Hail, Heroes!
It is great, as ever, to have you around our campfire. We’ve had a good month in terms of progress as well as in terms of feedback, and your contributions are making a difference. As mentioned in the previous updates, we’re shifting towards polish and optimization, but that doesn’t mean we can’t add new things on the way to full release.
September’s update is a big one, with several major additions and changes. Perhaps the biggest one for the tactical layer is the addition of house interiors and the ability to fight within them. The new houses are fully interactable with furniture you can kick and otherwise use with physics, and even destructible walls you can destroy to create new entry point. Be careful though - destroy enough walls and the roof will crash down on anyone inside.
We’ve also implemented two new environments, or rather new iterations of the Forest and Village environments - the old ones weren’t up to our standards and it was time to polish things up a bit. There’s also a bunch of AI upgrades and features including AI factions using hero units, and a meaningful performance upgrade as we’re investing more into optimization.
While 0.13.0 should not break save files from the last couple of builds, we recommend starting a new run because of how differently the AI behaves and the fact creatures are now gone.
The list of changes also includes changes from 0.12.0.2 and 0.12.0.3 which were released a few weeks ago.
Major Changes
- Replaced the Forest and Village environments with shiny new ones.
- Houses in the village environment now have fleshed out interiors with furniture that responds to physics and destructible walls.
- AI factions will now use heroes fully, including physics abilities and attacks - brace yourselves!
- Performance improved considerably.
- Creatures and recruiting creatures are removed in this iteration, along with creature dwellings on the world map - we received plenty of feedback from players finding it confusing and unrewarding as it is now. We plan to reintroduce creatures in some way down the road after we experiment a bit.
Gameplay
- Water tiles now have two types - shallow waters causing a stun and some damage each turn until the unit climbs out of it, and deep waters which auto kills units unfortunate enough to fall into, similar to how all water tiles behaved thus far.
- Large forest mushrooms added, this is the first object to break in half and slide when kicked or pushed, but we plan on adding more of them.
- Added images to tutorial scenarios to make them clearer.
- Three new guild upgrades added.
- Both player and enemy spawning patterns in tactical combat will now be more varied.
- It is now possible to vault short fences or jump into houses through windows using a normal movement action.
- Heroes cost less Beetcoin for all factions, and no longer cost magic to recruit.
- The 3-hero per week purchase limit has been removed, slots will refresh with a new hero as soon as you purchase one of them.
- All heroes (Player and AI factions) now have a passive stun resistance, making fights more balanced.
- Parties are no longer created with free creatures (so you must have at least one unit in town to create the party).
- Castle Walls environment temporarily removed, we’re not happy with it and want to remake it in a better way. For now we’re using a unique variation of the Village environment instead.
Visual & Sound
- Added multiple VFX and SFX throughout the game’s UI to provide better feedback for player actions.
- Units now have a new action points indicator on them, right under their health bar.
- High or low to-hit chances will now show in green or red font respectively.
- Improved multiple ability visual effects (Magic Arrow, Electrocute, Chain Lightning, Fireball, Vortex, Self-detonate, Holy Shackles, Rally, Empower and more).
AI & Balance
- Tactical AI overhauled from the ground up. It is now smarter, more effective, and can handle ability usage much better - including physics abilities. This is something we’re going to keep an eye on and tweak until we hit the right balance.
- Improved text spacing for ease of reading.
- Fixed an issue making it too common for players to reveal two enemy pods at once in the first mission.
- AI can now recruit heroes, with a maximum party size of 5, just like the player’s faction.
- AI no longer starts the game with a very large army.
Performance
- Forest and Village environment performance improved considerably. Older environments will be improved similarly down the road.
- UI rendering CPU performance improved.
- In combat, AI turn length reduced by improved pathfinding performance.
- Cover calculation performance improved, some cover rules adjusted (For example, small objects on top of larger objects will now be taken into cover calculation consideration).
- Replaced the see-through effect for tall objects to a slightly simpler one, because this new effect performs vastly better. The new effect is available for all quality settings.
Bug Squashing
- Artifact images that didn’t display correctly on the world map now fixed.
- Chain Lightning will now properly ignore unactivated enemies, as intended.
- The ‘Unit in enemy control zone’ status icon will now disappear and not linger after moving away which happened in some cases.
- Items with HP effects will now immediately register as intended.
- Some UI text ‘leaks’ fixed.
- Non-human faction portraits will now properly show customized color choices.
- Changing quality from ‘Low’ to ‘Very Low’ sometimes caused a black screen bug, which is now fixed.
- The ‘Physics 103’ and ‘Stunlock’ achievements are fixed and can be achieved.