Dear Steam Monster Keepers,
here's our monthly Progress Update for April! Here's what's been happening with Monster Sanctuary in April.
Voting for the second Community Monster Contest has begun
As of writing, the submission period for the second Community Monster Contest has ended. Once again, an astonishing amount of amazing Monsters have been entered to the contest! We are excited to see which Monsters will win the voting process this time. As last time, we as the developers of the game will also pick one Monster as our Dev Pick Monster to feature in the game.
From today until the 8th of May, "Monster Designer" backers (50€+) will be able to vote on which Monster they want to see in the game. We will reveal the winners shortly after. All of this is happening on our Discord server, which you may join by clicking on this link: Join us on Discord
April Progress Update
A lot of dev time this month went towards fixing the bugs and issues our Beta Testers found in the beta release. We released two Beta Patches with many bug fixes, some new content and some rebalancing - the patch notes can be found here: Beta Patch 0.3.1 and Beta Patch 0.3.2. These will probably be the last patches to the Beta for a long while - look forward to the next test version when we get closer to the Early Access release of the game in late summer.
Here's a list of the things we've added to the game and the things we've changed:
- Added two new Monsters to the Beta: Raduga, a new Champion found in Ancient Woods, and Toxiquus, a new regular Monster in Stronghold Dungeon. As a Beta Backer, you may fight and conquer them now as well! Steam updates your Monster Sanctuary Beta automatically when you log on to Steam.
- Added a much-needed feature to the Beta: An options menu! Among other things, it includes volume settings, key bindings and a highly-requested feature: a combat speed option! You may set the speed of combat animations to 1.0x, 1.25x, 1.5x and even 2.0x. This feature will be highly useful for all future testing of the game and it has already quite accelerated our own test runs of the game.
- Enemy leveling system has been revamped (changes also live on Beta now):
- Previously, enemy Monsters levels were based on the number of Champions the player had already defeated. This meant that wild Monster levels suddenly rose after beating a certain number of Champions, which penalized players who went directly for Champions, but also made the game quite easy if players skipped optional Champions. Especially since we're planning to make the exploration of the game more open, it seemed unnatural to bind enemy Monster levels to Champions. For instance, players could potentially explore 90% of Ancient Woods without fighting the Goblin King, then go back to Stronghold Dungeon and fight against severely under-leveled enemies.
- Instead, enemy leveling is based on exploration now. Whenever the player enters a room with a new Monster encounter in it, the enemy level is slightly raised. At certain thresholds, the enemy Monster levels rises one by one. A particular change with this new system is that wild Monsters will now stay at the level that they were originally encountered at (for instance, it'll be easy to farm Mountain Path Monsters for eggs now). Certain enemy encounters and areas will still have a minimum level.
- Lots of balance changes and bug fixes. You may find a complete list of them in the patch notes linked above (and found here on the Steam boards).