Draft of Darkness News

In this content focused patch, 2 new cards have been added for each existing weapon type, as well as 5 new cards for the unarmed card set. This brings us closer to our goal of 25 cards per weapon type. In general, I aimed to fill in the gaps and improve existing mechanics for the weapons; for example: more light damage opportunities for the flashlight, more synergy for the pistol, damage and energy sustain for the syringe, better deck control for the shotgun, a new bleeding approach for the knife etc. Some of the new cards intentionally promote inter-weapon type interaction, hoping to achieve better synergy in the current and future character decks.

I've also added a total of 13 new trophy items. These are distributed in the already existing item batches, so if you have already unlocked them, you'll start getting these items right away. Big thanks to those who helped me by giving awesome item ideas and inspiration in our Discord Server! I've credited them in the changelog below. If you have an item idea, you can join in and send it over too!

New decision events are also added to the game, which will add a bit more variety to your runs:

• "Hole in the Wall" will spawn in any one of the areas, which will let you get resources by sacrificing your hero's or companions' health.
  
• "Morgue" will spawn in the Hospital, giving you an opportunity to gain equipment, resources and cards.
  
• "Quick Enhancement Machine" will spawn in the Streets or in the Hospital, making it possible to upgrade your equipment, increasing their attributes.
  

The new knife card "Out for Blood" will let you inflict Bleeding with direct damage sources such as the new "Kunai" item and the good old "Choppy Chop"!

Another big change is made on Cara's perk. With the increased decay speed of the Bleeding that came with the previous patches, Cara's perk was becoming a disadvantage for her because of the limited time to build up Bleeding layers. To fix this, her perk's effect has been transferred to her old starting item called "Warning Letter", which is now toggleable. (This item had previously been removed when the perks were introduced). This gives you full control for when to speed up Bleeding procs, and when to slow them down. Her perk is also changed to give more incentive to natural Bleeding decay strategy, by having it enhance physical damage output from Cara or her companions.

The next patch will focus on the equipment system rework. I'm aiming to tone down the full randomization on equipment, and replacing it with a more user-friendly system. With the additional improvements to the UI, I'm hoping to streamline equipment management to make it a more enjoyable experience.

[h2]Full Patch Notes for v0.5.4[/h2]
[expand]
[h3]Content[/h3]
- (Card/Axe) "Ponder": Brace 4: Draw 3 cards. Discard up to 2 cards, gain Brace 2 per card discarded.
- (Card/Axe) "Prod": Brace 2: Deal 6 physical damage. Switch to alternative weapons. Increase the base damage of the next card you play this turn by 2.
- (Card/Flashlight) "Ricocheting Beam": Deal 6 light damage, then 4 light damage more to another random enemy.
- (Card/Flashlight) "Sunburn": Deal 6 light damage + 1 light damage for each debuff or disability on the target.
- (Card/Knife) "Dramatic Stab": Deal 1(3) physical damage. Next card you use this turn (except "Dramatic Stab") will be drawn back to your hand.
- (Card/Knife) "Shadow Rush": Advance 25%. If your have Stealth, Advance 40% instead.
- (Card/Knife) "Out for Blood": Limited 1. Knife attacks will instead apply Bleeding equal to their base damage this turn. Critical strikes will apply 50% more Bleeding.
- (Card/Pistol) "Play the Victim": Deal physical damage equal to half of the total debuff and disability layers on yourself twice (max. 5 per stack).
- (Card/Pistol) "Sidearm Tactics": Deal 4 physical damage. Reduce energy cost of next non-pistol card you use this turn by 50%.
- (Card/Shotgun) "Double-Barrel Shot": Discharge. Deal 6 physical damage twice. Next Pump Action card you play this turn won't trigger a Pump Action.
- (Card/Shotgun) "Payout": Pump Action. Draw cards until you draw a Pump Action card or a total of 3 card(s).
- (Card/Syringe) "Blinding Needle": Deal 2 physical damage. Apply Bad Vision 1.
- (Card/Syringe) "Secret Formula": Gain Kickstart 2 when discarded without activation. Goes to the draw pile when discarded at the end of the turn.
- (Card/Unarmed) "Heavy Punch": If unarmed, deal physical damage equal to the number of cards in your draw pile; if not, deal half the damage.
- (Card/Unarmed) "Karate Chop": Deal 4 physical damage. Combo 2: Goes to the top of the draw pile.
- (Card/Unarmed) "Oily Hands": Limited 3. Unusable. In hand: Reduce energy cost of melee damage dealing cards by 1.
- (Card/Unarmed) "Poke": Deal 2 physical damage. Create a Poke card in your draw pile.
- (Card/Unarmed) "Stall": Deal 3 physical damage. Combo 5: Advance 5% another random ally for each card in your hand.
- (Item/Trophy) "Post-it Note": Once per encounter, select a card from your draw or discard pile: On your next turn, draw that card if it's not in your hand.
- (Item/Trophy) "Kunai": Every 5th time an ally deals direct damage to enemies, deal 1 physical damage to all enemies.
- (Item/Trophy) "Radioactive Knuckles": The possessor's melee attacks deal 25% increased damage, but inflict Radiation 1 to the possessor.
- (Item/Trophy) "Radioactive Can": At the end of the possessor's turn, they restore 5 health but receive Radiation 1. (Credits: @KanadeBacon#0746)
- (Item/Trophy) "Old Backpack": For all allies increase Hand Size by 1 if they have 15+ cards, 2 if they have 24+ cards, 3 if they have 30+ cards.
- (Item/Trophy) "Red Ribbon": Selected card will be moved to the top of the owner's draw pile at the start of encounters.
- (Item/Trophy) "Scavenger's Rulebook": While looting, you can convert resources to another random resource. (Credits: @Strikeing#1158)
- (Item/Trophy) "Reverse Card": Once per encounter, transfer up to 2 stacks of a debuff from yourself to the targeted enemy.
- (Item/Trophy) "Pandora's Box": Gain random resources and consumables. Destroyed on use.
- (Item/Trophy) "Nazar Bead": Have a very low chance to receive 0 damage from enemy attacks during an enemy turn.
- (Item/Trophy) "Metal Lockpick": Allows you to open locked doors. Have a chance to gain extra loot from ordinary loot locations (drawers, garbage bags etc...)
- (Item/Trophy) "Suppressor": The possessor deals 30% reduced damage, but costs of the possessor's ranged damage cards are reduced by 1 during encounters. (Credits: @Anything Goes#5236)
- (Item/Trophy) "Whetstone": Increase Bleeding inflicted by cards by 1 during encounters. Any repetition on the card is reduced by 1. (Credits: @King Mordred#6223)
- (Decision Event) "Quick Enhancement Machine": Lets you upgrade equipment.
- (Decision Event) "Hole in the Wall".
- (Decision Event) "Morgue".
[h3]Balance[/h3]
- Cara's perk has been reworked to: "When Bleeding triggers naturally on an enemy, have a chance to reduce their Physical Defense by 50% of the triggered Bleeding."
- Cara now has a new starting item: "Warning Letter", which has the same effect of her old perk: "When enabled, enemy Bleeding interval is reduced by 1 second.". This item can be toggled on and of by the hero.
- (Companion) "Thug": "Opportunist" perk will only affect cards with 3 or more energy cost.
- (Card/Axe) "Braced Impact": Brace scaling limited to 20.
- (Card/Knife) "Bleeding Stab": Bleeding 4->3.
- (Card/Knife) "Stealth Blow": Stealth scaling limited to 10.
- (Card/Knife) "Wounding Tantrum": Repeat count 6->5.
- (Card/Knife) "Heroic Moment": Courage scaling limited to 8.
- (Card/Unarmed) "Kick": Energy Restore 3->2.
- (Card/Unarmed) "Punch": Energy Cost 2->3.
- (Card/Unarmed) "Recovery": Activation of the card will remove the energy reduction from Recovery.
- (Card/Unarmed) "Repel": Energy Cost 2->3.
- (Condition) "Brace": Physical Def Increase 2x->1x.
- (Condition) "Marked": Scaling limited to 200%.
- (Enemy) "Claw": "Vanish" Cooldown 10->20. Won't activate if user already has Stealth.
[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]
- Wording clarified on some of the cards.
- Fixed "Crippled" physical power reduction not being removed.
- Fixed "Little Robot" event rarely not spawning when required.
- Fixed some of the base damage scaling items not affecting Axe cards with multiple possible damage values.[/expand]

Hello all, I'm excited to announce the Early Access Roadmap of Draft of Darkness for 2021. While planning this roadmap, I aimed for bigger updates focusing mainly on content; with the rest mostly containing improvements, as well as addressing issues arising and feedback coming in from you.

In summary, there will be two big content patches: The Halloween Patch coming near the Halloween Sale, and the Winter Patch coming at the end of the year. These updates will add new heroes, companions, weapon types, enemies and areas to the game. Aside from these, there will be improvement updates: An equipment rework patch, aiming to enhance the equipment system from the ground up, will be coming at the end of September. Another improvement patch will aim to add controller support to the game, planned for sometime in November. Of course, these are the major goals of the updates, there will be many changes and content included along with these goals.

Keep in mind that the dates are not final and patch contents announced might be subject to change. I'll keep an updated version of this roadmap in the Steam forum and in our Discord server.

The next patch (v0.5.4) will be adding 17 new cards, new items and new decision events! We are also still working on various balance fixes and hoping to include them in this update. If you'd like to follow development a bit more closely, I'm once more inviting you to our Discord server. I'll be posting development logs and related stuff more frequently there.

[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]
- Fixed a bug with effect orders, causing issues such as Guard triggering even if the damage is dodged.
- Fixed blueprint creation taking the Dream Coin cost even after the process being cancelled.
- Fixed Alert Healer giving Dodge even if 3 Dodge stacks exist.
- Fixed preserved unique items not registering as "seen", causing them to be dropped again during the run.

In this second improvement patch, I've added two of the highly requested features to the game: Mouse movement and quick-playing cards.

You can now simply point and click at a tile you want to move to, and the hero will start moving towards that tile on a calculated path. This path is calculated taking into account obstacles and locked doors etc., so it's possible to click on a far away tile and you will start moving there if a path is found. Depending on the distance, finding a path may take a while. So, you might experience delays if you click on a hard to reach tile. I'm planning to polish this system by adding indicators for when a path is being calculated etc.



Also, be aware that the path calculation won't take into account enemy positions. This means there is a high chance you will run into enemies since you have less control compared to manual movement. Clicking the "Back" key (Right Mouse Button by default) will stop the character from moving on a path; so you can use this to stop when you notice an enemy. I might add enemy avoidance only for enemies that are visible, but I couldn't decide yet if that's a good idea. It also brings additional questions such as: Should the path adjust if an enemy becomes visible on the path? Let me know what you think about enemy avoidance: is it necessary or not?

With this patch, it's also possible to double click cards to quickly use them without the need to aim at a target. This is of course only possible if there is no need to aim with the card. In other words, double-clicking while selecting the card will immediately play it if the card:

• targets all enemies,
  
• targets all allies,
  
• has a single available target.
  

While the balance changes are still mostly in progress, there has been a few tweaks mainly on the Bleeding cards. After the last patch's changes, we saw especially Bleeding-only builds fall behind. To help with this, some of the bleeding cards are tweaked and the "Open Wound" card is changed again to prevent it from being outclassed by cards like "No Mercy", which was more powerful (even with low Physical Power) while having the same cost. As a side note: I'm also working on a change involving Cara's perk to prevent it from being a disadvantage because of the accelerated decay of Bleeding.

The next patch will be a small content update. I'm also planning to announce the roadmap real soon. For now, you can expect that we will move away from weekly updates to less frequent but bigger ones.

If you want to follow the project more closely, I highly recommend joining our Discord Server. On Discord, I'll be posting more frequently about the game and you can directly reach me for feedback, questions, help or anything else about the game.

[h2]Full Patch Notes for v0.5.3_p2[/h2]
[h3]Improvements[/h3]
- Added mouse movement to the exploration phase. Clicking on a tile on the map will construct a path and the character will start moving on this path until the targeted tile is reached. Selecting tiles with a long path will cause a delay, since calculating the path takes some time. Right clicking will stop the character from continuing on the path.
- Double clicking when selecting a card will quickly play the card, if there is no choice of target for the card. In other words, for cards that target all enemies/allies or when there is only one possible target.
- Changed the exploration tutorial to include mouse movement instructions.
- Pressing "Close Window" (ESC) key will close the map if open.
- Increased the size of tooltips that show when hovering over "?" icons.
[h3]Balance[/h3]
- Mend Power giving equipment now spawns. Dropped syringes will give Mend Power instead of Crit. Chance.
- (Item) "Charger": Now costs 3 Battery Charge to activate its effect in both exploration and encounter.
- (Card/Knife) "Bleeding Stab": Bleeding 3->4.
- (Card/Knife) "Open Wound": Changed to "Inflict Bleeding damage equal to 2xBleeding on the target and reset the decay of Bleeding."
- (Card/Knife) "Wounding Tantrum": Bleeding 4->6.
- (Card/Shotgun) "Hip Fire": Energy Cost 2->4.
[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]
- Fixed aspect ratios other than 16:9 causing unaligned UI in windowed mode.
- Fixed resolution dropdown not showing the correct resolution in windowed mode.
- Fixed a bug causing a crash before "Running Out of Resources" tutorial when certain cards are in hand.
- Added a workaround fix for the bug where interaction between Holy Charm / Orange Reflector and Dark Armor + Coward Status was causing a hang. This bug will not cause a hang anymore, but conditions with 0 stacks may show (visual bug). A proper fix is being worked on.
- Fixed equipment tooltips going out of screen.
- Fixed "Recovery" card's energy cost not updating after swapping to unarmed.
- Fixed card descriptions not updating after swapping weapons.
- Typo fixes and clarifications.

More than a week passed since the Early Access launch of Draft of Darkness. First of all, I'd like to thank you for all your support during the launch week! The positivity and all the feedback we received was invaluable!

I'll be preparing a roadmap for the content patches soon. For now, I'll be releasing improvement patches and balance updates with ideas gathered from your great feedback.

In this first patch, I made some improvements to eliminate some problems and streamline a few things to reduce confusion. The tooltip and card preview sizes are increased, for better readability of text. The stats screen is also simplified, letting you distribute your stats easily. Stats will show tooltips when you hover over them. You can see all improvements listed in the changelog below.



There were also some big balance related changes, mainly involving the "knife" weapon. Cara being very powerful due to her being able to stack high amount of Bleeding despite spending no resources was a common opinion. Using Stealth to hide after applying some Bleeding, then watching the boss melt away was feeling a bit exploity to say the least.

To fix this, I've made a big change to Bleeding condition itself: it decays by half when it triggers. This means the bleeding won't decrease by one after doing damage. Instead, it will lose half its layers, making it decay faster the more you stack it. If you stacked 50 Bleeding, after dealing 50 damage, it will be reduced to 25, then 12 and so on... This indirectly limits how much you can stack Bleeding, and requires a more active gameplay to effectively use it and benefit from its advantages.



Also, cards applying or manipulating Bleeding have been tweaked. One example is "Open Wound", which can now be used to have some control over Bleeding, by triggering it manually and delaying its decay.

(The Daemon now applies "Revealed" if it sees you hide in the shadows!)

Next week, I'm planning to add more exciting improvements, such as movement with mouse, faster ways to use cards, and more! I'll be releasing the next week's changes to the "experimental" branch on Friday, and it will be merged to the main branch on Monday! If you want to test things earlier, you can always switch to the "experimental" beta branch of the game on Steam.

Looking forward to hear more of your feedback. See you around!

Note: If you have a saved run, you might come across some anomalies when you load it in the new patch. For example, some attributes may decrease on leveling up. This will fix itself when you start a new run. On the other hand, if you come across any crashes or game-breaking bugs, please contact me in our Discord Server.

[h2]Full Patch Notes for v0.5.2_p2[/h2]
[h3]Improvements[/h3]
- Bleeding now loses half its layers when it decays.
- Encounter card drops will now include unarmed cards more often.
- The Daemon now applies Revealed with its "Menace" moves.
- Increased text size for tooltips and cards.
- Pressing corresponding keyboard shortcuts to open equipment/deck window will also close the window if open. The shortcuts will also function to switch between tabs while this window is open.
- Level up screen is more streamlined by adding "-1" buttons to remove points. Tooltips are added to stats.
- Equipment inventory screen now shows character stats.
- Equipment can be marked as junk inside the shop window.
[h3]Balance[/h3]
- Sell prices are reduced from 0.2x to 0.15x.
- Reduced the amount of Speed given by higher rarity equipment.
- Resource drops are now more uniform. The drops will be selected from all resource types 50% of the time, instead of being skewed towards characters currently in the party.
- Necessity drops are tweaked to only drop if player has less than 5 of a resource.
- "Strength": Phys. Power per level 1->1.5.
- "Intelligence": Light Power per level 1->1.5. Mend Power per level 1->1.5.
- "Dexterity": Crit. Chance per level 2%->1%. Speed per level 0.05->0.03.
- "Dodge" will now negate application of "Bleeding".
- (Item) "Broken Syringe": Reworked to "Whenever an ally draws a Viral Infection card, apply Bleeding 2 to all enemies."
- (Item) "Glass Cannon": Damage increase 40%->30%.
- (Card/Axe) "Carve": Won't apply Bleeding if its damage is dodged.
- (Card/Axe) "Pierce": Won't remove buffs or apply Bleeding if its damage is dodged.
- (Card/Axe) "Swiss Army Axe": Bleeding 5->3, 8->5. Won't apply Bleeding/Crippled if its damage is dodged.
- (Card/Flashlight) "Blunt Hit": Phys. Dmg. 5->7, Energy Cost 5->4.
- (Card/Knife) "Butter Finger": Phys. Damage 4->3, Crit. Multiplier 4->3.
- (Card/Knife) "Dash": Added Limited 2.
- (Card/Knife) "Sneaky Blow": Phys. Damage 2->3.
- (Card/Knife) "Stealth Blow": Crit. Multiplier 5->4. Added Limited 2.
- (Card/Knife) "Wounding Tantrum": Bleeding inflict count 5x->4x.
- (Card/Knife) "Vanish": Added Limited 1.
- (Card/Knife) "Twist the Knife": Applies 100% Bleeding instead of 50%.
- (Card/Knife) "Open Wound": Energy Cost 7->5. Now triggers only 1 layer of Bleeding, but also serves as a refresh for Bleeding, delaying its decay.
- (Card/Pistol) "Wounding Bullet": Won't apply Weak if its damage is dodged.
- (Card/Shotgun) "Head Blaster": Crit Multiplier 3->2.
- (Card/Unarmed) "Repel": PhysicalDmg 2.5->2. Stagger Chance 20%->10%.
- (Card/Unarmed) "Punch": PhysicalDmg 2.5->2.
- (Companion) "Nurse": Base Speed 3->3.5.
- (Companion) "Police": Base Speed 3->4.
- (Companion) "Scavenger": Base Speed 5->4.
- (Companion) "Thug": Base Speed 4->4.5.
- (Enemy) "Albino Rat": "Scramble" Bleeding 6->8.
- (Enemy) "Crawler Brute": "Head Slam" Bleeding 5->8.
- (Enemy) "Sentry": "Saw" Bleeding 3->4, Wounded 2->4. "Triple Chop" Bleeding 2->3.
- (Enemy) "Crooked Zombie": "Hack" Bleeding 6->8. Wounded 6->8.
[h3]Fixes[/h3]
- Fixed item tooltips obstructing the view when selling items in shops.
- Fixed Assassin perk not increasing Crit. Chance when weapons are switched using a card.
- Fixed card highlights not updating after a card is used.
- Fixed an issue with critical hit screen shake being delayed.