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Striving for Light News

Developer Livestream

Join the next Igniting Spark Games Developer Livestream on Twitch on Sunday 29th Jan. at 7pm CET/ 10AM PST.

Join at: https://www.twitch.tv/deventide

Bring 🍿and hang out with us! We are looking forward to read you in chat!

New Game Announcement - Striving for Light: Survival

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We are happy to announce a new upcoming game originated from Striving for Light!

[h2]Striving for Light: Survival[/h2]

[h3]It's our take on the roguelite arena survival genre![/h3]

Here is the steam page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2286450/Striving_for_Light_Survival/

Early Access release will be on 20th Februrary 2023 for 2.99€ / 2.99$ for windows and linux. There will also be a demo where you can already dive into this new experience pretty soon!

[h3]So what is this game exactly?[/h3]
Striving for Light: Survival is a roguelite arena survival game where you try to survive waves of enemies unlock achievements and climb the ladder in various leaderbords for different maps and difficulty tiers.
[h3]
What makes it different from Striving for Light?[/h3]
Striving for Light: Survival is much simpler in its mechanics and playstyle. You choose your weapons and skills for each run, select a map and the difficulty tier and jump right into the action.

Attacks are performed and aimed automatically, so you are mostly focusing on your movement. Movement is crucial in this game as defeating enemies does not grant you experience directly. Each defeated enemy drops light fragments which only grant you experience if they are picked up in the current wave. So if you take a look at a full run there is a finite amount of enemies where experience can be obtained. This makes a perfect foundation for competitive leaderboards as its all about performing best in the given timeframe.

A futher big difference is that there is minimal resource management. Melee and range attacks are all based on cooldowns. Managing plenty of resources (energy, endurance, dodge regeneration) in Striving for Light can be very overwhealming for new players at first. So those resources are completely removed from the skill tree which makes the tree much more compact and impactful when placing a skill point.

Overall the player progression is much faster than in Striving for Light. No endless runs, but defined compact runs of around 20-30 minutes.

Both games can be played independently without the need of having played the other game.

We hope that you enjoy this new experience with Striving for Light: Survival and are looking forward to hear your feedback!

[h3]Wishlist now![/h3]
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2286450/Striving_for_Light_Survival/

Get involved in the ongoing development of Striving for Light at our discord:
Join the official Discord!

Update 0.7.2.5

[h2]New Features[/h2]

[h3]New dynamic healthbar[/h3]
Last update we introduced an alternative healthbar which replaced the lengthly healthbar in the endgame with a numeric alternative to display your current health points. We received a lot of feedback regarding the alternative healthbar, and heard your voices about the need of a visual representation about how much of your health is acutally missing without having to do the math to keep the focus on the important stuff.

So we worked on an improved healthbar concept that combines all the positives from the legacy and the alternative healthbar and removes all the negatives of each individual healthbar design.

So how does the new healthbar look?



But wait isn't this just looking like the legacy healthbar? Exactly for low max health points the healthbar is looking like the legacy healthbar. We especially wanted to keep the legacy design for now as it matches the collectible hearts perfectly and makes the health concept easy to understand for new players.

Once you increase your max health pool the healthbar will at first extent in length but then decrease the heart sizes up to a point where individual hearts are still clearly visible.



If you further build up your max health pool the hearts will gradually fade into a bar-type health bar with the additional numeric information about how your current health versus your max health points.



There is technically no limit for the new healthbar concept. Even going way beyond 100 health will yield a readable bar-type healthbar with additional numeric information.



We hope this new health bar concept will meet your requirements on your journeys into the deepest corners of darkness.

Let us know your thoughts and experience using the new healthbar!

[h3]Improvements[/h3]
  • NPCs in town now recognize immediately that you have enough light to unlock weapons and skills.
  • Replaced shadow behind player character with additional light source. This should make the player outline better visible in dark environments.


[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]
  • Fixed unlock notification window blocking pause menu buttons for mouse input.
  • Fixed wrong tooltips on stats window elements.


If you encounter any issues please use the bug report button in the main menu to report them to us. Also consider attaching your save file for any issue which frequently comes up during your run.

Join the official discord:
https://discord.com/invite/GNEBkQDyUb

Update 0.7.2.4

[h3]New Features[/h3]
An alternative health bar is activated once you reach over 20 max health to improve visual clarity of the health bar. The alterative health bar will display your current health points and your max health in numbers to keep it compact no matter how much max health you gain.


[h3]Improvements[/h3]
  • All companions (melee and range) now are able to trigger enemy on death effects that are not bound to your weapons like fragmentation.
  • If you have multiple of the same skill nodes active the stats window will now display the total amount of each skill node


[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]
  • Fixed a crash when pressing a button in the skill tree while the placement of a skill gem or skill tree item is active
  • Fixed blocked UI elements when crafting window in the skill tree is open
  • Fixed a bug which caused to large window/ game resolution settings from other system (steam cloud) to launch the game in very suboptimal settings. Its now checked if the saved settings are valid for the current system and if not they are replaced with the native OS settings.


If you encounter any issues please use the bug report button in the main menu to report them to us. Also consider attaching your save file for any issue which frequently comes up during your run.

Join the official discord:
https://discord.com/invite/GNEBkQDyUb

New side dungeons & new item types - Patch 0.8 preview & beyond!

We are already working on the next major update (Version 0.8) for Striving for Light. There is a lot to cover so this is what it will bring to Striving for Light.



[h3]New Side Dungeons[/h3]
This update will bring new side dungeons to Striving for Light where you fight through random generated rooms all the way to a dungeon boss. Here you fight for acquiring a new item type that can also hold new active skills. You might have asked yourself what the 4 unused slots in the crafting window are for. Yes, exactly these will be able to hold 4 of the new items.

[h3]New Item Type[/h3]
The new item type introduced with version 0.8 can hold both, passive stat improvements and active skills which can be used by the right mouse button. Those skills have a higher cooldown and can be used to temporarily protect you from received damage or cast an aura that increases your damage output for a short amount of time with also making you more vulnerable to incoming damage. But this is not all these items can also hold completely new skills that do not cost any additional resources. You will be able to carry 4 of these new items in total. These items can hold set bonuses which grant you powerful skills when you have a set completed. So you will have to enter the new dungeon multiple times to find the perfect item combinations to suit your current build.



[h3]Difficulty Tiers[/h3]
Players constantly push the limits on the leaderboard so we want to provide additional challenges for players that already reached their level goals in the current season. Therefore, we will introduce new difficulty tiers that can be unlocked reaching a certain level on a run. This unlocks the next difficulty tier where you can complete on a new leaderboard specifically for this difficulty tier. With this we will also rebalance the endgame difficulty of Striving for Light.

[h3]In game achievements[/h3]
With 0.8 we will add a new achievement system which will give you transparent goals to aim at. These achievements can also grant unlocks if completed. This should make it easier for new players to get into the game.

[h3]Pathfinder rework[/h3]
The pathfinder system will be reworked slightly to support the new difficulty tiers but also to make the start for new players much easier. Your feedback made us clear that the pathfinder especially for new players is hard to understand and does not bring value for the first runs in a new season or in a new save game. Therefore you will need to unlock the pathfinder in order to use it. Most players don’t utilise the pathfinder until enough map shard have been collected so we want to remove the additional needed interactions to activate a map for early runs in a new season and make it available later when it will actually be used.

[h2]Beyond 0.8[/h2]
[h3]Different Character Classes[/h3]
Moving towards the full release of Striving for Light we will add new playable characters to Striving for Light. These characters can be unlocked completing specific challenges. Each character will have a different starting weapon set and a unique twist on starting stats or special abilities.

[h3]Changes to Unlocks[/h3]
We will do some experimentation on alternative unlock systems that give you a better overview on what weapons can be unlocked and a better possibility to set your goals to unlock the weapons you want.

[h3]Changes to skill system[/h3]
We will do some experimentation with changes to the skill system that will grant you possibilities to modify the skill pool that will be active for your next run in some extent. This will make it possible to plan a kind of build or playing style at the start of the run to some extent. We still want to keep the randomness of the skill tree and the available skills since this gives players great opportunities trying out new skill combinations and experimentations during runs. The skill tree discovery and experimentation playground will be preserved.

And there is even more to come.

Since the next major update is holding a lot in store for you it will not be directly around the corner. But there is another Striving for Light related project in the works that we are already hyped to talk about in the next days. So, watch out for this announcement as it will keep you entertained until 0.8 lands.

Join the official discord and participate in the ongoing development of Striving for Light!
Join the official discord!