Hello everyone!
After nearly 3 years of development this is it, the final major update! Its been quite the journey and I'd like to thank everyone who has followed the game throughout its long and sometimes chaotic development. I can't fully express how much all of your continued feedback, support and just general enthusiasm has meant to me all these years. So thank you!
I'll be hitting the final release button sometime in mid to late December at the start of the Steam Winter sales. Until then I'm going to be devoting my time to getting every last bug squashed and whatever final pieces of balance, polish or content I can fit in. I was planning adding achievements for this update but other things ended up taking more time than expected and I'd like a good month or so to just really focus on getting the game completely debugged before release.
I will be continuing with the occasional update post release, especially getting any bugs that slip through or are reported later. Likely some additional bits of content, balance and polish as well, whatever seems appropriate. After that though, I'm eager to move onto the next project. Maybe a bit of a break in between as well, its been awhile since I had one of those :P. Anyways onto the update!
GAME RECORDS:
This was the bulk of the update which ate up the most time. For some reason I find UI and menu stuff always takes a lot of fiddling and tweaking time despite the actual coding being pretty straight forward.
- A new character select menu that properly integrates race selection. The previous setup felt like it had races tacked on as a side thought, which, until recently, they sort of were.
- The option to play a seeded game which should generate identically each time. These games will not count towards game records.
- A new Game Records menu which, as above, fully integrates race selection and provides a few more options for viewing game stats.
- A new Records Table menu that allows for quick comparisons of best times, wins/losses etc. between races and classes.
CONTENT:
- New Clockwork-War-Train major boss for the Iron-Forge (finally). Was getting a bit tired of 1/3 of all games having the same boss and item drop.
- New Mind-Flayer mini boss for the Dark-Temple. The lack of a second mini boss here was causing the Crystal Archer to spawn in a high percentage of games.
- New vaults and levels in a number of zones.
- Trying out Flaming-Battle-Sphere as a replacement talent for Sticky-Flame which was pretty useless in the Fire-Mage kit. Feedback appreciated here, there are a few more suggestions and ideas that I've got to work with for this talent slot.
BALANCE:
After some discussion, testing, and watching Random595 clear most of the game with just E and Fire Balling the nearest enemies, Fire Ball has had its damage and range reduced. I think this talent is an interesting balance case study in that it wasn't really overpowered so much that its just so generally usable. It makes the rest of the Fire-Mages kit unnecessary since Fire-Ball seems to just work in all situations.
- Deceptively long range since the corners of the AoE reach beyond the range.
- Almost always hits 2 enemies, often 3 no matter how they are arranged.
- Can hit enemies through doors or around corners with the Aoe.
- Can hit a bunch of enemies adjacent to the player (most other spells cannot do this).
Playing with the reduced range and damage it still felt very useful but I definitely felt the need to use the other parts of the kit. Feedback here is also appreciated.
In other balance news, Dragon Scale Armor and Shields have had their resistance raised (best in game now). Given their rarity, late game spawning and high encumbrance these items didn't really feel like the 'super' equipment they are meant to be.
Also added a 'Blood Lust' intrinsic to the Vampire race which temporarily raises melee, range and magic power after consuming blood similar to the old berserk talent. Vampires will also use the character level for talent requirements mechanic similar to mummy.
MISC:
- Replay option will not show up on death menu when playing the Daily Challenge.
- Arcane-Arrows and Poison-Arrows (the slow moving projectiles), can now be shot through (like perfect aim).
- Enemy Smite and Fire-Storm will no longer be saved when leaving and reentering a level.
- The merchants inventory now applies some basic sorting, grouping item types together.
- Cold spells now harden lava into obsidian.
- Freeze can now be applied to an empty tile to create a temporary impassable barrier.
- Enemies will never summon more than 2 tornados on a level at the same time. More than 2 tornados always just got unreasonably messy imo.
- Poison staff now deals a full damage hit on the first shot and then ticks poison for a few turns after. Adjusted damage so that its approximately the same as before but just allows you to actually continuing dealing damage to a poisoned target.
BUGS AND CRASHES:
- Fixed a bug with ogre explore which would not explore or popup the 'partially explored' message when an unexplored tile was blocked by a diagonal trap.
- Fixed: when charmed and clicking to run away you would get a spam of 'cannot run' messages, one for each tile you had tried to move.
- Webs and vines will no longer be created on pools of blood.
- Traps will no longer spawn in 1x1 intersections and blocking the entrances to 1 wide tunnels.
- Flying enemies will now take damage from shock reeds when they collide with them (but not from the spreading shock on the water).
- Fixed some odd Burst-of-Flame AoE when used on torches near corners.
- Enemies in the sewers will no longer spawn near poison gas vents, take damage and agro the player from across the map.
- Fixed: A dominated enemy, if out of LoS for too long would 'lose agro' and become invisible on the screen until he reentered the players LoS.
That's it for now. Expect a lot of little hot fixes and small updates in the next few weeks as I try to wrestle this thing into some semblance of 'stable'. Also any final feedback or suggestions especially with anything introduced recently is much appreciated.
HOT FIXES:
Hot-Fix 1.41.1
- Freezing cloud (any cloud apparently) was overwriting ice blocks.
- All races were getting Blood-Lust when standing in big pools of blood.
- Added 'Cannot Shot' ability names to Cannon-Turrets and Cannon-Train-Module instead of just the generic 'projectile attack'.
- Fixed crash when starting game that resulted in DungeonGenerator.getLevelFeatures() TheSewers:5 error message. This ones been around for awhile and happened specifically when TheSewers:4 was displaying in the randomly scrolling menu background when hitting start game.
- Fixed: Dash attacking over slimes would sometimes cause the slime to split into the same tile you landed on. The next turn the game would crash when it detected both characters sharing a tile.
- Fixed fountains in one of the Dark-Temple levels that should have triggered spawning enemies (like the chests).
- Added a vault containing the corpse of Taldorak the Bloodthirsty a character/story from Expander way back during Alpha testing.
Hot-Fix 1.41.2
- Freezing or netting an enemy on a conveyor belt will now work. The enemy will not move himself and will not attack but will be pushed along the conveyor belt.
- If any member of the Clockwork-Train boss is frozen the entire train will not move.
- Normal freeze spell will now work on the Clockwork-Train boss.
- Pit traps will now never drop the player onto a floor trigger.
- Seeding was seriously broken in that the actual list of zones was not guaranteed. The levels in the zones would be the same, assuming the same zones were chosen. This is all fixed now.
- Shops should now have consistent items across seeds. The exception is an item may have a higher mod if the player already has that item.
- Boss drops should now be consistent across seeds.
- Fixed pretty tricky bug that created an impassable tile on the stairs after going up/down them. If the player had an allied Homing-Fire-Orb summoned by an allied Fire-Elemental and went up the stairs, the orb would immediately poof but was missing a return statement in the AI so it would poof and the dead orb would then follow the player. Assuming the player stepped off the stairs this left a dead 'ghost' monster on the stairs.
Hot-Fix 1.41.3If anyone can catch a screenshot or just a detailed description of the case in which Yendor does not generate his portal on death it would be much appreciated. I've been devoting hours to this every few days for the past month and still can't get it to occur. It has been reported multiple times though, including just recently so really want to get this fixed.
- Attacking a hidden enemy (you see him in an adjacent tile) now cause his hidden friends to also agro, the same as if he had spot agroed you himself.
- Groups of eels or pirahnas will now eventually unagro you when you are out of line of sight. They were shouting to each other and reagroing constantly.
- Fixed a crash (freeze without any error) when a levitating character descends a pit at the same time as a tornado goes off.
- Fixed an odd door that would occasionally generate in an Iron Forge entrance vault cutting through a bit of wall outcrop.
- Fixed a messed up drop wall in Yendor Crypt level (part of the wall didn't explode properly).
- Fixed another odd angle at which projectiles would pass through walls.
- Cool-Down-Modifer was applied twice resulting in much lower cool-downs than indicated by the stat.
- Fixed a crash when two nearby hell portals tried to summon Imps in the same tiles
- Runic Staff of Death will now score critical hits against unaware enemies.
- Game will no longer freeze when the player character has more than 1000HP. Discovered by players by spawning in the Mystic-Skull-Helm and 100+ potions.
- The Runic Staff Of Death will no longer trigger its heal effect when attacking fire pots.
- Tab (auto melee attack) will now work when standing in smoke, steam or dust which blocks your vision but you can still 'see' the agroed enemy.
- Splitting slimes will maintain domination status. Internally the Scroll-of-Domination effect is used so enchanters don't lose all their mana. This might actually be broken OP in which case I'll just flag slimes as immune to dominate.
- Cool-Down-Modifier is now capped at 75% like many other stats.
- Cool-Down-Modifier now shows in the stat panel.
- Roots (from the ent boss) are now immune to vines in case they spawn in his vault.
Hot-Fix 1.41.4
- Fixed another crash with hell portals when they summoned imps out of LoS.
- Teleport scrolls will no longer drop the player in a dangerous cloud.
- Clicking an empty slot in the wield menu will no longer generate error text (wasn't crashing).
- Minotaur will now perform a normal melee attack when he is immobilized (ex. by a bear trap). Previously he would not attack at all since trample only worked when he was able to move.
- Side rooms (for example the reward vaults), will no longer generate with their doors over pits.
Hot-Fix 1.41.5Added first set of achievements, mostly from suggestions on Discord. Will be doing some more debugging for the next few days, but hoping to still add some more before launch.
Hot-Fix 1.41.6
- Fixed: "Infinite Energy" achievement was not working (spelled wrong in code).
- Game will maintain a local list of achievements so it doesn't keep trying to post to the steam servers (this may have caused some performance issues).
- Slimes (and non-regening monsters) will no longer be healed by Group-Heal spells. They were already invalid for single target heals, this was just an oversight. Will be testing to see if dominated slimes are still OP.
- Fixed: Dominated slimes splitting into a fire shroom would then split again into a non-dominated slime..
Hot-Fix 1.41.7
- Was never able to replicate the bug where Yendor does not spawn his portal upon death so I've simply rewritten the system so that the portals always spawn in a set, central location upon his death. Hopefully this fixes it, let me know if it still breaks! If he's still occasionally not spawning his portals that will tell me the problem is somewhere higher up the chain i.e. somehow his special death functionality is never even called.
- Fixed: charging a fire pot was resulting in a 'dangerous target' message and not ending the charge.
- Block Chance now caps out at 75% like pretty much all other defensive stats.
- In the (quite rare) cases where more challenge vaults generate than intended treasure on the level, the remaining 'spot' will now be filled in with a standard item chest. This should only add maybe 2-3 items per game at most so shouldn't effect balance but it will fill up those spots that really look like they should have some reward.
Hot-Fix 1.41.8
- Fixed: when you had the Shield-Block talent but no shield equipped, hovering over any talent was incorrectly showing UI increases to Shield-Block stat.
- Fixed: when you had the Reflection stat and hovered over any talent, the UI was incorrectly showing +0% Cool-Down-Mod.
- Fixed: Dash attack was hitting and dealing damage to the player on the last tile. Was possible to kill yourself with dash attack.
- Fixed: Dash attack with spear was multi-hitting enemies (will just single hit everyone you pass through).
- Fixed: Achievements were not working (all of them, not just Dragons-Hoard). I messed up some code in one of the previous hot-fixes. Should all be working now.
- Thanks to some discussions on Discord, found at least one case in which Yendor could fail to spawn his portal and added a safety check to fix it. Thanks joojamoi, KawaiiKiwi and Rethlit! Please let me know if this continues to occur in some even more obscure case.
- Current seed now displays in the game menu.
