Hello again everyone! Last house keeping update before I go into the big leaderboard and stat tracking updates.
BALANCE:
All enemy hit points have been increased by 1.5 and all player damage methods (weapons, abilities, spells etc) have been raised by the exact same amount. When there was a value that needed to be rounded, melee damage was rounded up and range damage was rounded down. So this is a very slight nerf to all range and a slight buff to all melee, which keeping with my own experience and your guys feedback, should be a step in the right direction. This change does a number of things:
- First it sets everything up for future balancing efforts in that having a wider range of values lets us fine tune exact numbers a bit more. I wanted to do this update early just so we could all get used to the new values (I know I'm still getting used to dealing 'so much' damage).
- It helps spread out the effect of all modifiers. For example, since say melee power only increases melee damage by 5% (always rounded), having a larger spread of values helps to make each point more likely to actually round to the next value.
- Prepares for an update to enchantments I'm planning on making where all items will uniformly be enchantable to +3 which will raise stats to 1.5 times their base. So for example, putting +1 enchantment on a 10 damage weapon may raise its damage by say 2 points wheres on a 5 damage weapon it would only raise by 1 point. Once again, a wider spread of values will just help with this.
- There's a nice symmetry between player hit points and enemy hit points now. Previously enemies had quite a bit less hp than the player.
- In general, this should not be seen as much of a change yet since, if I caught everything correctly, the actual mechanics have not changed. As said above, this is mostly a 'for the future' thing.
INTERFACE:
- Right clicking on yourself while standing on stairs will use them.
- New enchantment menu that is usable w/ the keyboard. Will be adding text to this in the future that shows the exact stat increases for enchanting each item which will become important with the enchantment update mentioned above.
DANGEROUS_OBJECTS
The player will now treat ice eggs and bombs as 'dangerous'. Let me know if there are any other objects you can think of that need this treatment. What this does is:
- Stops movement, exploration or resting when a 'dangerous' object is visible.
- Stops slow characters from diagonal stepping when a 'dangerous' object is visible. This works the same as hostile monsters currently.
- Stops player from resting if dangerous object is visible (same as hostile monsters currently).
- Stops player from starting exploration if dangerous object is visible (same as hostile monsters currently).
BUGS_AND_CRASHES:
- Fixed player unable to descend into a pit while levitating.
- Falling down a pit will now pull all of your summoned / charmed pets with you in the same way that stairs work.
- Fixed: being dragged into a pit by a tentacle leaving behind the tentacle sprites on the next level.
- Win times will now update immediately on the main menu rather than waiting for quit/reload.
- Hidden enemies, that are visible due to telepathy, will now count as visible for all safety checks (the sort of stuff that the dangerous objects are triggering above).
- Fixed block on shield not actually triggering.
REFACTORING:
As part of a general process of constantly cleaning up the code base I rewrote a ton of the code that handles menus, making it much more general and extensible. This is going to be a constant effort on my part over the course of the project. So much of the code was written, bit by bit, as needed and was never really systematized correctly. So I'll slowly be doing bits of clean up, whenever I need to touch a particularly nasty part of the code base. I hope that by spending a bit of time every week on clean up, I'll be able to make faster progress in the future simply due to a cleaner, more extensible code base.
NEXT UPDATE:
The next update (not counting hot fixes to this one), will be the leader board and stat tracking update. This ones going to take awhile to get done (maybe a week), though I may release bits of it for testing depending on how its going.
The leaderboard stuff is going to be pretty rough to start with, since I'll mostly just be trying to get the code correct and extensible. I'm still not sure the exact specifics of how I want to track stuff, how ranking will work, if we'l do some sort of 'seasons' etc. so this will mostly be about getting the infrastructure setup then we can discuss together how the actual records should work.
So be warned that these records will be liable to wiping over the course of early access as we fiddle with different ideas. Nonetheless I'd like to get them in here at an early date:
A) Because stats are cool
B) A little friendly competition is always good :)
C) It should help a lot with balancing to have actual stats on win %, average win times, deaths by level or zone etc.
CONCLUSION:
That's it for now! As I said, next update might take awhile to get through, though I'll still be active on the forums and discord. Thanks as always for your guys support and I hope you continue to enjoy the game!