A Storm Unsung News

Hello all!

Another week, another devlog! Today, we will be talking about the bounty board and the little critters that are associated with it - the vulights.

The Bounty Board

The bounty board is a building in town which will be unlocked through you travels. Once unlocked, you fill find bounties associated with unlocked characters posted on the board. This means, that there is a chance that, during a normal run, a vulight cultist will spawn and attempt to hunt you down.



Those are all the current different cultists, but we've many more planned.

Cultists

These cultists follow the teachings of a being known as Indariil, it which carries the wind in keili, more succinctly - the Wind Carrier.

They function as mini-bosses which spawn randomly throughout the level, but only for characters that are atop the board. If you should fall while a cultist is currently spawned, the bounty will be removed and a new one will be added the next time you are in town. If you should succeed in killing the cultist, however, you will be marked as a higher priority - your bounty level increasing as well as the number of cultists that will spawn next time.

Cultists and their ilk drop a particular currency - the vulight pearls.



The vulight are an enigmatic group. They're lineage diverges from normal vulpine somewhere near the end of the leonen era, when the leonen capital of Granforn was razed to the ground, as they say, by Indariil.



Their anatomy is similar to current vulpines, but stunted. They stand about a head shorted than your average current vulpine, but they are much stockier, with a pair wicked horns growing from their head. They mature quickly, but die just as fast - it is rare, indeed, to see a vulight over the age of ten.

Their hearts produce these pearls. The mana that sustains their life seems to be too much for their smaller frames and condenses into these pearls. It's a messy affair to retrieve one, but they fetch quite a price on the open market. Not to mention their use as reagents.

Watchers



Along with those fought as cultists or wanderers in dungeons, there is another source of pearls - the watchers in Riilavkava. They sit hidden and waiting in town, always watching. Once found out however, they will quickly flee and leave behind pearls, from where, no one knows.

Vulight pearls are the currency that is used to interact with the Shroomery, which is also unlocked with the bounty board. More on the shroomery later, as I've said before.

I got a little bit lore-y there for a minute. Lore is one of my favorite parts of, well, most forms of media and I'm quite the proponent of both the 'untrustworthy narrator' and 'distant mountains' styles of lore and narration.

But, yes. That is this week's devlog! Next week, finally, I will be talking about the Shroomery. Keep your pants on, it sure is exciting stuff.


Until next time,
Thank you all for reading,
Lucas

Hello all!

This is a bit later than usual, but here we are!
Today, I will be talking about upgrades - very juicy stuff, I know. There are multitudes of ways to increase your character's abilities, from flat stat upgrades, to more dynamic things, like choices in upgrading skills.

The Board Boar



Umnok, the proprietor of the Board Boar, will allow you to refurbish old buildings along with building new ones and upgrading those that you find in the wild.

Skill Points



The first thing that I will be going over are skill points. These are gained from skill shrines which randomly dot the dungeons that you are going to be visiting. They are used to increase the efficacy of any given skill, but only for the current run that you are on.
Along with increasing the efficacy of the chosen skill, they also increase base stats. Each skill increases base stats in a different way, giving a bit more choice to placement than just what skill you like the most.

The Blacksmith



In town, and unlocked by default, is the blacksmith Gon. Gon will augment your abilities through a pretty straightforward stat increase. Not particularly exciting, but, as it stands, he gives you upgrades for your base stats - Health, Armor, Shield, and Damage.

The Apothecary



Koria, both a playable character and the proprietor of her own shop, will upgrade your potions for you. By default, the player is able to carry one potion with them on each run, but after unlocking the Apothecary, you are able to both increase the capacity of potions and their efficacy.

The Scarification Altar



Roil, once found and rescued, will open up shop in town, allowing him to grant the characters different 'scars.' Each scar is, in essence, a generic upgrade that each character can choose from individually. Despite being generic, as in, all characters have the same scar choices, they are very powerful and generally very different from the types of upgrades found at the Blacksmith.

The Smoking Room



Oriilou'sii, again, once found and rescued, will open up her smoking bar in town. From there, you can get temporary buffs that will persist only one dungeon run. That's alright though, they are free, but you can only take one at a time. Some buffs also come with negative effects, so read the choices carefully.

The Bosses Killed Bonus, or BKB

I had nowhere else to explain this one in particular, so here we go. The Bosses Killed Bonus (BKB) is a cumulative bonus for all characters to their defensive stats based on the absolute number of bosses that have been defeated. It doesn't matter how many times one defeats any particular boss, they still grant more bonus.
The bonus is small, something like 0.5 health per kill, but eventually, it leads all characters to being stronger. The bonus that you receive is also different based on the 'class' of the character that killed the boss.
A pure mage, for example, gives bonus shield, but a rogue gives bonus armor. And a hybrid mage/rogue gives half the value of each!

That's not quite all that I have to share about upgrading, but the last bit needs to wait for another day - the Shroomery. But! That will be coming eventually, I've a plan, you see.


Until next time,
Thank you for reading,
Lucas

Hello all!

Once again, Lucas here, coming to explain more systems for you.

This week, as I mentioned in the last Devlog, we are talking about motes.

Motes

Motes, as the lore goes, are miniscule pieces of the base, animating elemental magics that flow through everything. Souls are made of motes - both intelligent and non. Souls break down on death, creating mana, which condenses into different states, one of which being the motes we are here to talk about.

More practically, motes are little creatures that you will find in the field that will aid you on your journey. There are at least a dozen types currently, but we've plans for a lot more. There are a few different variants that we will talk about today: random, caged, and active.

Random Motes

Random motes are found throughout the world just waiting for you to come by and pick them up.



When collected, simply by walking near them, they will begin to follow the player. Following motes of this variety do not do much more than bolster the player's stats.



This variant is the most abundant and the type that you will interact with most often.

Caged Motes



The next variant are the caged variant. They will spawn randomly throughout dungeons, just sitting and waiting to be rescued.

When rescued, a few things will happen. First, if you have not rescued that variant before, you will unlock a new mote to bring with you permanently. Second, the caged mote will transform into a temporary active mote.

Here is the most important bit about motes. Active motes, temporary or permanent, augment the player in the same way that random motes do, but they also augment their abilities.

Think of active motes as little passive effects that one could gain from an item.

A couple examples:

-The active earth mote heals your armor when you take damage to your health

-The active fire mote spawns a passive aoe that follows the player and damages enemies within

-The active moteshroom spawns a bouncing mushroom underneath you when you dodge

Mote Hutch

Now, after you have rescued a caged mote and made your way back to Riilivkava, whether through success or failure, you will be able to harness your new companions as never before.



The mote hutch is a building which is found after defeating Saren Glass for the first time. From it, you are able to permanently summon whichever type(s) of active motes that you wish to follow you.

At first, you are only able to bring one with you, but after leveling the hutch to the max, you will be able to choose three.

These motes will all follow you, regardless of death or anything else that would cause motes to previously despawn. Sort of like equipment that you can add to your loadout before venturing forth.

Now, through the hutch, you can also level up active motes. This increases the efficacy of their passive abilities, but also increases the amount of stats that they provide to the player. In a double-whammy, leveling an active mote, will also increase the abilities of random caged motes. So, for instance, if you have leveled your fire mote to level 5, then all caged fire motes that you find will also be level 5!

On that note, you can also have multiple of the same mote following you - only one can be chosen, but you can have as many temporary active motes of the same type as you are able to find.

And there you have it - motes, our take on gear, in essence. I personally think they are much cuter than a sword, but maybe I'm just biased!

Next time, we will be talking about leveling both yourself and your town, along with a couple smaller mentions that don't warrant their own devlogs.


Until next time,
Lucas

Hello all!


Lucas here, once again, to talk more about ASU! Today we will be talking about dungeons and various mechanisms therein.

Each run toward takes the player through three different dungeons to their ultimate goal of Castle Glass, the game's ending dungeon. Dungeon is used loosely here, as a lot of them are more like areas than dungeons, but I digress.

Initially, your runs will be the same each time: Malignant Marsh -> Putrid Plains -> Virulent Village -> Castle Glass. But after defeating Castle Glass's master, and your character's long lost relative, you will unlock a higher difficulty and with each new difficulty comes a set of three new areas, one for each 'slot', that you can possibly enter into each run.

So, for instance, the hard difficulty unlocks are: Star-crossed Spores, Blistering Beach, and Scorching Skeletons. (I like the alliteration, sue me!) Which means that any given run can look like:

Malignant Marsh -> Blistering Beach -> Virulent Village -> Castle Glass.

Or:

Star-crossed Spores -> Putrid Plains -> Virulent Village -> Castle Glass.

There will be an unlocked level for each 'slot' for each difficulty, so in total there will be 12 different levels that will be unlocked once you reach the final difficulty.

Ultimately, you will always end up back at Castle Glass. And Castle Glass will also change with each difficulty, becoming more unstable and blighted by the fetid magic that seeps from Saren Glass, changing the area to be much more dangerous overall.

An aside: there is a way to reset the game's difficulty, two in fact, but I will focus on the one that is unlocked from the start. The difficulty resetter, Fa'lia, will allow you to turn the difficulty back to normal, but doing so will not reset the dungeons that are available. Castle Glass's form, however, will revert as it is tied strictly to difficulty level.

Fa'lia, the resident resetter

Each dungeon is randomly generate from a set of hand-made tiles. The make-up is entirely randomized, other than the fact that you can make it from the start to the end.

Below are 4 examples of the Malignant Marsh - each in a different difficulty.

The current difficulty that you are playing on increases a lot of things: enemy strength, enemy number, trap spawns, mana shard drops, etc. But! It also increases the maximum length of dungeons, ensuring that runs through the higher difficulties will end up taking longer and longer, pushing you to your limit!












Enemies spawn dynamically along with random events, all the timings and quantities and types of which are determined by the generically named Dungeon Master.

The Dungeon Master, which I should probably change the name of *cough,* is simply a bot that takes into account dozens of different factors to choose what is happening at any given time. It tries to keep the game from becoming too easy or too crushingly difficult. Though, sometimes, it decides it wants to drop a horde of elites on your head, along with an unnecessarily difficult event.

I could probably talk forever about this because, well, that's how I am, but beyond that I am really happy with how the dungeon system has turned out and, frankly, proud that I was able to make something as robust as it is. Anywho!

Next week, we will be talking all about motes - the little critters that will aid you and work as your equipment!




Until next time,
Lucas

*Edit:* My poor grammar again. This seems like it will be a repeating pattern.

Hello all!


I am the project director at Clouds of Glass Games, Lucas, and today I wanted to explain some bits about our upcoming game A Storm Unsung.

A Storm Unsung, as the description and other various things on the Steam page explain, is a rogue-lite dungeon crawler. In ASU, you play as a variety of characters who are all cursed by the same bloodline, though the characters themselves are quite diverse in both stature and means.

I will be talking about the characters today, and probably about once a week, I will be writing a similar devlog to explain various mechanics and ideas behind ASU. I can't help myself, I always make simple things much more complicated than they really need to be and I suppose I felt that it would be a good idea to start explaining some of what we have going on in ASU ahead of time.




As of this writing there are 12 characters to choose from to venture into the dungeons. Only three are available at the beginning but the others can be acquired from various means.

Each character is equipped with 4 unique abilities: a main, a secondary, a defensive, and an ultimate. Along with all those, every character can perform a short hop to propel themselves whatever direction they are moving.

The primary stats of each character are: damage, armor, shield, and health. Damage does as you'd expect, proportionally translates to extra killing power based on the ability in question and other such things. Armor is the defensive stat for blocking physical damage. Shield is the defensive stat for blocking magical damage. And once a character runs out of either armor or shield, the respective damage type will start to lower health - which, as you could guess, means a game over if you run out of it.

Characters are roughly divided into three classes: warrior, rogue, and mage. The three rough classes can also be roughly combined in certain characters. Each class has characteristics that are not found on others.

The warrior class is generally about melee engagement. It also has means of sustaining itself - whether that be through directly healing one of its defensive stats or through stopping or lessening damage. Generally, warriors will also have higher base armor than others.

The rogue class is about mixed engagement - both ranged and melee, character dependent. The main strength of the rogue class is their ability to stun enemies for a time. Generally, rogues have lesser armor and shield than the other classes.

The mage class is about ranged engagement. Their primary strength is to deal large amounts of damage quickly and/or in a large area. Generally, mages have the lowest of all defensive stats, except shield.

As mentioned, these can also be mixed in different characters. For example: Irenian is a warrior/mage hybrid that has the means to sustain herself through lifesteal and has the capability to deal damage over a large area.




I realize that this all may seem rather abstract. For those of you who don't know, I'm rather longwinded and I meander a lot in my descriptions and explanations. Something that I should probably do somewhere along the way in these devlogs, which I tentatively will be doing each week, though probably not on Saturday, is to do character showcases and explain each in turn. But, I suppose that will have to wait until the actual work on the Shroomery is completed - the Shroomery being a way to permanently change the way each character's skills work in order to customize their kit a bit more to your liking.

But! That is a devlog for another day!

Until next time,
Lucas

*Edit:* My poor grammar. >.>