Order Of The Gatekeepers News

Hoo boy it's been a while hasn't it. With all the craziness of this year only now am I finishing up the work I started so many months ago.

I want to say thank you to everyone who gave me input over this past year on how to improve on the game, it has been incredible to see the different strategies people came up with and all the different ways someone has used their creativity to completely blow the game wide open.

Patch Notes:

• Added mazing gameplay!
• Added Reroute, Piecewise, & Lanelock levels with mazing enabled!
• On levels with mazing enabled enemies will use the shortest path they can find to reach the exit. Players can build Towers in these levels to block enemies and force them to take a longer route!
  
• Mazing levels contain a few pre-placed Towers to use as blockades. They can't attack or gain any experience but they do help you change the enemy's path by moving them around.
  
• Blockade Towers do not factor into any XP sharing equations. Having them near a Tower that is sharing XP will not reduce the amount given to other Towers.
  
• Players cannot cast Potions or the Scholar's Last Lecture on Blockade Towers to prevent annoying mis-clicks.
  
• The Whirlwind build cost from 100->225g.
  
• Added Fast Forward Toggle to options. Enabling this option will make fast forwarding toggle on and off with the hotkey instead of requiring it to be held down.
  
• Fixed warning spam in users' output logs caused by music tracks without dynamic mixing.

I hope you all enjoy this new gamemode and its levels! If you have any friends who are on the fence about trying the game out I have created a short four-level demo available on the Steam Store!

The new mazing gamemode is complete and getting tested, but in the meantime I have a bit of balance and a few bugs to fix.

Patch Notes:

• Added a failsafe to the Tower targeting loop to prevent it from breaking in certain circumstances.
  
• Tunneler: Mole Beartraps now expire after 120s or if a player builds or moves a Tower on top of them.
  
• Tunneler: Mole Patrol can now be cast on any part of the level that is not currently blocked by a Tower.
  
• Hybrid Artillery: Mines now explode after 180s if no enemy touches them or if a player builds or moves a Tower on top of them.
  
• Hybrid Artillery: Mine placement logic changed to allow mines on buildable spaces that are not currently blocked by a Tower.
  
• Fire Elemental: Chain effect now respects level geometry better.
  
• The Whirlwind: Drop ability now deals 150 + 25/Lvl damage along with its stun.
  
• Enemy APC Explosion radius on death increased from 250->300.
  
• Black Hole: Insatiable Mass base mana cost increased from 7.5->8.
  
• Fireball: Build price increased from 85->125g.
  
• Potions & Scholar's Last Lecture items can no longer be applied to Support Structures to prevent mis-clicks.

If you have any issues or suggestions you can stop by the game's Discord or the Steam forums, I'm always open to everyone's feedback.

While I work on the mazing gameplay I was made aware of a few bugs so I've decided to release a patch in the meantime.

Patch Notes:

• Fixed all Towers failing to level if a player sells a Tower in the same frame it received XP.
  
• Presents now drop beyond wave 50 in Endless Mode (for real this time).
  
• Capacitor Aura will no longer consider abilities that cost negative mana to cast.
  
• Max Player Limit in multiplayer increased to 6. With the recent performance improvements this should be manageable for a midrange gaming PC to handle.
  
• Endless Mode delay between waves no longer the same as normal mode. The delay between waves will now reduce to 0s by wave 100. Speed waves will reach a wave delay of 0 at wave 150.
  
• Optimized Snowman bone hierarchy to improve performance when many are built.
  
• Reality Shard mana cost can now be reduced by its Tower's mana cost reduction percentage.

To keep everyone in the loop I thought I'd make a post here to let you all know what's currently in the works.

Right now I'm working on levels where players are able to build on the enemy paths allowing them to influence where enemies must go to escape. You can block off entire routes forcing the robots to go a very long way around the map depending on what your strategy is. I like how it opens up another portion of build strategy as well as providing great replayability as different configurations will lead to different enemy pathing.

At the moment I've gotten the mazing gameplay working for both singleplayer and multiplayer modes however I need to iron out a few major bugs with it that arise from enemies like the APC bot spawns and Toolbot resurrection. I'm also going to be adding a Tower to this mode that only blocks a space, providing no attacks or abilities. Whether this Tower costs gold or is simply buildable on a cooldown will depend on how playtesting goes. From my testing so far this is a necessity as otherwise it's simply too expensive for players to influence the pathing early on into a match due to the sheer cost of building 3+ extra Towers that may not even be within range of an enemy for the final path.

Mazing gameplay will be enabled solely for levels designed around it, users will be able to set their custom level to use maze pathfinding instead of the usual preset path in their map settings.

Another thing I'm working on is an additional faction with five new Towers. So far I've completely finished one of the Towers and I'm quite excited to get working on the rest. These new Towers will most likely be released after the mazing update as that is my current focus.

I post more incremental updates on my Twitter as well as the game's Discord channel as well in case you'd like to see more.

I'm excited to keep working on the game and I'm happy to see so many people have been enjoying it. Every time my Steam analytics tells me someone else got one of the absurdly tedious achievements it makes my day.

Did a couple multiplayer tests and a lot of internal testing to make sure I didn't break any important systems. Everything seems good so I'm merging the new changes to the main build!

Patch Notes:

• Added Stockpile Specialty, Towers built with this Specialty gain an additional Item Slot!
  
• Stockpile Specialty gained from completing Singleplayer level 6, all other specialties require one less level to unlock. For anyone who has already completed level 6 they will unlock this Specialty automatically upon starting the game.
  
• Presents can now spawn beyond wave 50 for endless mode.
  
• Fixed Steam Rich Presence reporting the wrong difficulty for the host player in their friends list.
  
• Stun Immune & Slow Immune waves added to Serious Difficulty.
  
• Removed 'None' Specialty option.
  
• Fixed "STRING MISSING!" showing on the bottom of the Ash of the Scholar tooltip.

New Towers are the next big thing, just a bit time consuming. I'll have some teasers hopefully soon!