Update 1.37

Hello everyone! Update 1.37 is finally here after a long development cycle but I'm very pleased with this one. The main thrust of this update is a complete rework of the Branch-II zones (Forge, Arcane, Crypt) and the addition of new end zone bosses. Along the way I added an absurd number of new vaults and special levels throughout the game and generally fine tuned the balance in many places.

After this, I'm planning a final major update for The-Vault-Of-Yendor which is looking pretty lame now in comparison to all the levels that come before it and then its just a number of final clean-up updates before I'm calling the project complete.

Zone Expansion:
Due to the new boss levels generally consisting of a single large room, I've expanded the length of the two branch zones (Sewer/Core/Ice and Arcane/Forge/Arcane) to 5 levels. So there are now 4 standard levels and the special boss level at the end. These special boss levels now have unique level names reflecting the boss so for example The Crypt levels now display as "Crypt:1/4" - "Crypt:4/4" followed by "The Tomb of the Lich King".

Zone Partition:
The zones in the later half of the dungeon (the two branch zones + Orc/Temple) have had their difficulty and spawn tables more distinctly partitioned. There is now a more pronounced jump in difficulty at the halfway point and of course the boss level is another noticeable jump. I tend to prefer these kinds of discrete 'breaks' in content which as opposed to just smooth gradients. During my testing I found that this encourages a much less linear path through the dungeon where, depending on my build, I may do the first half of a zone then return later when I feel better prepared for the second half. For reference the following levels are roughly equivalent in difficulty:

Orc:1-3 and Ice:1-2
Orc:4-6 and Ice:3-4 and Crypt:1-2
Crypt:3-4 and Yendor:1-2
Yendor:3-4

Branch-II Zone Rework:
This is the bulk of the update with complete reworks on the generation and content for The-Iron-Forge, The-Arcane-Tower, and The-Crypt. Pretty much rewrote all the generators from the ground up and added a ton of new vaults, layouts and levels. Also added new end zone bosses to these 3 zones which I'll leave as an exercise for the player to discover. Some specifics:

• Reworked all the tiles in The-Iron-Forge as the old ones were pretty crusty.
  
• Added conveyor belts to The-Iron-Forge that push the player and monsters along.
  
• Special armor sets with attributes have been moved to Branch-II so Wizardry, Shadow-Silk, and Heavy-Brass Armor now drop in Arcane, Crypt and Iron-Forge respectively.
  

Vaults in Other Zones:
During the Branch-II rework I significantly improved the system I use for creating, storing and tagging vaults and so I ended up adding a quite frankly ridiculous number of new vaults, layouts and special levels throughout the rest of the dungeon. I'll be continuing to do this for the remainder of development as ideas and inspiration strike. Just for reference we're now approaching nearly 2000 unique vaults.

Monster Power vs Num Monsters
With the introduction of so many vaults to the game it was becoming common for single large vaults to contain most of the monsters in a level leaving the rest of the rooms empty. Furthermore, I find that large fights with lots of different monsters tend to be more interesting, particularly in the late game. So to this end I've reduced the hit points and damage of enemies a bit and increased the number that spawn, specifically in the later half of the game. Note that these changes are more of a nudge then a drastic change, I think most of the values only changed by about 20% but I feel like it makes the later half of the game play a lot better.

Monster Hit Point Rounding
Monster hit points greater than 20 are now rounded to the nearest 5. This doesn't really make much of a difference balance wise, I just prefer the 'cleanness' of not having enemies with 39 or 41 HP.

General Boss Changes:

• Boss hit points have been quite drastically increased. I want to really push these guys to be as big of a spike in difficulty as possible.
  
• Bosses now give a lot more experience when killed (always satisfying to get a level up from killing a boss).
  

Specific Monster Changes:

• Imps now use a special Surround-Blink ability rather than randomly blinking when hit. They will now attempt to 'surround' the player by blinking to the adjacent 'quadrant' with the least enemies.
  
• Dark Elf Summoners and Summoning Statues now have a basic magic projectile attack.
  
• Summoned Battle Spheres can now be attacked and destroyed (getting blocked into a hall or corner was pretty lame).
  
• NPC Discord ability now deals more damage (it barely dealt any before)
  
• All healers now heal twice as fast for half as much. Similar changes to cooldowns were applied in a bunch of other places. I was using 10CD as a default but after some testing I noticed that 10 turns is actually a long time and so unless an ability is intended to be a once a fight thing, its better to have shorter cooldowns and just reduce the power accordingly.
  
• Poison damage on Crypt-Crawlers has been increased to make them more specifically dangerous.
  
• Skeleton archers now fire slow moving arcane arrows. I'm always looking for ways to add these sorts of dodgable, multi-turn attacks, which tend to be more interesting then 'always hit' damage projectiles.
  
• Necromancers now summon exploding skull bombs rather than poison gas to differentiate them from Pestilence-Priests.
  
• Wraiths now blink to surround the player and have a life tapping melee attack.
  
• NEW MONSTER: Clockwork Knight that raises and lowers a reflective shield
  
• NEW MONSTER: Clockwork Turret
  
• NEW MONSTER: Clockwork Pyro Turret
  
• Iron Forge monsters are now immune to lava and resistant to fire (there's a lot more fire and lava in these levels as I try to make the 'Forge' label more appropriate.
  
• NEW MONSTER: Storm Vortex - just to fill out the fire/ice/storm elemental set.
  
• All statues now summon vortices and have a very long range projectile attack to distinguish them from standard casters.
  
• Reworked the monster sprites in The-Iron-Forge
  
• Reworked the monster sprites in The-Arcane-Tower
  
• Storm Elementals now summon tornados that suck the player in and deal damage.
  
• Reduced the duration of Confusion when cast on the player as this could often be an immediate death sentence.
  

Attribute and Talent Gain:
The old system was a bit messy and difficult to predict. I cant even remember on which levels the player got attribute and talent points. So to simplify things and make it easier to plan your build the player now consistently gets an attribute point every level and a talent point on every odd level. To compensate for the greater control over attribute points, talent requirements have been slightly increased.

I've decided to remove random attribute gain from leveling up as I believe the player should not be 'forced' to take some random attribute as part of the basic character progression system. Fountains and potions of attribute gain will continue to give semi-random attribute points.

Tome of Knowledge

• Tomes of Knowledge now immediately train the selected talent rather then just making it available. I didn't like how there was a deferred choice here where you'd first have to choose which talent you wanted and then later choose to spend a point on it. Now the choice is combined, you just pick the talent and you get the talent. For the case in which you want to wait before making your choice (I often do this with the elemental resistance talents and wait to see what zones appear), you can always return later.
  
• Tomes of Knowledge now have the option to simply take +1 Talent Point so the player always has some default option, and pure, non-multi-class builds are possible.
  
• Reworked the graphic for the Tomes to make these important milestones a bit more visually distinct.
  

Non-Magic Ability Cooldowns:
The second rank of most non-magic abilities now reduces the cooldown in half rather than increasing the power. Though on paper this doesn't effect the balance (say half damage, twice the speed), what it does is provide more options and control for higher level characters. I was finding it frustrating to use my 2-3 abilities and then have everything on cooldown and be left with no better options then just spamming attacks. This is related to a point above regarding monster cooldown. Most battles are over quite quickly and so shorter cooldowns should be preferred.

Levitation
Changes the way that levitation works when hovering over pits. Previously you could float there indefinitely and melee enemies would never be able to attack you. So now when floating over a pit, a 10 turn timer will be added to your status effects after which you will fall down the pit. Not really a massive change but simply removes an obvious exploit.

Talents and Abilities:

• Replaced the enchanters ability to siphon mana with 'Enchant Item' which immediately summons 2 enchantment scrolls. Siphon Mana was kind of wonky and was either rarely useful or could be used to completely cripple a boss so I wasn't happy with it. I like that the enchanter has the ability to actually enchant. Finally this is just a really nice talent in general and I've found myself taking it from Tomes-Of-Knowledge with lots of different builds.
  
• Reversed the requirement tiers of Poison-Cloud and Summon-Skeleton for the necromancer and adjusted their power accordingly. Summon-Skeleton is basically the signature ability of the necromancer and so I feel it should take a bit more work to get it online. Given the changes to attribute point gain, I can still typically get it by the mid point in the game.
  

Enchantment
Many stats will now increase by a greater amount when enchanting. This was mostly apparent with stuff like hit points where +10HP was only turning into +11HP/+12HP/+13HP when enchanted multiple times. Its now roughly a 20% increase so many items that were not worth enchanting now get pretty substantial upgrades.


A bunch of stuff I'm likely forgetting to list but the following has been fixed:

• Charge will no longer halt when going through clouds (its a sprint so should avoid the damage).
  
• Charging through a trap will no longer halt the charge though you will take damage.
  
• Fixed a level generation hard crash in The-Ice-Caves (a complete freeze when descending).
  
• Trying to attack a trap when out of range was causing a console error to continuously throw (though not crash).
  
• At XL:16 the players exp was showing NaN (not a number) percent. Now exp percent is just hidden.
  
• A soft crash (lockup) was occuring when using a wand of draining on a summoner and his summons. The summoner was killed, his summons would poof, then it tried to apply the AoE damage to his now non-existent summons.
  
• Infusion of Storms (and possibly other talents) had its text overflowing on Tome of Knowledge menu.
  

As always there's tons of little tweaks and additions that I've failed to list so give it a whirl and please let me know how it goes, what's working, what isn't working and any suggestions etc. As is always the case I'll be dedicating the next few weeks to reading through feedback and bug reports and trying to hammer this thing into a stable state with daily hot-fixes.

Thank you everyone for your continued support and a big thanks to those who have reviewed the game here on steam, it makes a big difference in terms of discovery in the Steam searches. Just one more to go to hit the big 300 :).

May-10-2021 Update-1.37.1

• Lowered the attribute requirement of the final ability rank to 24 so that most (but not all), race/class combinations can get it.
  
• Only the last instance of The Slime King should give experience when killed.
  
• Fixed a Fire-Mage vault in The-Upper-Dungeon that had a door on top of a wall.
  
• Summoned fire and shock glyphs should not fire on the first turn they are summoned.
  
• Fixed: was possible to see the blast radius of fire pots when mousing over them in unexplored space.
  

May-12-2021 Update-1.37.2

• Fixed a bug where confusion (cast by the player) was wearing off within a few turns when monsters went out of line of sight of the player.
  
• Dominating the Lich King will now unlock his glyph gate (all bosses are supposed to do this).
  
• Dominated Lich King will now raise allied skeletons.
  
• Obsidian Golems (and other monsters) are immune to lava but when dominated they would avoid it. This is now fixed and allies should now move through terrain that they are immune to.
  
• Fixed a special level in The Iron Forge that was missing a switch behind one of its gates.
  
• Fixed: dash attacking an enemy on oil or ice would cause him to be knocked back into the tile that the player would then land on resulting in a crash. Dash attack will simply no longer trigger these environmental knockbacks.
  

May-13-2021 Update-1.37.3

• Fixed: level generation bug that was spawning bosses early in The-Upper-Dungeon.
  
• Fixed: goto stairs would not cancel when given a manual move order.
  
• Fixed: crash in Vault-Of-Yendor resulting in the console log: Uncaught getCharWithID: id is not a number. Occured when a fire/storm glyph was summoned, the player left the level and then returned. The glyph was not storing its casters ID. There were several more crash reports in Yendor so maybe this is related.
  
• Fixed: level generation bug in The-Iron-Forge that would create a room w/ a conveyor belt leading into it and the conveyor belt was blocked by a wall.
  

May-17-2021 Update-1.37.4

• Fixed a vault in The-Iron-Forge that had adjacent conveyor belts pointing in different directions.
  
• Fixed evasion not working against non-physical projectiles. There was actually a ton of stuff this was applying to so evasion (which was already pretty powerful) just got a big boost. I'll be adjusting some of the values going forward to balance this. My thinking is that evasion should be weaker than armor or resistance but should be the most general of the defensive stats.
  
• Fixed a broken minotaur zoo in The-Orc-Fortress that had walls that were broken by hall generation.
  
• Fixed conveyor belts so that you can now sprint up and off them correctly (previously you couldn't take the final sprint step off the belt).
  

May-18-2021 Update-1.37.5

• Fixed a crash when starting the game when the scrolling menu background was on Crypt:5. I believe this occurred for a number of different zone and dungeon level combinations.
  
• Strafe attack will no longer trigger twice when moving on a conveyor belt. It should only trigger when the player moves.
  

May-24-2021 Update-1.37.6

• Fixed: Occasionally when equipping an item, the escape key would no longer work for closing the character menu.
  
• Fixed: Game would crash when a Cannon-Turret tried to throw a bomb through a flaming cloud which was atop a ground object like scrap metal. The bomb object would be created on top of the scrap metal causing the crash. The bombs will now just explode with their usual radius and damage when hitting a flaming cloud.
  
• Boots of Speed and Molten Forged Boots are now enchantable (not sure why they were flagged otherwise).
  
• Battle Spheres now show their full NPC stats on mouse over since they are now treated as normal monsters i.e. you can attack them.
  
• Fixed some incorrect floor tiles in the corners of narrow hallways.
  

May-28-2021 Update-1.37.7

• Fixed: Falling down a pit while auto traveling will continue to try to travel on the next level, sometimes resulting in a crash.
  
• Fixed: Teleport traps also had odd behavior when auto traveling (or quickly pressing explore after), resulting in the player 'sliding' across the level to the destination through walls.
  
• Potion of Gain Attribute was incorrectly showing attributes raised beyond their max (when wearing equipment that raises the attribute). You should still be able to choose this option in case you want to remove the equipment but the UI text now shows that it will not break the max cap.
  
• Fixed: bear traps could be thrown onto pits.