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Dungeonmans News

Hatch and Slash Sale Week!

To celebrate the launch of Hatch and Slash, the free 1.10 Dungeonmans content update, the game is on sale for the week of 12 July to 19 July. Those of you weeping with regret at 10:05am last Thursday can redeem yourselves and get the best dungeon crawling adventure on Steam for the insane price of Five Ameridollars.

[h2]Battle Poultry[/h2]

Heroes of level 5 or higher will soon find a Mysterious Egg, another item that can be identified and put to good use by the Academy Headmaster. Soon you'll be joined by Professor Hatch, a master of Ovomansy that will teach you the ways of egg magic.

Most Battle Poultry start as a blank slate, you help them grow and train by feeding them delicious monster steaks, steaks that sensibly drop from every type of monster, including skeletons. Guide your pet towards melee or ranged combat, and along the axis of Tough vs Swift. Tough pets will have extra health, and may taunt enemies away from you, or put up powerful shields. Swift pets move quickly around the battlefield, dashing through foes and doing adorable little flips while firing razor sharp quills at doomed foes.

Your pets can also learn powers, just like you. Monster steaks may contain the essence of monster powers -- feed your pet with meat from Pouncebiters, your bird may end up pouncing and biting too. Bandit Assassins? Watch your poultry learn to toss ninja stars around the battlefield. They can do all sorts of cool things, drop battle banners, toss healing potions, pull you out of trouble, and even (if you find the right steaks) bring down starlight power and bend the forces of gravity.

Back at the Academy, you can trade in unhatched eggs you find for items that let you breed new poultry. Each generation is a little bit stronger, and can mix the powers of its parents. Find the right combination of monster steaks and breeding to build your ultimate battle pet and watch them dominate monsters alongside you.

[h2]Thank you for years of adventure[/h2]

Dungeonmans has been live on Steam for just about seven years now. I deeply appreciate the community that has grown around it, the support has been absolutely life changing and the Discord is my favorite place to be.

I try to throw in something new into the game every year, I know I should be focusing on the Next Thing but Dungeonmans is my favorite old toybox and I can't help but play. Hopefully this update will inspire you to play a bit as well.

I aimed for this update to capture the spirit of Dungeonmans and I hope you agree. Heroic adventure with a wink and a smile, a lighthearted game with serious gameplay. If you're new to the game, welcome aboard and I hope you end up swimming in loots. If you're coming back to give pets a try, I hope they entertain you and make you glad to spend your time here.

[h2]Other Changes / Bug Fixes[/h2]

[h3]Save Issues[/h3]
For the longest time, there's been a rare issue with Steam Cloud Saves and the first save slot. Sometimes after an Academy is erased, Steam Cloud tries to keep it around, which causes confusion and sometimes lost saves for players. I've added a check for that and if something goes wrong the player is shown what adventures are in the slot and asked to keep one.

[h3]Real Armor[/h3]
This line of powers has been buffed a little bit. Specifically, Iron Defiance costs a bit less, lasts a smidge longer, and the damage reduction has gone from 20% to 30%. The goal of the class remains endurance and success when surrounded by foes, where getting hit hurts less and increases the damage you give back. It's closer to that ideal now than ever before.

[h3]Monster Changes[/h3]
Very few here. The Triger has increased health, they should be threatening monsters when they arrive and truthfully they just died too easily. They're a little harder to kill.

There's a notorious horse boss in the Dread Spire that ended a lot of adventures with an attack that honestly felt really cheap. Part of the stupid damage that attack dealt was based on bad math, but it was also bordering on unfair with the distance it could travel and the immediate speed of the attack. That rush has been pulled out. In return, the other attacks he makes have been buffed a bit, including his spear toss. The ultimate goal is avoiding cheap ass'd one shots against tough and prepared heroes.

[h3]Experimental Zoom View[/h3]
Some players, especially those with certain disabilities, have asked if they can zoom the game in even further to upsize the UI. I've finally got something that might meet that requirement. The game's tech doesn't lend well to this, and you'll notice a drop in graphical fidelity, but if you want to try it you can select it from the options menu.

[h2]Final Poultry Thoughts[/h2]
One of the most common pieces of feedback I've gotten about Dungeonmans gameplay is that the difficulty really spikes around levels 6-10. That part of the level curve is the steepest, and a lot of heroes end up dead. Battle Poultry are intended to soften that a little bit. It seems to be working! Also, the emergent interactions with an AI pet are surprising and fun, so at this point I'm certain the pets are a really positive influence on the game.

That said, some players might find that pets make the game a little easier than they'd like. That's ok! They're entirely optional. In the future, I might add an item that allows a player to intentionally nerf their own pet, if they feel like pets are too strong but still want to have fun with them. If you have thoughts on this (especially once you've played for a bit), please come by the discord and let me know! discord.gg/stremf

4 July 2021 Patch Notes

New items and a shop:
  • Added a Poultry Protection Potion which gives your pet a heal over time and strong damage resistance shield for 5 rounds.
  • Added a Bird Rename Card for renaming your birds, in case the one you named Fartwing turns out to be an absolute unit and that name no longer works.
  • Hatch will now accept Unhatched Bird Eggs as currency. You can trade in 5 of them for a Passionate Poultry Poultice, Power Pruning Poultice, Poultry Protection Potion, or a Bird Rename Card.
Gameplay tweaks

When your hero dies, all eggs are returned to the Academy *except* Unhatched Battle Poultry. Those blanks are lost. However, eggs that are generated from breeding are not lost, even if they haven't been hatched yet.

Bug fixes
  • Teleporting with your pets would sometimes crash.
  • Fixed mouse support for dialogs with more than 5 lines.

2 July 2021 Patch Notes Part 2

Pet Powers

There's a limit of 4 powers that a bird can learn. This was intended from the get go, and I slipped up. Those 4 do not count the autopowers pets get for being particularly tough or swift, those are free. But otherwise, 4 is the cap. If you *currently* have a bird with more than 4 powers, consider yourself lucky! But birds will no longer learn powers once they have 4, you'll to seal some away if you don't like what you have.

Bug fixes / Features
  • Gotta be at least level 5 to see eggs and such, oops.
  • Breeding when you owned exactly two eggs was broken, that's fixed now.
  • Someone out there is getting a crash with dialog boxes, that's fixed.
  • There's a crash with unequipping an egg that I think I fixed, probably.
  • The Toss Fire Bomb power from the Gutter Chemist was pulled, it's not great on bird AI.
  • All snake steaks give Swift now instead of whatever else they gave.
  • You can no longer add Cosmic to your bird eggs. Instead, a Radiant Starshard will add two points to your pet's Pluck value, increasing max health by 2%
  • Added Experimental Zoom View. If you're playing at 4k and need things to be bigger -- but a little messy -- turn this on.

2 July 2021 Patch

  • Poultry Protection bug fixed, correct status effect now applied.
  • If a Mysterious Egg dropped for you, but you didn't turn it in -- or it broke or vanished or rolled off to some other game whatever -- another one will drop for you when you kill a boss or champion.
  • Eggs are no longer considered when melting down stuff at the blacksmith or auto-selling piles of loot.
  • If you press escape when the Feed Bird dialog is open you are no longer damned to crash.
  • The inventory remembers what tab was open when you last had it open. That only took seven years.
  • Using your Battlebird Whistle to summon a pet will display the pet's name in the log.
  • Fix for occasional crash when trying to seal away a bird's power.
  • Fix for Shield Rush crash, sorry about that one!

1 July 2021 Patch

  • Breeding works again, sorry about that.
  • You can no longer target your pet with ranged attacks.
  • When you go through a portal, your bird joins you.
  • Stick and Move once again Sticks as well as Moves.
  • Fix for rare soft lock when a bird is directly on top of a monster and uses a Bolt of Foom.