Hey everyone, glad to see people trying out the game and starting to bank their first blue chest items as well as dipping their toes in the daily!
I wanted to announce the first patch for this game which I plan on releasing Monday night (8/17). You should note that because of the server side replay validation that exists in this game, any in progress daily you have will be invalidated when the game updates. I'm considering engineering a "dual-core" solution to this so that this doesn't happen in the future, but right now it seems like most people aren't really making serious deep runs in the daily yet, so the engineering cost seems quite high in comparison to the negative effects.
Here are the current changes I plan to include with this upcoming patch:
Fix exploit around being able to revive with HP changing equipment
Change sentry type enemies to require LoS to aggro
Make non-usable items such as yggdrasil fruit selectable from the menu so players can read their descriptions when using a controller
Make skills which aren't usable in battle due to being OOM still selectable in battle with a controller so their descriptions can be read
Increase mid-late difficulty (buffs to arch fiends and dragons)
Significantly reduce the early game difficulty/variance of the main mode by insuring mages get access to a good scroll early and increasing the expected numbers of ethers a player will find. Also remove the intentional drought of restorative items in the early-mid floors. These changes will only be in the main mode and not the daily (which I want to be challenging even for players who have mastered the game)
Added a ThatsFairZack inspired blue chest pity mechanic. After watching the legendary ancient cave runner ThatsFairZack stream this game and seeing him not find a single blue chest in the main game mode after 25 floors, I've decided to guarantee that for players with an empty vault, a blue chest is now guaranteed to spawn within the first 10 floors. Everyone thank Zack for his cursed luck
Added a sword swinging animation that fires when the player waits on the map. Waiting is an integral part of regularly forcing preemptives, but currently there is no visual indicator other than watching the monsters move which doesn't help at all if there are no monsters on the screen. My hope is that adding an animation to a button press will make players realize it's probably an important thing to utilize
Added a poison debuff indicator when the player venom strikes a target
Added additional sprites
Took a pass at making some of the worst looking sprites more aesthetically pleasing
Monsters have eyes now and I think look considerably better
Removed every instance of identical sprite but different monster appearing in the same formation
Made mobs have an aversion to being inside of 2 width hallways
Gave mobs a slight preference for being near walls
The above two changes should significantly reduce the amount of time the player spends waiting for a mob to maneuver somewhere that's preemptable
[EXPERIMENTAL]: The current daily mode takes a bit long for my taste. It's fine when players are only reaching floor 20, but a full run takes something like 5 hours. To that end, I've significantly reduced the number of enemies that spawn in the daily mode while significantly increasing XP gained. I think I'm happy with the results, but will continue to monitor player progress in the daily as well as test myself.
Any other last minute bug fixes that I can squeeze in
I've also done some work to create a daily bot on our Discord server that will report the current daily's estimated difficulty along with some leaderboard stats every day, so if you haven't checked out our Discord yet, come hang out! https://discord.com/invite/knJeRX3BWT