Zofia News

A quick hotfix for a couple of obvious nagging issues:

- (Client) Fixed lucid damage/death sound
- (Client) Fixed Ghost damage/death sound
- Fixed lucid negative fall damage
- Fixed lucid item drops as they basically only dropped invalid items
- (Client) Fixed duplicated character editor music
- Gave username more space on invite list in editor

There will be another update here 'soon' to fix about a dozen other issues. This one is getting pushed out a little early as we found some critical bugs and needed to get them knocked out.

This update contains some bosses but most of them are still being worked on.

Patch Notes:

- Fixed a critical issue where the game could crash if you destroyed an enemy airship with fire magic
- Fixed a critical issue where clients would get stuck hearing 'underwater noises'
- Fixed an issue on enemy riflemen that stopped their head armor from rendering
- Fixed Anna's Shirt (She is no longer shirtless)
- Reworked some Item data which should eliminate invalid items
- Fixed and re-enabled difficulty options in map select
- Death zones now just do a ton of damage as opposed to a special death function
- UI can no longer show negative HP
- Fixed splitscreen location spawn after creating a character
- Right click -> Drag with mouse now works in character editor
- Fixed editor hair being one off from final selection
- Fixed some customizing options not saving if you're playing online as a client
- Character on main menu now has correct hair style
- You can no longer drop Luna
- Changed most enemy skeleton models (Still working on skeleton prop models)
- Fixed some airship control issues
- You can no longer dodge while talking
- Knights no longer sometimes have invisible guns
- Wards can no longer be double tapped to repeat their 'death' animation
- Ammo now goes to max capacity at start of level
- Fixed escape button while in map select
- Fixed navigation meshes for some level areas
- Fixed Morrison's feet clipping in Oceanside
- Fixed Luna's navigation being wrong in the prologue
- Fixed bottle shaders
- Quickslots are no longer off by 1 sometimes
- Quickslots show correct number if you replace a slot that previously had multiple consumables
- Quickslot 1 no longer sometimes fails to load the item you had saved after level transition
- Quickslot element icon should reset/change when swapping items now
- Clients joining intro cutscene have camera now (As opposed to black screen with text)
- Traveler's letter can be picked up by clients
- Wall jump for clients fixed
- Clients can now hear NPC dialogue correctly
- Ice projectiles no longer collide with each other
- Wood projectiles no longer collide with each other
- Metal magic effects now work on client
- Fixed airship music in the border map
- Chest opening sound now works on client
- Player gunshot sounds now correctly replicate
- Swap spell now correctly works for clients
- Magic works on rocky snow terrain properly now
- Shield knights drop armor debris correctly for clients now
- Slimes/Mini-Slimes now have HP bars
- Ward 'death' animation is now synced
- Rock golems now explode for clients as well
- Clients now properly aggro enemies via noise
- Clients can now see boss HP bars
- Enemies now hit otters much easier
- Many other small map adjustments and additions

Additions/Changes

- Enemy spawn difficulty scales much better now, enemies now have a chance to spawn as a higher tier rather than 'always' spawning as a higher tier.
- Added gamepad layout selection option to character editor
- Lowered rock magic brightness when you hit it
- Massively increased 'eavesdropping' distance for players
- You can now keymap Player 1 and Player 2's gamepads in splitscreen (Work in progress)
- Added tarby enemies
- Added 'wood man'
- Added regenerator enemies
- Added some bosses
- Added Lucid enemies
- Enemy fall damage significantly reduced (20x less)
- Changed enemies in Cliffside
- Vegetation magic now breaks if it inflicts enough damage or if you kick someone into it
- Added more dialogue and characters in certain levels
- Rifle shot sound distance cut by 50% as it could aggro entire levels
- Greatly reduced power attack of lunge sweep as it was calculated incorrectly (Legion Warblade, Pressed Sword)
- Greatly increased power attack of downward striking weapons, such as the Legion Axe

A quick hotfix!

- When loading an older save with no volume data set, your volume settings will default to '100' rather than '0'.
- Fireballs now have a trail/explosion sound.
- Fireballs now do less base damage on hit (5 -> 3), and less base damage while burning (5 dps -> 2.5 dps), but their scaling has been increased so it will do more damage at higher levels.
- Fixed some enemy rotations as they would spawn in facing the wrong direction.
- Fixed a minor level issue.

This update is actually a little early but I ran into a few critical bugs and had to push it out a little early. Also this seems to have happened last update too. ːsteamfacepalmː

Additions:
- Added PlayStation Gamepad support (Currently you should be able to switch gamepad types in the options menu)
- Added Quest log
- Added some quests
- Added dozens of sound effects
- Added a new level section right after the prologue
- Added additional art assets in some areas

Fixes/Changes
- Fixed an issue where sound volume wouldn't save at all
- Essence now shows how much money you lose on death, and will not show if the value is 0
- Made some minor level changes and adjustments
- Several text fixes
- Adjusted all spawn area triggers to be roughly ~10x the area (Enemies shouldn't spawn in so close now)
- Fixed some texture issues in several areas
- Blight areas now do 0.4 HP/s (up from 0.25 HP/s), stamina recovers at 40% normal speed (up from 0%)
- Ammo capacity upgrade now looks like a bag
- Grapplehook upgrade now looks like another grapplehook
- Added an elevator to the end of the Frozen Fort so you don't have to do a risky plunge to the mines
- Fixed a weird collision issue with air magic
- Fixed a damage scaling issue with air magic (Reduced base damage from 10 -> 3, but changed level scaling so it becomes 3x stronger as you level up)
- Frankie no longer steals all your schematics if you bring the schematics up
- Fixed some unoptimized foliage materials

Noted: If you load a save that was created before this patch, your volume may default to 0. Setting it to your desired setting will save it correctly now. All new saves are unaffected by this.
^ This has been hotfixed - Volume should default to 100 if you have no previous sound save data.

When we first put Zofia in Early Access, we anticipated a 2023 release date. We have (most of) the quests added and have been testing them internally, but as we have been playing through the whole game, we're finding a few things that aren't clicking, so we're pushing the 1.0 release to 2024.

Let's talk about some of them:

- Encounter Design

Early on, enemy placement was static. In some locations the enemy placement is still static, but we've included a lot of enemy spawners that can adjust to difficulty settings and the amount of players.

The default 'trigger' area for enemy spawns was ~10 meters, which isn't enough space to assess a situation before you're in the fight, and doesn't allow you to effectively sneak.



The new default is roughly ~40 meters, so you often won't see enemies spawn at all.

This is compounded by another issue. As Zofia's magic system requires a nearby element to leverage in combat, we're finding too many areas where options are too limited and so don't give you much to work with, so we're reworking some areas to include more element types.

Lastly, some of our enemy types are a little too limited and predictable, so we're looking into expanding the current set.

- Quest Designs

Currently we have ~11 quests that will be available. One of which is not very good and may just get removed entirely, and two that need some reworking.



We expected the quests to be challenging to make, but we're running into unusual difficulties having all the pieces connect together, having things change if a quest is completed and you revisit a map, and trying to make sure the quest is intuitive.

My concern early on was to leave quests until later as to not get wonky save data if the quest is changed or updated, and unfortunately in our testing, this is absolutely something we ran into.

- Some Quality of Life features and changes

There are several things that have been brought up previously that we're also trying to add, and one of the bigger ones was PlayStation gamepad support, which should be included in the next update.



There are some other smaller additions/changes but I'll talk more about them when I actually get them done and in an update.