Talented News

- Replaced the Mastery 10 penalty that increased the cost of Rare, Epic and Ability Talents with one that adds a new Enemy Type at Night 10 and Night 15
- Replaced the Mastery 20 penalty that added an extra enemy per wave with one that increases the power of Elite Enemies (+25% HP, +10% Speed)
- The Mastery 25 penalty now only gives double enemy upgrades from Night 5 onwards
- Reduced the chance of Mystery Talents by 5% per Mastery Penalty (from 10%)
- Reduced the vision range cap by 5% per Mastery Penalty (from 10%)
- All per-night Mastery Penalties from Mastery 11 onwards only come into effect after Night 10 (e.g. "Enemies gain 1% movement speed each night" >> "After Night 10, Enemies gain 1% movement speed each night"
- Second Easy Difficulty enemy now appears after Night 5 (instead of Night 4)

Hello Talented Gamers!

We've been hard at work fleshing out the Bandit Class that we announced in the previous devlog! I have a few more details to share, including a couple of his brand spanking new Talents and Abilities but first I want to take some time to address a few of our most common pieces of feedback.

Advanced warning that this will be a fairly systems heavy devlog, so if you're more interested in concrete features I won't be offended if you skip the next two sections!

Trial and Error

We've been made very aware that our difficulty scaling is harsh to the point of being unfair, beginning around Mastery 10 and doubling down at Mastery 20.

It was never our goal to make Talented about restarting runs until you find a combination of enemies and Talents that let's you finally scrape your way past the first 10 Nights and sail your way to the end. So we're making some substantial changes to the Mastery system with 2 goals in mind:

- Make Mastery 10 - 25 more achievable with a higher number of builds
- Move more of the difficulty of Mastery 10 - 25 into the later portion of the game (Nights 10 - 20)

And how will we achieve this?... (Spoilers for Mastery Levels ahead)

- Replaced the Mastery 10 penalty that increased the cost of Rare, Epic and Ability Talents with one that adds a new Enemy Type at Night 10 and Night 15
- Replaced the Mastery 20 penalty that added an extra enemy per wave with one that increases the power of Elite Enemies (+25% HP, +10% Speed)
- The Mastery 25 penalty now only gives double enemy upgrades from Night 5 onwards
- Reduced the chance of Mystery Talents by 5% per Mastery Penalty (from 10%)
- Reduced the vision range cap by 5% per Mastery Penalty (from 10%)
- All per-night Mastery Penalties from Mastery 11 onwards only come into effect after Night 10 (e.g. "Enemies gain 1% movement speed each night" >> "After Night 10, Enemies gain 1% movement speed each night"



As well as making the game generally a lot fairer, this should push a very significant portion of the challenge into the final 10 Nights - allowing you to establish a build before the difficulty really ramps up.

Our plan is to add the Mastery changes to a Hotfix for 0.10, so you won't need until 0.11 to get these. They should be live in the coming days!

Taking a Chance



Since the early days the Common that appeared on the tree were pulled completely at random from the pool of available Talented. Sometimes this worked in your favor (I've seen screenshots of people with 10 Damage on Archer on Night 3!), but often it can lead to situations where you simply cannot find the Talents you need.

To help solve this issue we've moved to a random pooling system.

When the Talent Tree is created at the start of a run Common Talents fill a pool and whenever a Common Talent is placed on the tree it is removed from the pool. Only when the pool is empty does it refill completely again.

Note: Some Common Talents appear multiple times in the pool and others don't. For example,
the [Attack Speed Up] talent appears in the pool 4 times for Archer but the [Damage Up] talent only appears once.



This means that all possible Common Talents will be more evenly spread throughout the tree, and you should have more consistent access to whatever you're looking for.

Several other areas of the game have benefited from this system too. Rare Talents, Abilities, Enemy Spawns and even Enemy Wave Sizes all use the pooling system. We hope this will lead to more consistent and fairer feeling runs.

The Fun Stuff

Thank you for indulging us by reading the, slightly more dry, balance talk above! Let's reveal some Bandit Abilities!



I mentioned last time that some Talents would allow you to fire more bullets. Something worth noting is, Bandit will not have access to the [Damage Up] talent so you'd better stack up those shots!



Bullets won't be the only thing you're firing, Fireworks can provide some useful crowd-control for tanky enemies that you can't finish off without reloading.



Now you've stuffed your gun full of extra shots, challenge an entire lane to a duel while the others look on in awe.





Phew! That was a lot to talk about, so I won't keep you any longer. I can't say too much about the next devlog, but it will be... Legendary...

Stay Talented

- Fixed a bug with Save File Corruption
- Added new Run End Music
- Moved old Run End Music to the Title Screen

Hello Talented Gamers!

THE NEXT CLASS IS... BANDIT.



I've been wanting to say that for weeks at this point, and oh boy, is there a lot to talk about!

Cash Money



The Bandit has access to a brand new resource Gold Coins. We had so much positive feedback for the Archer's loot mechanic that we've made it a fundamental part of how the Bandit works!

Bandit has a brand new stat called Luck. Your percentage chance for an enemy to drop a Gold Coin when they die.

Luck can be increased by learning the Common [Luck Up] Talents, so while you start with a handful of pennies you can earn some fat stacks later in the run.

But where will you spend all of this hard earned dollar?

Big Spender

There are two main ways to empty your savings account!


The first is the Talent Shop. Accessed through the Talent [Cash Out] you can go on a shopping spree - buying Common Talents, Rare Talents and even Abilities and Epics if you're lucky enough to find them!

You can also slam that Re-Roll Button to re-fill the shop or get any unwanted options out of your sight... but beware, the price of Re-Rolling increases with every press!


The other way to spend your hard earned money is on Abilities! That's right, the Bandit is Pay-to-Win (this is a joke).

Will you save up your coin to spend in the Talent Shop? Will you overspend and end up bankrupt at the exact moment where an extra use of an Ability would have saved you? Time will tell...

Shoot to Kill



But that's not all... Every single Bandit Basic Attack will fire two bullets, and with some of their new Talents you'll be firing even more!

What's the down side you say?



The Bandit can only fire three times before he needs to reload his weapon - so you'd better pick your targets wisely as the enemies won't wait around.

Never fear though, you can use [Reload Speed Up] Talents and some Abilities (more about those next Devlog) to reload faster!



Aaaaand that about wraps it up for this time! There's plenty more to share, so expect to hear more detail about the Talents and Abilities that Bandit has in the coming weeks. Including some brand new Status Effects!

Stay Talented

Hello Talented Gamers!

It's been a truly amazing first week for Talented - 3259 people and counting have picked up the game and the vast majority of the feedback has been extremely positive and constructive. We cannot thank you enough for that - we take the move to Steam very seriously and it's good to see that our work to make a solid groundwork before releasing paid off!



Some Ground Rules

This is a continuation of a devlog I've been running since the start of Talented over on itch.io, if you'd like to see more about the history of the game we've worked hard making do head over there! I aim to get these out around every 2 weeks (but sometimes life gets in the way!).

Just so we're being completely transparent, anything discussed in these devlogs is subject to change - they're intended to be an insight into development rather than concrete feature announcements! (although we do our best to only mention things we're confident are coming)

But I know what's really on everyone's mind! What's next for Talent Ed?...

New Challenger Approaches



The first thing on the list for 0.11 is our 5th Character Class, this is the first one we've developed since the Summoner in 2021!

We're committed to getting right, so we don't want to reveal anything until we're happy with how it's looking internally - but I can tell you we are prototyping a completely new resource and trying out a second way of getting Talents, both unique mechanics for Talented!

Legend Has It

Something I've wanted to do ever since Version 0.1 is a tier of *extremely* powerful Talents, that bend the rules even further than Epics.



This update, finally, I get my wish with Legendary Talents. These Talents will cost more Talent Points than any other and only one will be available on the tree each run - but should you find it here are a few of the effects we're thinking:

[Bullseye] (Archer) Double your Critical Strike Chance
[Overconfident] (Warrior) Your Combo Meter doesn't reset at the end of the Night
[Scourge] (Summoner) Enemies have a 25% chance to spawn a fly on death

Additionally, some Talents that have had to be nerfed in order to remain Epic Talents will be upgraded to Legendary. For example:

[Echomancy] (Wizard) Whenever you cast an ability, that ability will cast a second time for free after a short delay

Note: The plan with all Legendary Talents is for them to be useful (if not ideal) in any build, that way you'll never be sad to see them.

We've Listened!



Finally, we want to take some time to address some of the major areas of feedback on the 0.10 build. The two points we want to focus on for 0.11 are:

- Certain classes being reliant on specific Talents/Builds.
- Mastery 10+ feeling difficult in an unfair way.

We'll dig into both of these in a future devlog, but needless to say, things like Archer's reliance on [Piercing Blows] and Wizard's Orb build are definitely on our radar for next update. You can also expect changes that shift more of the high Mastery challenge into the late game of the run, giving you more time to craft a build before feeling the need to restart.

Phew, that was a lot - thank you so much if you made it through! Please keep the feedback rolling in, we're dedicated to making Talented the best game we can. Next time I'll hopefully be able to go into more detail on the new class.

Stay Talented