Happy New Year Everyone!
Despite the hustle and bustle of the holidays, we’ve still managed to put together an update that we’re very proud of. In the month since launch, our vision for our Early Access / Game Preview roadmap has grown clearer by the day. We’re going to share more details about the roadmap with you shortly.
Our overall goal with Don’t Die, Minerva! Is to take the leveling experience you would find in a game like Diablo III, which would take several hours for an average player, and compress it into a run that lasts just a little over an hour. We want to capture all of the excitement of unlocking new abilities and constructing new builds with legendary gear into a bite-sized play session.
For that to work, things like pacing and loot tables are incredibly important. And so a big focus of this update is on pacing and loot drops. Minerva isn’t a huge game, but it does have a lot of variety to offer and we found that it could be slow to get there. So we’ve sped up the pace and increased the amount of loot you’ll find, including guaranteed Legendaries on nearly every floor of the dungeon.
We’ve also focused on the variety of rooms and enemies you’ll experience along the way, and we’ve done lots of bug fixes and quality of life improvements to boot.
There’s much more to come, but we think we’re moving in the right direction and we’re more excited than ever to grow and improve the game. Remember: Your feedback is invaluable so please share with us! Links are available on www.xaviant.com.
More Variety
- New Enemy: Fly (Replaces the Ram Bat)
- New Enemy: Banshee (Replaces Rapid-Fire Ghost)
- Added 6 New Challenge Rooms
- Challenge Rooms now appear more frequently on each Floor
- New Challenge Room Hazard: Bomb Flinger
- New Challenge Room Hazard: Pendulum
Improved Pacing
The game moves faster, which feels better and allows players to experience more of the variety the game has to offer.
- Reduced the average number of rooms per floor.
- Increased the number of Challenge Rooms per floor.
- More consistent number of Cauldron Rooms per floor
- Fewer rooms means fewer enemies to fight per floor, increased the chance for gear to drop from enemies and small chests to compensate
More, Better Loot
We want players to have an exciting run from start to finish. That means ensuring that plenty of loot drops, including Legendary items. By increasing the quantity and quality of gear that drops, we empower the player, expose them to more of the wide range of loot available, and give them more meaningful choices as they construct their build for each run.
- Large chests have a more random selection of gear, guarantee at least one Epic and one Legendary item.
- Large Treasure Chests rooms are now guaranteed on the 2nd floor.
- Medium chests have more variety of gear and guarantee Rare items at a minimum.
- Small chests no longer drop currency, offer more variety of gear.
- Vendor table loot lists adjusted to guarantee improved rarity.
- Reduced cost of rerolling the Vendor’s stock.
- Reduced the value of recycling items to compensate for increased amount of gear that now drops.
Quality of Life
We made several changes to streamline the experience and help communicate how systems work.
- Mods already in your inventory are now automatically equipped to a new Friendly or Flashlight when it is picked up
- You can now unequip Mods using a new interface in the inventory
- When equipping a Mod or Item, the effect of the associated Attribute is included as part of the preview to help you make more informed decisions and better communicate the Attribute system.
- Stat previews when equipping a Flashlight or Friendly now assume that existing Mod will be carried over to give a more accurate comparison.
- Added hit reaction animation to Minerva to better communicate when she takes damage
- Improved hit VFX for Enemies to better communicate when they take damage
Balance
- Orb Launcher is stronger: Increased damage, reduced charge time, increased explosion radius
- Bosses now always grant health when they die (quality varies based on Difficulty setting), this was meant to be fixed in the previous patch.
- Revised how Legendary loot items are rolled - “True” legendary affixes will only roll for Legendary items
- Did a pass on which affixes can roll for which items to remove some that didn’t make intuitive sense and correct some oversights (i.e. bonus attack speed for Monkey was missing)
- If player has “Witch’s Brew” Essence unlock, rooms are added to the dungeon floor layout corresponding with the number of Cauldron rooms present to preserve the number of combat rooms
- Reduced health item drop rates on higher difficulty settings
- Reduced cost of Lazy Childrens’ Map Essence Unlock to 7, placed it in front of most of the other Essence Unlocks
- Increased likelihood that boots will receive a movement speed affix
- Increased movement speed bonus affix value ranges for all rarities
- Reduced frequency that players will encounter enemies that slow the pace of combat, i.e. Crow, Dervish. Added more enemy variety per floor to compensate.
Polish
- Improvement pass on Dragons - movement, targeting, and VFX
- Improved Friendly models / materials / colors
- “True” legendary affixes are now formatted differently in the UI to draw attention to them
- Added a special SFX when a Legendary item drops
- Added trap door secrets to Garden and Crypts
- Reskinned a duplicate room variant in the Garden
- Added SFX for Boss loot delivery
- Improved music functionality for Boss encounters
- Improved calculation for Bee DPS
- New SFX added to boss fights
- Reformatted the game credits screen
- Adjusted frequency with which certain Enemy SFX play
- Adjusted range at which some enemy SFX can be heard
- Orb Launcher has a new firing animation
- Ice Attribute bonus is now communicated as “+X% Armor” instead of “-X% Damage Reduction” for consistency with other Attribute bonuses.
- Challenge Rooms can now occupy dead ends in Dungeon layouts, which reduces the chance you will get two of them side by side
- Polished some existing Ice Challenge Rooms
- Improved Minerva’s run animation
- Polish pass on Boss animations
- Reduced the time it takes to recycle from 1.2s to 1.0s
- Added a recycling progress bar to UI
- Polish pass on Bat materials
- Polish pass on Boss materials
- Made an additional change to procedural dungeon generator to ensure players see maximum room variety during a run
- Improved UI flow of starting a game - we no longer show the option to restart run in situations where it is not appropriate
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug where a Boss’s adds could persist after killing the Boss, often resulting in the player being killed during the post-fight dialog
- Fixed rarity VFX positioning so that it shows up properly for all pickups
- Prevent player from opening inventory after death to avoid related bugs
- Several enemy actions are no longer interruptible from Knockback or Wallslam - this was creating some situations where enemies were either very difficult or very easy to kill if the player was using Physical weapons.
- Fixed a data issue with regen delay affix - it was having the opposite of the desired effect.
- Fixed a bug where Minerva could get stuck when dashing into objects
- Fixed a bug where the floor could block projectiles in some cases
- Fixed a bug where projectile flashlights could fire their shots at steep angles
- Fixed some terminology on the keyboard key remap screen
- Fixed a bug where some ghosts could get stuck after attacking if the player didn’t move
- Fixed a bug where the Friendly movement speed loot affix did not affect Dragons
- Fixed a bug where rooms might not load properly if they were adjacent to an identical room layout
- Fixed a bug where a particular dead-end room would not load