Shattered Pixel Dungeon News

(For the best viewing experience, please read the original copy of this post on Shatteredpixel.com)



Hey Dungeoneers, v1.3.0 has been released on Google Play, the App Store, Steam, and GitHub!

[h2]What's New in v1.3.0[/h2]
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v1.3.0 includes a variety of additions and improvements, including a new scoring system, custom seeds and daily runs, and a harder alternate ending! There are also some new and changed badges, various UI and control improvements, and a bunch of balance tweaks.

I talked about this update in two previous blog posts:

• Coming Soon to Shattered: Seeded Runs!
• Coming Soon to Shattered: Badges and Ascension!

Here's a condensed runthrough of the major changes this update. You can check out the changes screen in-game for a fully detailed list.

• v1.3.0 is releasing 105 days after v1.2.0, which released on Mar 23rd, 2022
  
• Support for user-enterable custom seeds
  
• Offline daily runs with local score history
  
• An overhauled scoring system to go along with seeds and dailies
  
• New mechanics that make ascension a proper challenge
  
• Improvements to UI/UX, mainly for desktop and controller users
  
• ~15 new badges, ranging from easy to extremely hard
  
• Reworks and replacements for several curse effects
  

• Added several more talent options to the scroll of metamorphosis
  
• Lots of adjustments to existing badges
  
• Additions to several buff and spell effect icons
  
• 10+ misc. changes
  
• 10+ bugfixes
  

• Buffed several armor abilities
  
• Buffed the wand preservation talent
  
• Buffed crystal path rooms
  
• Buffed a few underused alchemy items
  

• Nerfed smoke bomb and heroic leap armor abilities
  
• Nerfed (i.e. made weaker) a few curse effects
  
• Reduced elemental spawn rate on floor 16
  

[h2]What's Coming Next?[/h2]
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The next Shattered update will be v1.4.0! After focusing on game porting and multiple smaller additions, v1.4.0 will finally focus on new core game content! I expect v1.4.0 to take about 2 months to complete, as I want to focus primarily on the core content and not overload the update too much with other smaller additions.


...Before v1.4.0 though, I would like to add a few interface improvements for desktop users in some v1.3 patches. In particular I still haven't added more detailed enemy info to the main game screen. I expect to be adding these things along with the usual bugfixes in patches for v1.3.


The main content in v1.4.0 is going to be a total rework to the blacksmith's quest in the caves! Currently the quest is pretty simple, and I'd like to expand it to continue the trend of quests getting progressively more involved. Expect more mining for rare ore and gems, with some greater rewards if you perform well!


I plan to also have one significant piece of side content in v1.4.0. I haven't yet locked this in, so there are a few possibilities. Expect the side content to be on the scale of a single new item, challenge, or similar.


v1.4.0 will also have some tweaks, as usual. In particular I plan to focus on hero talents and some pieces of equipment. Shattered's overall balance is better than it ever has been, but there is always room for more incremental improvements.


Lastly, while this won't be coming in v1.4.0, I am making some progress on adding a new hero in 2022! Expect to hear more on this after v1.4.0 releases!

v1.3.0 ended up taking a bit more than 3 months. That's longer than I wanted but v1.3.0 also ended up having more content than I was originally planning. For v1.4.0, I'd like to try and get things a bit closer to 2 months. I should have some more info on v1.4.0 to share in a blog post some time in August. In the meantime, please follow me on Twitter if you'd like some quicker mini-updates!

(For the best viewing experience, please read the original copy of this post on Shatteredpixel.com)

Greetings Dungeoneers! After some delays, v1.3.0 is finally ready to go to beta!

The beta for v1.3.0 is live right now! To access it on Steam, go to your game library, right click on Shattered and select 'properties' then go to the 'betas' tab and select the beta from the dropdown list.

In this post I'm going to detail some more of the new content coming to Shattered, with an emphasis on the challenging content additions coming in in v1.3.0!

[h2]New Badges and High Scores[/h2]
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Firstly, v1.3.0 includes 15 new or totally reworked badges! A few are fairly straightforward, but several of them are focused on giving experienced players something to sink their teeth into!

• The first row contains some new or heavily reworked 'cause of death' badges that are a little harder to get than the bronze ones. Most of them involve death by some special magical means, such as to your own item or to a grim trap!
  
• The second row are badges for earning a score of 5k, 25k, 100k, 250k, and a whopping 1 million in a single game. They run the gamut from easy to extremely hard, with 5k being achievable by Goo and 1 million probably being the new hardest badge in the game.
  
• The final row is a set of new boss challenge badges! They are all harder than fighting the boss normally, and keep ramping up as they progress. For the final one you'll need to win with all four demon spawners alive AND the badder bosses challenge enabled!
  

I'm also adding a score breakdown page for players who want more incremental tracking of their performance in a particular game. This page shows how you did on each component of the run, and what multipliers were applied for winning or enabling challenges. For more details on what each score component means, take a look at last month's blog post.

[h2]Ascension[/h2]
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For a while now the game's ascension route has been pretty trivially easy. After getting out of the demon halls enemies start getting weak, and it becomes more of a test of patience than anything. I want to ramp up ascension difficulty, make it impossible to just run away back to floor 1, but also not make the player feel like they're just forced into fighting waves of enemies arbitrarily.



To accomplish this, I'm adding a few limitations to the game when the player starts their ascent. They won't be able to teleport back up a bunch of floors to quickly escape, and there will be a steadily increasing debuff that can only be lessened by defeating enemies. The debuff's effects range from subtly drawing enemies to you, to basically forcing you into combat.

The enemies themselves are also getting tougher. Each enemy will get a multiplier to their effective health, armor, accuracy, evasion, and damage. This multiplier is on a per-enemy basis, ranging from no changes for scorpios and eyes, to 2.25x for gnoll brutes, to a whopping 10x for rats! The goal in terms of enemy strength is to keep difficulty relatively consistent during the ascent, with it eventually falling off a bit as they player gets close to floor 1.

Ideally this will turn the ascent into a proper gauntlet that feels like it encourages the player to keep moving and picking their fights. It will only outright force combat if the player is very consistently trying to avoid enemies. As a reward, players who make it to the surface will find that they get a 2.5x score bonus, rather than the usual 2x for winning.

[h2]Other Changes[/h2]
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v1.3.0 also has a bunch of other changes both big and small, it's probably ended up being the largest variety update I've ever done. In no particular order, here's a quick summary of a few other things coming that I haven't mentioned yet:

Last blog post covered seeds extensively, and I've now fully implemented dailies as well! Every night at mightnight UTC another daily becomes available, and the game keeps a full history of all your daily scores. At some point in the future I might like to add online leaderboard functionality.


I'm also making several badge adjustments in addition to the new badges in v1.3! Unlocking the huntress is getting a bit easier, grandmaster treasure hunter and monster hunter are being made harder, several gold badges are being promoted to platinum tier, and the dungeoneer badges are becoming a bit less grindy.


v1.3 also has a higher than usual number of balance tweaks. Several curses are getting changes to make them less frustrating, including the complete removal of fragile and exhausting. Armor abilities are getting a variety of buffs and a few nerfs as well. Lastly, woolly bombs and some of the more helpful darts are getting new effects to make their usage less niche.


I'm also making some improvements to various interfaces in v1.3.0. The settings menu is getting expanded with some new options for keyboard and controller users and I've added a new 'quickslot swapper' for mobile users! I plan to implement a little more here before the beta is finished, including radial controller menus and more enemy info in the top left of the full UI.

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With the little bit of remaining UI work, I expect this beta is going to last a bit longer than the usual timeframe of one week. Look forward to v1.3.0's full release in early July!

(For the best viewing experience, please read the original copy of this post on Shatteredpixel.com)

Greeting Dungeoneers!

I've got some news to Share about v1.3's development! I've implement support for custom seeds, a new scoring system, and a few other miscellaneous changes. However, development on v1.3 has been going slower than planned, so I don't have a beta or release date to share yet.

Also in non-development news, Shattered is part of Steam’s “Going Rogue” sale that runs this week! The game is 15% off on Steam during the sale, and I’ve taken the opportunity to spruce up the game’s store listing as well.



[h2]Custom Seeds![/h2]
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Probably the largest single feature coming in v1.3 is support for custom seeds! When the game generates the dungeon, a lot of purely random calculations are involved. If they’re given a numerical 'seed', then these calculations always give the same result. Normally the game generates a random seed each time, but starting in v1.3 players who have won at least once can optionally enter a custom seed!

Each seed is represented by nine uppercase English letters, with optional dashes in between for readability. You can also enter whatever you want in the text box (like a name or place) and the game will convert it to a seed behind the scenes.



As an example, the header image for this blog post is the first floor from my in-development version of v1.3 with the seed ABC-ABC-ABC.

I'm also planning on using this functionality to add daily runs! Each day you'll be able to start a run with a pre-determined seed that's the same for everyone! This makes it easy to play the same game as everyone else, without having to directly share seeds with each other. Note that daily functionality will be pretty basic to start, there won't be any online leaderboards.

[h2]A New Scoring System[/h2]
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With seeded runs being added, now seemed like an excellent time to improve the game’s scoring system too! The current system is very simple, with just 3 components:

• Progression, which determines most of the score; it maxes at 78k.
  
• Treasure, which is just equal to total gold collected.
  
• Winning will also double your score.
  

In total a winning run will be worth about 85-100k points before the win multiplier, but an infinite score is technically possible with gold farming. I’m planning to implement a new scoring system that should measure overall run performance much more effectively:

• Progression will be scaled back to make room for more score categories.
  
• Treasure will include held items and will have a cap to prevent score farming.
  
• Exploration will grant a bonus for each floor that’s reasonably fully explored.
  
• Bosses will grant a bonus based on how often you were hit by avoidable attacks or hazards.
  
• Quests will give a fixed bonus for completion, but may be performance-based in the future.
  
• Winning will still double score, but you’ll get a slightly bigger multiplier for a surface win.
  
• Challenges will provide an additional multiplier that stacks with itself.
  

Overall I’m expecting a perfect score to be about 100-120k before multipliers, though winning with a bunch of challenges enabled will be able to easily push this past 1 million. This, combined with seeds and dailies, should make it much more possible to compare your skills against other players!

[h2]Other Changes[/h2]
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There are a few other significant adjustments that I already have in place for v1.3:

I've implemented a change that makes it possible to have more than one floor at a particular depth! This opens up a lot of possibilities, as the dungeon doesn't need to be a straight line from floor 1 to 26 anymore! To start with, I'm planning on using this so that quests can have their own sub-levels. If all goes well, I'll rework the blacksmith's quest in v1.4 to use this new functionality.

I've also made a few improvements to the scroll of metamorphosis. Currently there are 10 talents which are excluded from appearing for other classes, but I've whittled that down to just two. These talents will now have a slightly different effect when metamorphed, mostly to help other classes use the effect without unique class items. A few are a bit of a stretch, but most of them are essentially the same as their regular versions.



Lastly, based on the results of a poll from Patreon I've gone over all of the buff icons in the game and eliminated (almost) all cases of duplicates. There are still plenty of recolors, but it should be basically impossible to have two buffs with the exact same icon now. I've also added icons to a couple of buffs that needed them. Here are a few examples, from left to right, old on top new on bottom: featherfall, targeted, adrenaline, cloak of shadows, fire imbue, and nature's power.



[h2]Still Some Work To Do[/h2]
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I've still got a fair bit to add before v1.3.0 is ready for beta and release though, Here's a quick rundown of what I'm still planning:

• I'm going to be making several UI and UX improvements as a followup to v1.2. In particular I want to add better enemy info in the new full UI, radial menu support for controller players, better controls tutorialization, a better settings menu, and support for 6 quickslots on the mobile portrait view.
  
• I'm also making some more incremental badge improvements in v1.3. Expect some adjustments to existing badges and several additions. In particular I'm adding some more 'death by X' badges, and a new challenge badge for each of the game's bosses.
  
• A few curses are also getting improved in v1.3. Some curses are a lot more interesting than others and so I'm going to be taking the most boring and directly harmful ones and change them to give the player a little more to work with.
  
• Lastly, I'd also like to make some specific changes to the game's ascension route to make it more challenging. Currently it's too easy to simply run back to the surface, and enemies become trivially weak after only a few floors. The changes in v1.3 won't be a full rework, but I would like to improve on these issues.
  

Expect another blog post with a beta in about another month, hopefully in late May or early June. In the meantime I'm going to try to post at least once a week on Twitter, if you'd prefer news at a quicker pace.

I lied, v1.2 gets one more patch!

v1.2.3 is almost entirely bugfixes (about another 10 of them), but there is one tiny tweak to sacrifice rooms: you now get a little progress from sacrificing fly swarms after they split, instead of only getting progress from the initial swarm.

You can check the in-game changes screen for a full list of changes.

Hey Dungeoneers, one more patch before I move on to v1.3.0!

v1.2.2 fixes up a few things left over after v1.2.1 and makes a few more tweaks to some of the new levelgen features.

You can check the in-game changes screen for a full list of changes, but here's a quick summary of the most important adjustments:

• Sacrifice rooms now require slightly fewer enemies at lower depths
  
• Sacrifice rooms now accept sacrifices that are adjacent to the fire
  
• The game can now only spawn one room that requires a solution potion per floor
  
• Moved Steam notification location to bottom-left from top-left
  
• Updated translations.
  
• Fixed ~10 bugs, including a couple crash bugs and various other issues