Vault of the Void News

Another day, another patch!

Before diving into this however, a HUGE thank you to all who have left a review on the game so far! Your support continues to blow me away and I'm so thankful!

Also, this weekend I'm looking to have around 30 new Elite artifacts added to the game! That patch should drop around Friday/Saturday. Also - for those asking for direct mouse input, I have a solution for this and will be deploying that hopefully in the coming patch also!

Now, onto the good bits!

+ UI/General
- Minor text/spelling corrections
- Tweaked colours for Keywords and Upgrade text.
- Fixed the Tooltips showing underneath the opening choice window sometimes.
- You can now Pet the Dog.
- The Void Stones currently in your backpack will appear along the top bar at all times now!
- Class Trainer: price has been reduced, and multiple re-rolls will increase the chance of higher rarity cards!
- Increased the delay for tooltips on cards in hand.
- Fixed an issue when you have 1 card in hand, and it being cut off.
- Save Deck will now default to the Deck Name previously saved.

+ Cards;
- Hidden Blade buffed to 3 (4) damage
- Grasp has had its Threshold pushed up by 1, but will now check mid card processor that the condition is met.
- Opportunity has changed. Quite a bit - might be easier to look it up in the Compendium!
- Fixed Self-Inflicted Agony increasing Threshold on Double Play

+ Spells;
- Blade Hidden starting Spell has changed to 'Combo 1 and add 2 Volatile Hidden Blade to your hand'. 4 Turn Cooldown.


+ Bugs;
- Voids can no longer be removed from your deck using Right Mouse
- Have changed it so you can get Potions in Introduction mode now. I see you Keg of Lucky Rum Intro runners!
- I'm still chasing down the bug where the game crashes very rarely when drawing cards. I've adding more debugging to help track down the issue.
- Fixed Flurry of Blows going a bit silly with triggers.
- Fixed a bug with Dragon Mother's ability capping Bleed text on cards.
- Lots of other small tweaks and bug fixes based on crash reports.

Hey everyone, finally got around to pushing this one live over the last few hours. Lots of little bug fixes, a few new features. I've been monitoring the Crash Logs and trying to tend to anything I find as quickly as possible!

Thankfully, this patch will fix the Texture/Memory issue that some were getting. As mentioned in the notes, it does mean there may be a short 1-2 second black screen now as I have to reorganize/optimise the texture pages. Hoping to get that done this week as well.

Also just a note - thank you to everyone who has left a positive review! I appreciate that so much, it's really, really helpful!

Diving back into the content patch for this weekend, which may or may not contain a good 30 or so new Artifacts! (it does).

+ UI/General;
- Auto Zoom function added which will automatically zoom all cards when you mouseover, rather than requiring the SHIFT key.
- Major change to the Texture Pages. This has fixed the "Hardware/Memory" issue that people on Laptops and lower end machines were suffering, however it does mean I have a bit of reorganising to do. For now, you may get a 1-2 second pausing when starting the game and entering different pages the first time.
- Disabled tooltips when the Menu is open.
- Increased the dealy of card tooltips showing up when viewing cards on the Map.
- The Battle Progress bar will now remain on screen when filled, with the message about having the room completed.
- The Difficulty slider will now remember your last runs selection.
- Cards will now show up on the left hand side when mousing over a hex, if it would cutoff the tooltip

+ Cards;
- Bleed keyword is now showing up as it should
- Zig Zag will now correctly show the number
- Fixed a projection error on Side Step
- Wave of Focus upgrade fixed
- Fixed a crash with Meteor
- Fixed a crash with Memento Mori

+ Bugs;
- Removed old particle scripting that was causing odd crashes.
- Removed the Dull Blades Achievement temporarily
- Fixed a bug which would let you buy Artifacts twice
- Sneak Attack damage prediction changed when fighting the Taxidermists
- Fixed some issues with Particle systems causing crashes
- Fixed a bug on decktile images causing a random crash.
- Fixed a bug which caused a crash on the Class Trainer if you had no options to trade in.
- Can no longer End Turn when picking Elite Artifacts
- Lots of other small bug fixes and typos

Here we are! Nearly 24 hours since launch and it's been a busy time! There was a number of little hiccups along the way, but none quite as big as :

[h3]Releasing the game into "Full Release" instead of "Early Access". [/h3]

I'm not even sure what went wrong there. All I can do is apologize to anyone who thought the game was a "Full Release", I'm so sorry - it wasn't intentional. Thankfully Steam had it fixed within an hour or so, so things are back on track.

I wanted to quickly update everyone here on a few things:

Discord Link! Click me
This is probably the best way to log bugs and reach out at all. There's a collection of over 1200 like minded Vault delvers around, sharing decks and talking strategy. There's also a bug reporting bot, and also an opportunity to log feedback.

Bugs!
This brings me to my next point - game crashing bugs! The big one that's out there right now may have an error message like this:



This is a hardware/performance issue, and a strange one. To recap the tale, we had a Beta tester who has been playing the game for around 12 months, close to 350hrs logged on one machine. As of yesterday, he started getting this error as well.

It’s usually on laptops or slightly older machines. The fact that it has only just happened makes me think it's solvable. However reverting back to older versions doesn’t seem to be fixing the problem for these people. I’m going to keep debugging this one and try to find a solution.

Roadmap
This is a big one and I need to spend some time putting it together. I’ll need the next week to just handle the small bugs showing up, but I’ve got some great stuff planned heading into December. Once I get a handle on all the bugs/minor issues, I’ll lay that out in a more public sense.


Thank you again to everyone who picked up the game, and especially to those who left positive reviews. I’m so glad to finally get to share Vault with the world, and I hope you all enjoy playing it as much as I did making it!

Hey everyone!! It seems as though I've published things as a "Full Release" and not "Early Access".

I'm currently working with Steam to get this fixed up!! I'm so sorry!

Wow - so a lot has gone on in the last couple of weeks! For those who haven't seen, the game now has a healthy collection of “Let’s Play” videos on YouTube, a number of Streamers and Content creators have taken to the game positively, which is amazing to see, and still blows me away!

With that success has come an increased demand in people wanting to get their hands on the game! The Beta Key program was completely cleaned out within minutes of the first video going live, and then after a key restock, those were gone in a matter of hours as well! It’s been a lot of reactive play from my end here, as I try to adjust to the massive influx and interest in Vault of the Void. Our humble little Discord server grew from around 150 members to 1000+ literally overnight!

This led me to look towards making a few decisions. I spoke with a number of players privately and asked “Is this game in a state where it feels worthy of an Early Access release?”, and secondly “Is it worth the $14.99 price tag?”. My personal answer to both those questions, I’ve learnt, will always be no - I think it's a case of a creator always undervaluing their work (something I really need to work on!).

Thankfully, out of the 10+ I asked, it was a unanimous “Very much yes to both”.

So, armed with that information and full serve of fear and anxiety, I have decided to release Vault of the Void into Early Access on Nov 20 (a full 3 weeks early!). Yup, that's about 24 hours away. (I actually made that decision and announcement on Discord about a week ago but have fallen behind in updating Steam posts - I’m so sorry!)

[h3]What does this mean? [/h3]
I’m... actually not sure? I’ve never released a game before. I’ve actually never made one before either.

2 years ago, I didn’t even know how to code a simple line of text to appear on the screen. The idea of a Concept Artist just “taking a shot at making a game” seems like a distant memory now, and filled with the vision I had, and mixing that with the support and ideas from the community, coupled with a great amount of testing, Vault is what it is today. There's still a lot more to go (new class hype? Impossible+?), but I do think it's important to release things into the wild. It will never be “ready” in my eyes - there's always something I’d love to fix, or a new feature I’d love to add. But eventually, you have to set things free!

[h3]An Important Note[/h3]
One very important note I want to put out there, as I’m seeing this come up a fair bit now. There's been a number of comments along the lines of “Oh my, he stole artwork from XYZ game!?” or “Yikes, looks like some stolen icons right there!”.

That is 100% incorrect - whilst I’ve tried to get as much of the artwork in Vault to be custom done by myself or other art friends (trust me, there's a lot!), something did have to give. Namely, the artwork for players cards, and also some spells/ability icons.

However, all that artwork was purchased legally from royalty free game dev packs (in fact, you can even grab them for yourself right now, and I encourage you to do so! It’s great for giving your game idea the jump start needed). It just so happens that those other games did the same thing! Monster Slayers, The Last Hex to name a few - all great games who had the same need as I did.

I will mention however, I do, and am in the process of, getting all that repainted with custom artwork over the coming months. It’s my goal by January to have all 200+ player cards all fully painted! I’ll be bringing in some art help to assist with this (on that note, if you’re an artist, feel free to drop me your portfolio!).

[h3]In Closing[/h3]
I’ll have more to say about this all post launch - but please do keep in mind I’ll be learning on the fly a bit! Thankfully I’ve had some great community help step up and assist with the workload where possible, and with keeping things like the Discord running silky smooth.

I’ll close by saying a massive thank you to everyone who has left personal messages of support, emails about their love for the game, comments about how much enjoyment they’ve been getting out of it, etc etc. It truly does blow me away. When I started doing this, there was a lot of advice flying around along the lines of “Your first project won’t make it to market, let alone be a success, so keep working on new ideas and games constantly”. EIther through stubbornness or stupidness (maybe both!), I really wanted to prove the first point wrong at least.

As of tomorrow, I can finally say I did.

- Josh