Vault of the Void News

[p]It’s finally here! Thank you everyone for you patience as we navigated the difficult situations over this past year. Let me first start by thanking everyone for the support shown on our studio update post. It was truly overwhelming seeing how many of you took the time to comment or reach out to us, and it was so encouraging. Your well wishes went a long way to getting us across the line here, so thank you! [/p][p][/p][h2]The Weaver[/h2][p]Today we are so excited for our first DLC Class: The Weaver. The Weaver, as you may have seen from the previews and the artwork, is a summoner class. She weaves adorable (mostly?) Pets to her side, in a brand new way to engage with Vault. With the all new Pet cards, you’ll be building a deck of superfriends to take into the fight, each with their own skills and abilities![/p][p][/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p][p]We had a lot of debate as to how to frame the Weaver, in terms of skill level. She really does fit into the cliche of “easy to learn, difficult to master”. She has something for all skill and difficulty levels, and those who love careful sequencing and specific ordering will not be left behind. For those you who like to just grow big things, and hit even bigger things with them, you’ll be right at home as well. [/p][p][/p][h3]DLC Contents[/h3]

• [p]A new unique class: The Weaver![/p]
• [p]Over 90+ New Cards[/p]
• [p]Over 50+ Unique Artifacts[/p]
• [p]3 New Challenge Coins, unique to the Weaver (plus the ability to play her on 20 existing CCs) [/p]
• [p]An old Guardian takes a newly sinister approach to a long-gone sibling...[/p]

[p][/p][h2]Release Platforms[/h2][p]Overall, we hope you love the Weaver, her new mechanics and the changes she brings to Vault. As always, we’re going to be standing by over the next 24-48 hours hotfixing whatever we can. We are releasing simultaneously on PC and Mobile which is so exciting. We can push updates to the PC version instantly, and mobile may take an hour or so to receive and critical bug fixes. The Switch is good to go on our end, however with our inability to update that platform as quickly as the others, and being a small team for both development and QA, we’re going to ensure all things are smooth before sending to Nintendo. Expect and update on that in around a week or so! [/p][p][/p][p]From all of the team here, thank you so much for your continued support. We love and appreciate you all, and are hopeful that we can continue to create more content for this game! Please let us know any bugs or feedback either on the forums here, or our discord server. [/p][p][/p][p]Thank you, and enjoy! [/p][p]- Shu, Dabor and Josh [/p]

[p]Pets were obviously going to be the centerpiece of the class, and once we decided on finite slots the moment of "you filled all your slots so now you can only replace, not add" was set in stone. From then on you need to use a variety of abilities, buffs, artifacts, pets and even a few attacks to buff AP and make your board hit (and sometimes block) even harder. But there's also a LOT of synergy in Unraveling (sacrificing) Pets, and...[/p][p]It's hard to even know how to write this post - AP buffing pets synergizes with your token Spiders since they also deal their AP as damage when Unravelled (even if you already attacked with them this turn). And any normal Pet keeps its AP when Unravelled so you can discard them and then draw them again and play them with whatever AP you buffed them too. A few kinds of Pet have ways to duplicate themselves, and then Unravel so you can play and duplicate them again at a higher AP value. You can Unravel by playing over something with a Pet card, but there's also plenty of cards (and Pets) that directly munch Pets to (often optionally) boost their effects, and that can clear space to mass-Weave more Spiders so you can buff them and then Unravel them again for damage. [/p][p]Oh yeah, and all of this Pet-based damage, Unravels included, works with Rage, so you can save up buffed Spiders for a Rage turn and then Unravel them all (after having already attacked with them) for a fight-ending spike of damage. Oh and there's Infests you can put on enemies that'll be triggered by dealing enough damage... it just keeps going. In the limited amount of playtesting as I write this we've already seen an unprecedented amount of hybridizing and archetype-pivoting throughout Weaver runs. [/p][p]Trying to describe any one aspect of the class and potential synergies very quickly turns into describing the entire class. You might be stacking AP buffs onto a main damage Pet so it can trigger a pile of Rage-Infests quickly on a turn you plan to go off so your AP-buffed Spiderlings can be mass-Unraveled by a card that also gives future Pets you Weave this turn more AP for every Pet you used it to Unravel so you can refill the board with a Pet that duplicates itself so the duplicates can benefit from the new-Pet-AP-Buff twice and... you get the idea.[/p][p][/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p][p]So to limit the amount of run-on sentences I'll be writing, let's just center in on three Pets that fill a similar niche in different ways and give examples of some things they synergize with particularly well.[/p][p][/p][h2]Wippersnapper[/h2][p][/p][p]A very straightforward common. As you deal damage, get a bit of Block. This might not be as crazy as it sounds since if it's blocking enough to keep you safe, it's already dealing enough damage to win a fight. Nevertheless, the fact that the Block scales perfectly to the damage means it has a great relationship with Rage and Vulnerable, as well as benefitting immensely from extra actions given by abilities or artifacts, since a second attack on the same turn also means double the block. [/p][h2]Rock Collector[/h2][p][/p][p]An uncommon that can fuel itself but massively benefits from building around it. There's a variety of support Pets that have AP (and might benefit from AP buffs) but don't actually use their AP, as well as Pets like the basic Rat that have an optional action (a Delay Block 4 in their case) that doesn't scale to their AP and doesn't care if you drain them down to 0. This happy otter is still only going to be attacking for his baseline AP value, but he'll be refunding cards invested into buffing him on the way there. Spend early turns where you're building up your board gaining AP (and drawing even more cards to help build up), and then once you're setting up big damage-boosting Rage start attacking for big chunks and closing things out pretty fast.[/p][h2]Combat Wombat[/h2][p][/p][p]There's a number of much more complicated AP-payoff Pets up at the rare level, so let's go with the simple one. Every turn after the first, you'll be getting 2 actions out of this guy, doubling whatever AP you've buffed on it. The trick is, the fact that this is in the form of "two actions" instead of just "double damage" still has a lot of neat interactions. [/p][p][/p][p]Put a Red Void Stone into it, shove it in the leftmost slot, and have it also produce 50% Rage in the process of attacking twice. Throw in an upgraded Sceptre of Command and that's another 50%. Buy a Blue Ribbon at the floor 2 soul collector and as soon as you buff Wombat enough to get to 10 it'll be keeping the biggest enemy locked down by debuffs consistently.[/p][p]This is just 3 of the 25ish Pets Weaver has to offer, and I've already seen playtesters surprise me with enough clever synergies to know that even I haven't fully grasped the potential of the class yet. Hopefully all the players reading this find lots of interesting ways to (ab)use the possibilities offered by Pets.[/p][p][/p][p]- Dabor [/p]

[h2]Pet Cards[/h2][p]The main power of Weaver relies on cute Pets, and they can be summoned by playing a Pet card. Pet is a new card type (similar to Ability, Attack and Buff), but different in a handful of ways:[/p]

• [p]A Pet card has an Attack Power (AP) value stored on the card, and the value persists in a fight,[/p]
• [p]Playing a Pet card will transform (Weave) the card into a Pet on the board. The card will not shuffle into Discard until the pet is un-summoned (Unravel).[/p]
• [p]Pets will have various actions, and normally each Pet can perform one action every turn, including the turn they are summoned. Performing an action does not count as "playing" a card.[/p]
• [p]There are a total of 5 Pet slots. Playing a Pet card when slots are full will Unravel the Pet in the desired slot first, and then Weave the Pet.[/p]

[p][/p][p]Think of Pet cards as limited buffs that provide values over turn where you get full control of! One of the many difficulties of implementing pet cards is displaying the transform smoothly. An early approach to create a separate game object for pet on board to distinguish their differences with a pet card, however that soon proved to be buggy with so many minor things we kept in a card.[/p][p]In the end, a Pet on the board is now a special form of card object, just with their display tweaked. All card attributes, like expel, rebound, or even random energy under the Dolus passive effect, are kept safe when displaying as a pet on board and will resolve correctly when the pet is unravelled.[/p][p]Another key point of pet cards is that they stay on board and do not shuffle into your Discard pile (or other places) until it is unravelled. When describing the pets, "Rebound" can bring up many questions -- Does it return to hand immediately after being played? Does it stay on the board, and return to hand when unravelled? If the pet is unravelled next turn, does it still return to the hand? If a pet card that cannot rebound is played this turn, can it rebound when unravelled next turn?[/p][p]We try to answer these questions by clarifying the mechanics in the card texts. All pet descriptions will present "Rebound/Expel/Loop when Unravelled". In addition, we also made a "cheatsheet" that you can reference in the game about all pet behaviours. The texts on queen stones, unfortunately, cannot be changed without making other classes unreadable, so keep in mind that all "Rebound/Expel/Loop" all mean to take place when the pet is unravelled. Hopefully you can find more broken combos![/p][p][/p][h2]PlayOps and Mods[/h2][p]One of the most popular requests is mod support. During our 2.0 rewrite, we put foundations of mod support by introducing the PlayOps system (you can find our old dev diary here).[/p][p]In short, cards and artifacts effects are written as sequences of operations, and whenever the effects are triggered, these operations are read and executed in the game. We have been using this system to update the game since 2.0, and that greatly simplifies how we ship balance patches -- most of the changes just modify numbers in the cards and artifacts definitions and don't need to go deep into the code.[/p][p]With the upcoming update, we have taken a step further: all cards, artifacts, spells and such are now stored as JSON files that you can read at anytime! Of course, you can even edit the files, but we have file integrity in place that deviations from official files will be detected and your game will be marked as "modded", so no cheating in daily draft by bringing a Rigged nuke card to kill everything on turn 1 :)[/p][p]We have future plans to fully implement mods on top of those files, with full support of loading image assets and Steam Workshop integration.[/p][p][/p][p]-Bugphobia (Shu)[/p]

[p]Josh and I wanted to make a summoner for years, but it was just one of a few ideas in the running for classes with unique ways of scaling over a fight. The missing piece of the puzzle was how to fit it into the game's existing UI - especially on mobile - but as soon as we started brainstorming about how to create an alternate version of the central UI to make space for Pets, the Weaver concept was born. [/p][p]Every class (and most enemies) in Vault have ways to get stronger and scarier every turn, and it was important to make Weaver feel fundamentally different. By limiting players to 5 Pet slots it forced making choices that make playing Pets feel very different to Buffs, but still leaving a ton of room for customization and growth over both individual battles and runs as a whole. [/p][p]The last piece of the puzzle is the Infest mechanic - playing effects on enemies that will trigger after you deal enough damage (or just kill them), whether further hurting/debuffing the enemy in question, or drawing cards/Weaving Pets. [/p][p][/p][p]All of this combines to make the Weaver probably the most nuanced and, hopefully, rewarding to play - Pets are essentially another 5 cards you can carry into future turns with which to attack, block, draw, gain rage, apply Infests that do any of those, make more Pets which might do some of those, boost the ability of themselves or other Pets to... you get it. [/p][p]Next time we'll go into detail on how Pets work - unlike a Buff they don't just do a specific amount of one thing, but usually have multiple possible actions, many of which scale their effectiveness to that Pet's current AP value, and allow you to choose targets every time. You'll have to learn all about Pets to decide on which ones to Weave, when to Unravel them, what Actions to take in which order, when to play cards to increase their AP, and when to ignore all that and smash enemies in the face. [/p][p][/p][p]- Dabor [/p]

[p][/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink]Thank you everyone for you patience. The wait is nearly over :) [/p]