Playtest Update 2023-02-17

We have another development week behind us and we made quite some progress this week on some technical parts in regards to performance but also a lot of balancing. With big steps we getting closer to where we want to be for the first public version of the game and we might have some news in that regard next week.


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[h2]Change Log 2023-02-17[/h2]

FEATURES

• Each completed quest increases the experience gain by 1%
  
• You can now find abilities and items on the stage
  
• Added more Gamepad support, some menus are still missing
  

BALANCING

• General monster health has been increased
  
• General monster damage has been increased
  
• Lowered the speed for Hellhounds
  
• Increased speed of Elites and Boss Monsters
  
• Difficulty through the waves of monsters increases faster
  
• Lowered the effect of the torment rank
  
• Torment rank no longer increases monster damage and monster speed
  
• Monster speed increases over time now
  
• Level ups require significant more experience through later levels
  
• Increased the damage of all abilities (exception: transfixion -> view bug fixes)
  
• Ember Grounds boxes now drop more gold and potions than
  
• Reduced potions drops in Haunted Halls
  
• Increased Effect of “Receptive Mind” (6% -> 10%)
  
• All fire damage have increase Burn Chance
  
• Burn damage ticks faster now for lower damage
  

OTHER CHANGES

• Ember Grounds unlocks now by surviving until the Skeleton Lord appears
  

POLISH & QOL

• Elites now have a blue outline while bosses have red outlines
  
• Added several UI Sounds
  
• Regeneration values are now shown in “per Second” values
  
• Added button prompts when entering the halls (can be deactivated)
  
• Added character selection prompt when the game started
  

BUG FIXES

• The damage of arcane splinters did not decline over time
  
• Transfixion dealt 5 times the damage it should
  
• Quest “Flaming Passion” was fixed
  
• Quest “Shield Training” was fixed
  
• Health would sometimes not properly displayed when picking up potions
  

PERFORMANCE

• Putting physics into a different process to spread load between CPUs
  
• Reduced the damage numbers that can pop up (also added a setting to toggle them off)
  
• Reduce logging load
  
• Stages should load faster through better resource loading
  

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[h2]What's Next?[/h2]
The Gamepad support has not yet fully implemented, but we certainly made some progress and it will be ready for the first public version. Also since we feel more confident with the base balancing we want to set the meta progression for the early game in stone.
We received a lot of feedback from our lovely community and we will use it to sort around some quests and unlocks. This will also mean that we need to reset the save games with the next patch.
Also outstanding is the balancing of items and creating more assets for our abilities, traits and items.

We decided to not touch the shield maiden for now, even with the feedback received that she differs too little from the swordsman as we wish to focus on the first three characters for now. But we have some ideas how to bring some variance to her!


[h3]Have a nice weekend![/h3]
- Chasing Carrots