A major update of Beta-2 (Cut version)

We should have continued our development of The Golden Rogue long time ago, but inspiration brings us to update the original D’LIRIUM game again and again. Beta-2 was in public testing for a brief time, and it still is. Today we finally provide a changelog of latest version. There are a lot of things to see.

A brief list of changes:

• Arcade mode
  
• Total statistics
  
• Custom maps
  
• Steam Workshop support
  
• Custom characters
  
• 2 new runes: "Protection" and "Vision"
  
• 2 new melee weapons: knife and needles
  
• Weapon modifiers
  
• Fixed object shaking when using dynamic camera
  
• Using "restart" command is now considered cheating
  
• Fireball can now be destroyed mid-air by using
  
• Player now splatters blood when hurt physically
  
• Improved quality of some of the sounds
  
• New visual and sound effects when player gets consumed by Darkness
  
• Added uncomfortable screen flickering to Personal Hell
  
• You can choose classical HUD visualization of player's physical condition
  
• Save game previews now display rune effects and player health condition
  

Now let's go through the details: there is a lot to mention.

Arcade mode is the biggest change, and also serves as the basis for most of the other new features. There isn't much of a properly understandable story in game at the moment, so arcade mode allows players to derive fun from the gameplay itself. So we decided to focus on replayability and develop it as much as possible to make the game more interesting. The primary goal of arcade mode is to open a much wider spectre of possibilities of replaying it after you’ve already finished the original story-mode run. There isn't any story in the "default run" mode, so you can play it right outright. It maybe useful for players who would want to get various achievements, without having to sit through all story-mode cutscenes, but still receiving a total of 100% of gameplay!

Total statistics menu is displayed under the arcade mode section, where you can now see how many items you’ve collected, how many monsters you’ve burned with fireballs, torn into pieces or telefragged, how many souls you’ve saved or slain, and how many times you’ve died. The menu displays as much information as possible both from arcade and story modes. There may be highscores scoreboards in the future.

Custom maps provide the ability for players to not only play the standard default levels, but also new levels that were created by other players. Now anyone could create something unique — you could even recreate your own neighbourhood! All you have to do is get a free map-creator tool called "Tiled", and then let your friends play what you yourself have created! Not only that, but there game now supports Steam Workshop, which means that you could publish your own maps and subscribe to other playermaps right there. Later we will provide a detailed guide on creating and publishing your maps in Steam Workshop.

Another feature of arcade mode is the custom player characters. In arcade mode you don't play as Ada: you create your own character! The character creator is far from perfect, and there are not many mane or tail styles to choose from, but you can get creative and play as who you would like to be in the D'LIRIUM universe!

Runes: before Beta-2 release there were only two runes—Quad and Mega. Quad would provide a quad damage multiplier for 30 seconds, and Mega would fully restore player's health, sanity, and toxic poisoning conditions. Now there are two new runes: one that provides invincibility for 30 seconds, and another granting the ability to see in the dark (guess how long it lasts).

Knife and needles are modifiers for melee weaponry. We will talk about weapon modifiers later, and for now stick to discussing these two new weapons. The knife make very fast swings, but not much damage compared to the wrench (as you may have already seen), which swings slowly, but brings a lot of pain to the monsters. Needles are just pure magic, but deliver lots of damage and instant attacks! It is not simple, though: you have to land your hit first, and it is not so easy. As for how one actually hits the target, we won’t tell you.

The main combat changes are the new weapon modifiers. There are three modifiers for fireballs, plasma, and the teleportation spell, and the two new weapons prior mentioned above. Every modifier makes its spell stronger. The first modification is just a pure weapon without any upgrades as the player gets when they pick up the spell for the very first time. To upgrade the that spell player needs to find another identical spell. To switch between modifiers you will need to press the hotkey of desired spell or weapon. To switch between teleportation spell modifiers you would use either or depending on your control scheme.

However there is a bitter morsel among all these tasty bites of new features — memory leakage. Everytime you load or reload a level, the game would eat up more and more RAM. This problem was actually present in previous versions too, but now, in the arcade mode, it becomes even more obvious. After the game reaches its 2GB peak it will simply stop responding and crash. We are still not sure of how exactly this problem occurs, but we will fix it as soon as we find the solution. But don't be too afraid — it will only consume between 200kb and 3MB, and only either people who load different saves or levels too often or people who don't have much RAM would notice this. We are sorry for such a critical bug, but we will do our best to fix it.


So, as you can see, there are really a lot of new things! We hope that you will really enjoy this update. And if you really will — we will leave D'LIRIUM up for you to play while we, ourselves, would continue working on The Golden Rogue. After such a huge update, it looks like as tiny a mouse compared to an elephant, although it was quite the opposite before. Time to fix it!


We also would like to thank everyone who support us on Patreon. Your donations help us to work on two projects on the same time, although it's still not that easy. We appreciate it and your names will be displayed in credits. Thank you, everyone, for being with us!


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