Hello everyone! A big content update today with a bunch more tweaks and changes. Continuing to do some very rough balancing along with the new content just to try to keep things sensible. Based on where we're at right now I think we'l definitely be able to have something reasonably playable by the end of June ready to finish the transition phase as planned. To recap how to access the dev branch version of the game:
Right click on the game name in your steam library and at the bottom of the drop down menu select 'properties'. Then under the 4th, 'Betas' tab enter the password 'secretpassword' and it should give you access to the test-branch. Please let me know if you have trouble accessing it.
I'll be on discord tomorrow as always around 2:00pm PST to take any feedback or questions. Here's a link to the discord since it hasn't been posted in awhile: https://discord.gg/3waKpjR
UPDATE 1.29:
As always, much of this content is placeholderish in nature and will be gone over in more detail once we've established the world and meta game more firmly.
NEW UNIQUE NPCS:
Each with its own unique item drop.
- Ancient Mummy Stormologist
- Ancient Mummy Necromancer
- The above two are on a random rotation with the existing Cylomar unique.
- The Cat Lord: summons cheetahs like a beefed up rat piper.
- Orc Warlord
- Orc Blacksmith
NEW NORMAL NPCS:
- Fire Giant
- Fire Giant Warrior
- Ice Giant
- Ice Giant Warrior
- Note: these giants would be a perfect first example of characters that really need to be multi-tile eventually.
- Minotaur
- Ice Golem
- Wolf Spider
- Dark Elf Cryomancer
- Corrupted Druid
- Dervish Magi
- Orc Axe Thrower: high damage ranged w/ physical damage type
- Orc Dark Knight: heavily armored tank
- Orc Slaver
NPC CHANGES:
As part of trying to unify The Orc Fortress as a dungeon high in physical damage types, weapons and armor, the following changes were made:
- Orc Storm Mage => Corrupted Druid
- Orc Summoner => Dervish Magi
I also got tired of the reealy ugly orc graphics so redrew them to be more in the style of the recent graphics. I'll be slowly going over old sprites and giving them this same treatment. I'm definitely trying to establish a basic look and style for at least the humanoid characters. Still not sure how I'd like to handle the animals and other critter stylistically. As mentioned above, we'l almost certainly be moving to multi-tile enemies in the future for giants, dragons, big boss types etc.
WORLD:
- Changed The Core to only generate cave type levels. There will be a fire themed dungeon after this (possibly The Iron Fortress).
- There is now a one-way door from The Blood Pick Mines => The Under Grove.
- Based on some further consideration, this Blood Pick door should really go to the swamp and a door from Orc Fortress should lead into The Inner Cavern. In this way these two dungeons are connected Tier II => Tier III just like the Grove and Desert.
- A locked gate now bars entry into the Inner Crypt with the key spawning somewhere outside. This is a proof of concept of sorts just testing that I can add 'structure' to a dungeon. I can see using switched, levers, teleporters, draw bridged and various other elements in the future in more complicated versions of this.
- Barbarian Village in The Ice Caves: this will be greatly expanded on later on and will act as a balance of sorts to The Library in the desert. For now the weaver guy here will take giant beards and sew them up into light weight resistance armor for you (a proof of concept of basic quest mechanics).
NEW TALENTS
Will be drastically increasing the total number of talents eventually, so figured I'd just start knocking a few out now.
- Shroud of Wind: storm magic sustained ability that grants projectile reflection.
- Arc Lightning: storm magic high end damage spell. Pick one end point, and then another and ZAP!.
- Flame Strike: fire magic high end damage spell. A big cross shaped explosion w/ smite targeting i.e. don't need a clear shot.
MECHANICS AND BALANCE:
Just generally unifying or simplifying stuff along with some rough early balancing. One of my major goals is to keep the game streamlined, transparent and just generally intuitive to play, even with the new content and scope.
- Renamed protection to Armor Class just since that's how I always read it in my head anyways and 5AC on a piece of armor is basically universally understood.
- Unified the resistances stats w/ armor class i.e. they run along the same values (approx 0 - 20+), and mitigate damage in the same way. This is really just for sake of simplicity.
- Removed the clarity / regeneration from fountains effect and went back to our previous normal rest mechanics. This was just too weird for now so I'll pull back to something we know works.
- Resting was shortened to compensate so it now takes 1HR for full mana and 2HRs for full health.
- Increased the nukers damage and added a 1 turn cooldown, as they were behaving similarly to archers. I'd still like to avoid having high, undodgable attacks getting thrown at the player so will be continuing to fiddle with this one.
- Removed the tiers from talents so they only have one level now. This is partially experimental and may lead into a number of things I've been considering. For now its just generally simpler (always a good thing), it helps to reduce late game power creep (where the PC becomes unkillable), and it encourages me to really work at making each talent feel unique and impactful.
- Slowed the gain of exp across the game quite a bit. Still not sure what we're going to make the max level cap (likely higher than 20), so for now, I've just slowed down exp gain a bit to better suit the larger, non-linear world.
- Smoothed out the difficulty progression of the outer caverns level chunks (basically adjacent chunks shouldn't differ by more than 1 level).
USER INTERFACE:
Still just experimenting here. Went through several iterations of some of these features in this week alone.
- Small, local, world map now visible on game HUD that shows nearby chunks and their contents. Click an adjacent chunk to fast travel to it.
- As part of regen/rest changes the rest menu is now disabled. R, shift + space and shift + pc click will all now perform the same extended rest as before.
- World map will now display unvisited chunks in a darker color so that you can easily tell where you have been. As a note: I'm still working on getting the 'contents' of the chunks i.e. unique npcs, enchantment tables etc. to update on the world map once killed / used.
- World map now differentiates hostile vs good features in chunks by color.
- Added goto health fountain and goto energy fountain buttons to world map (hotkeyed to 1 and 2 respectively).
- Finally, was experimenting a bit with adding damage indicators when targeting, so this is left on for some attacks / abilities.
CONCLUSION:
Yeah, so lots of stuff again :P. The plan for next week is pretty much more of the same. Some rough goals:
- A bunch of totally new zones I've been planning, spread across the world.
- Implement z-level so that we can rearrange the world map a bit by burying some of the dungeons.
- Continue adding the unique npc + unique item + unique vault / map 'features'.
- Continue with very rough game balancing.
So as mentioned before I think we're well on track to being stable and playable by the end of June, ready to merge back onto the main branch. I anticipate at least 3-4 more weeks of this messy sort of rapid building followed by a week or two of balancing and general clean up. Once everything is stable and merged, then I'll switch back to a workflow where I can narrow in on one little area of the game at a time and really give it some care and attention.
Welp, that was another long announcement. Thanks as always for everyones support and feedback! Take care for now!
Justin