Hello Everyone!
Was off for most of August visiting family and friends and just generally taking a bit of a break. So I’ve been getting back into the swing of things these past few weeks. I was planning on finally settling in to tackling a big expansion to the dungeon with new zones, sub-zones, special levels and eventually about a 50% increase in total size but I decided about halfway through that there was more than enough stuff on my ‘fiddling little problems’ list that I should do a huge clean up before pushing forward.
So this is a pretty massive update of all the little bits and pieces that have been floating around. There are also some bits of the update from the start of this cycle that are in preparation for the dungeon expansion that will be coming up in the next bunch of updates.
So these first few are from the first part of this dev cycle and will be fleshed out more in upcoming updates.
MAX LEVEL TO 20:
Set the max level back to 20 and balanced everything roughly as it was before. I believe that my issues that led to this change will be solved by the upcoming expansion to the dungeon allowing level gains to be spread out a bit more and solving many of the problems with end game power creep. Obviously overall balance is going to continue to be tweaked pretty much until release but for now, since it wasn’t broken before and will likely be improved in future updates, I’m setting it to what we know is at least reasonably stable.
ZONE ORDER:
These were changes in preparation of the dungeon expansion earlier in this dev cycle, before I decided to do all the cleanup, so don’t read too much into it yet. Orc Fortress and Dark Temple are now cycling on tier III. Sewers, core, and ice are now on Branch I and Crypt, Iron Fortress and Arcane Tower are now on Branch II.
I haven’t completely decided exactly how I want to structure things in the expansion but roughly speaking my current thinking is that tier III will be increased in size quite a bit with lots of cycling special levels with themed, challenges and rewards. Basically boss levels, or sub-themed levels, or just tricky challenge levels.
Orc and Temple are fairly similar already so they may end up getting merged together and then split out into a bunch of sub-zones, special levels, etc. that can be randomly composited together for each run all part of one big ‘Dark Fortress’ with a lot of variation game to game. With a bit more room to move around in the mid game the branches can then be made quite a bit more specifically challenging and given their own unique rewards. They will likely also have their own even more highly specific special levels.
Again this is all tentative, still need to sit down and really plan this stuff out.
ENCUMBRANCE:
Added an encumbrance system so that armor has a weight that can be overcome with enough strength. You will incur penalties on armor if the encumbrance is higher than your strength. Basically the idea is to maintain the previous penalties on heavy armor but allow characters that build up their strength to eventually overcome them. Still working out the exact balance on this.
Alright onto all the clean up!
GENERAL MECHANICS:
- Pathfinding now works through portals in the arcane tower
- Chakrams, nets, javelins and bombs have been moved to the consumable bar since that’s quite literally what they are. Will be adding more things like stun bombs, poison darts etc. to this item class in the future.
- Darts have been changed to an infinite ammo weapon, the same as bows, slings etc. giving most of the melee classes a weak ranged option early on.
- Ammo items were basically just a holdover from RFII when all ranged weapons were consumable. The idea here is to firmly split these into either standard ranged weapons or very powerful but consumable items.
- Reduced the spread of electricity in water by 1 tile since it was absurdly overpowered in the swamp and sewers (it’s still a pretty massive spread even after the change).
- Fixed poison staff ticking twice in the first turn (the hit and the first turn of the effect). It now deals damage on the first hit (so you can one shot an enemy without taking damage), but will no longer double tick. Added 1 duration to make up the difference.
- Projectiles now ‘poof’ after their range which effects stuff like misses going on forever.
- Made it easier for projectiles to target past characters and walls at an angle. Previously they were being blocked at even really ‘shallow?’ angles.
- Axes will no longer cleave through fire pots unless you specifically target them.
- Player will gain a random attribute point on 3rd levels (starting at 2). This might get weighted a bit towards your lowest attribute. The idea here is, along with the random skill points from book shelves to maintain a bit of minimum power in your non primary stats so that if you find a nice weapon or talent halfway through the game, you’re not starting from 0 in order to use it.
TALENTS:
- Changed around the way tomes generate their talents to try to provide a mix of passive and active talents. As an example, a magic tome will always try to provide focus or magic mastery (if the player doesn’t have it) along with 2 ability type talents. This should just make it easier to actually make use of a new tomes talents.
- Defense and Melee talents were just merged into a general melee tome that tries to provide fortitude or weapon mastery.
- Removed the tome of power since its talents are now merged into the caster tomes.
- Power shot now works with perfect aim.
- NEW TALENT: Warriors now get Recovery: which is a % based heal and cure on cooldown. Quite firmly establishes them as the tanky, resilient class and recovery is just generally useful for anyone finding the talent.
- NEW TALENT: Storm mages now get Air Strike instead of Thunder Clap which is a physical damage, distantly targetable, cone shaped knock back attack (click once to set origin, click second type for direction). Thunder Clap was either pretty useless or totally abusable since enemies could never resist the stun.
- NEW TALENT: Rogues now get Bear Trap instead of nimble fingers, allowing them to toss out a bear trap at a distance (or set one up before a fight). Nimble fingers was neat but just generally a pain to use regularly since it required a lot of fiddly micromanagement which I’m never in favor of.
- NEW TALENT: Completed changed shield wall which had a relatively obscure effect. I had a hell of a time trying to write the in game description of this and am having trouble writing it now, so any help here would be appreciated. Basically it limits the number of enemies that can attack you in melee per turn, all additional attacks are auto blocked. Goes 3,2,1 based on talent rank. So the final rank would block all but one melee attack per turn.
- NEW TALENT: Hand of Reaping – necromancer sustained talent that adds life drain to your melee attacks.
- Attunement talents renamed to Infusion and immediately restore a portion of mana instead of reducing mana cost of spells. This makes them a solid ‘panic’ button when shit hits the fan. I’m planning on adding some kind of requirement such as fire requiring you to be within a few tiles of a source of fire (always usable in core, never usable in ice caves), ice requiring you to be [x] tiles away from a source of fire (always usable in ice caves, never in core), storm requiring you to be in a wide open position i.e. no walls [x] distance away. That sort of thing.
- Deflect has a longer duration and a longer cooldown so that it can actually last through a fight. It previously had a duration nearly as long as its cooldown which would require constant micro to keep it up in fights. I’m considering just making this a passive that turns your shield blocks into deflects by default.
- Confusions AoE can now be targeted on objects. This was just bugging me where you’d have a 3x3 glyph room with a chest in the middle and you couldn’t cast confuse to cover all the enemies due to the chest.
- Summoned skeletons now have their level modified based on your toxic magic power.
GENERAL BALANCE:
- Reduced number of monsters in zones (balancing against the changes to spawning that unintentionally increased num monsters).
- Monsters will ‘pull up’ their levels a bit if they spawn on a level that is much deeper than their natural level. Due to the way spawning now takes levels into account this also reduces some of the later game hoards.
- Roughly speaking num monsters are now closer to what they were before (slightly higher on average). Sometimes there will be a bit more, sometimes a bit less, but the amount of total exp per level will be consistent.
- Increased duration of food clock a bit which balances against this slight increase in num mobs.
- Reduced damage of hell fire scrolls a bit (still pretty monstrous but no longer a guaranteed, kill everything button). Maybe a new, rare, once per game scroll that is basically the ‘flip the table’ scroll?
ITEMS:
- Rand-Art stats will now only apply to basic armor types. I always found it odd to get an item that reads as say ‘ring of strength’ but actually has some massive reflection bonus or whatever.
- Rand-Arts still need a ton of work in general so this is one of those ‘likely to change in future’ things.
- Rand-Arts can no longer be enchanted since the bonus to multiple stats is pretty extreme. Again this will likely be adjusted in the future as rand-arts gen their stats scaling based on depth.
- Added chainmail to bridge the weight and protection gap between leather and plate.
- Added Crown of Power (+3 STR) to drop off the orc king since he was missing a drop.
- Added Robe of Flames (+3MP, +1rFire) to Cylomar since he was also missing a drop.
- All uniques will eventually need more interesting… unique drops, for now, just trying to temporarily fill some of the holes so they at least reward something.
- Added Elven Chain Mail (lighter ENC) that only drops in Dark Temple (part of future expansion, subject to change)
- Added Heavy Brass Armor (heavy with best protection in game) that only drops in Orc Fortress (part of future expansion, also subject to change).
- Amulet of Extension: increases the range of all ranged weapons.
- Amulet of Recovery: reduces the cooldown of abilities by 20%
MISC CONTENT:
- Corrupted Ent Unique in Under Grove that continuously summons up roots. This is also sort of incomplete and will be the sort of thing likely made much more interesting and stuck on a special level.
- Added a bunch of vaults to Orc Fortress. Guard rooms, archery ranges etc.
USER INTERFACE:
- Characters now display a health bar on screen rather than a number. I’ll likely make this a togglable option in the future since opinions may vary on what’s more clear. For me, flat numbers are very deceiving across the course of the game since damage and hit points keep scaling up.
- Show damage on power shot, power strike, tunnel shot based on equipped weapon.
- Mystic Skull Helm now shows the actual amount of HP its giving you based on # potions.
- Enemies now display their poison damage along with their melee damage.
- Bigger item/ability slots and reduced saturation to make it easier to see the icons + text.
- Better ring sprites for uniques, summons, elites etc.
- Tunnel shot and chakrams now show correct targeting.
- Dialog options now have numbers next to them (you could always use the num keys to quick click them).
- Traps, lava, ice bombs, clouds etc. all now show their damage on mouse over.
- Crit modifier is now displayed on the char screen (this entire stat area needs a complete rework).
- Levitation is now shown on character screen.
- Right click (quick slot attack) will no longer use your primary weapon if the quick slot is out of range or invalid (I killed myself on a crystal golem due to this).
- Tomes now list off what talents they give you when you pick them up (really need a chat log in the future to list this sort of stuff).
BUGS, CRASHES AND MISC:
- Fixed scrolls of fear not working.
- Fixed some tweaky issue with sprint and charge where the character sprite would continue jittering after completing the movement.
- Characters now face correctly when they are semi-visible.
- Summoned monsters no longer follow you up or down stairs.
- Fixed a crash in sewers generation
- Fixed a crash when King Urrazo tried to drop his item.
- Fixed blinking causing double blink messages at the destination tile.
- Resting now stops if your starving.
- Fixed shock occasionally double (or even triple) hitting in water.
- Fixed an issue where spawning or summoned enemies were sending popup text flying towards the top of the screen.
Aaand that’s it for today. Likely a bunch more little bits and pieces I missed (typing this up from a big ol pile of notes), but that should cover most of it. Will be taking it easy for the next few days, keeping an eye out for any bug or crash reports and then getting down to the business of planning out this next update.