Aliosso News

We're excited to share the new development of the Path of the Djinn playtest, which introduces traveling, merchants, new cards, new runes and finally new die types.


Traveling will allow you to move from one scenario to the next, eventually reaching the boss. Scenarios can have bonuses, like a merchant having a discount, a battle providing certain rewards on win, and so on. While for this version battles are somewhat simple, we plan to make them more interesting, likely by attaching maluses or by showing what enemies you'd be fighting.



Merchants are mostly in the business of selling runes and cards, but you might find that some of them also sell water. For your convenience, merchants will show new wares in exchange for gold ;). The introduction of gold and traveling has been a great opportunity to introduce cards which mechanics are, you guessed it, related to gold and traveling.




Green runes make their debut in this playtest, while yellow and blue ones affect support and character dice respectively, these ones have miscellaneous effects, like traveling to an oasis, transforming cards, or providing gold when sold to merchants.




New dice! The mechanics of some of these dice are triggered by all faces, whereas other types can be seen as a bunch of numerical faces with some "special" faces. We aren't exactly sure if we prefer the former or the latter yet, we definitively want to hear from you about this.




The next playtest will likely introduce one or more travel scenarios, we're also eyeing the idea of making it so that you only play one character at a time, with each character affecting the game mechanics in an important way.
Last but not least, the Ukrainian games festival will be taking place from August 19 to 26, so the next few weeks are going to be really busy, with a new playtest and the Steam page remake.

Dice have become the player's main focus during the turn. Support dice increase power or grant other effects, while Character dice cast attacks when played.

On "Play", all dice will be played from left to right. You can also Reroll up to 4 dice at a time, twice per turn.




Dice can be customized throughout a run by adding minor or major symbols to their faces. The common way to do so is to use Runes, which act as consumable items that, usually, have dice-altering capabilities.





Cards enact a more passive role compared to before. Their effect can range from a simple fixed Power increase to more game-altering potential, including conditioning of the game outside of battles.


With this patch, we're also introducing negative cards, i.e. cards that affect the player in a negative way. We're still not 100% sure where we want to go with these, but each boss will probably have its own card, alongside a card that is applied depending on the environment.

We're eager to see the player's reaction to this change, don't hesitate to give us feedback through the steam community forum or the in-game feedback button!

We're excited to finally put this build out in the open! For this first playtest, we're focusing on combat, which has gone in a direction that we'd describe as more Balatro-like, a game of which we're great fans.



Every (roughly) 4-5 battles you can expect some rest in the form of camping, which, while lacking content, is something we wanted to move forward with.

The playtest will last two weeks, if you wish to discuss or provide feedback feel free to post on the community forum or to use the feedback form in the game.
[h3]What *NOT* to expect?[/h3]

• For this playtest runes have no specific effect, that is, the symbol on each rune only serves the purpose of distinguishing one rune from another.
  
• VFXs and art assets are a work in progress, many cards have no art.

[h2]What's Next?[/h2]
The next playtest will again be about combat, but with a slight change of tune when it comes to runes themselves, along, of course, with adjustments resulting from your feedback.

Early May we'll be launching our first playtest, we're looking for feedback on the combat, and that's what the first playtest will be focused on.

It will have a limited time window and we'll follow up with more playtests as we adjust things. To apply visit our steam page and look for the "Request Access" button, it looks like this:

[h2]Skills have become cards[/h2]
Their availability during combat follows the classic card battler formula, with a deck and a discard pile. This comes after reflecting on all the feedback we got, from the original combat-only alpha up to now.



Yet another slay the spire clone you say? Stop right there! Here's the real deal of this post: runes! Runes allow you to power up skills during combat, enabling you to create powerful effects and execute crazy combos.

Let's take one step back and break down what a card looks like:



The top left area contains the card cost, its icon, name, and, just below the name, its tags, like "Attack" or "Skill". Certain runes require a card to have a specific tag to be applied. Below that, are the rune sockets, which show what runes are already applied and what capacity the card has.

At the center of the card is the combo: this effect is applied only if (at least) a certain amount of rune colors have been applied. Finally, at the bottom is the base effect of the card, e.g. doing some damage.



Runes follow a logic similar to cards: you start the game with a deck of runes and discard or acquire new runes by visiting points of interest or as a reward for battles.

[h2]New battle UI[/h2]
The battle UI went through a comprehensive rework to accommodate cards and runes. Moreover, characters aren't in a line anymore but are distributed across the battlefield for a more natural look.



[h2]Runes and Prayers[/h2]

Most prayers of the prayer system (link) have been realigned to (also) provide runes at the cost of some water, this will help in getting out of tricky situations when, if only you had that one rune, things would work out!



[h2]Dialogs[/h2]

Runes and prayers also tie in with dialogs. We wanted to get away from the (in our humble opinion)
stale "classic" formula for dialogs, and runes fit the purpose perfectly.

Dialog choices will now include rune sockets that can represent a requirement or a power-up, that is, fitting the right runes would increase the probability of a good outcome or its magnitude. Short of a rune? Perhaps a prayer can help.


The camping location has been reworked into a special dialog where the available activities depend on which characters are in the party! ⛺⛺⛺



What excites us the most about runes is the opportunity to plug in rare and tricky runes into the game, daily runs will be an excellent place for this.
We also hope that modders will enjoy the experience of creating new runes, something that we're making as simple as possible.

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https://store.steampowered.com/app/2730820/Path_of_the_Djinn/