thank you for playing CODEX MORTIS. Feel free to join our Discord if you wanna know more about what’s going on behind the scenes.
- CRUNCHFEST & GROLAF