Trawel News

v0.8.b_4 has been released to beta.
Report issues and bugs in the steam forums. GitHub faux roadmap for the brave and foolhardy here.

Known Issues: Local currency rewards (the ingame system that replaced gold, not related to the regional pricing updates from a few weeks ago) from Nodes and Explore town Features are still not up to snuff, but they're getting closer, same with mass battles with an uneven number of fighters.

Going forward, the plan is to keep the main Steam branch at least the second latest version, and the Beta branch will be no more than one update ahead, if possible. This is more for upload management reasons than stability reasons, but none of the updates have been less stable than the ones preceding them, despite the shocking number of changes. I consider this more revealing of the inherently instability at this point in development than an accomplishment on my part, and am glad I choose to keep Trawel in early access.
Expected earliest release of v0.8 has been moved from September 9th to the 17th of that month, but it may still occur even later than that. The intention of v0.8 is to be stable and fully featured landmark to start off post 2022 Trawel with.

Actual Patch Notes:
Changes from the last beta, in a VERY rough order:

• As always, many small bug fixes that weren't noticeable unless you looked very hard, or were to lesser used mechanics.
  
• Added 'pouch/bag', which lets you store up to 3 different pieces of backup equipment. Currently there are some issues with clearing up space if the thing you want is of a different type than what you have stored, but it works fine if you don't treat it as a full inventory and just an alternatives system. This may receive full inventory status later, but the goal right now is mostly so you can store more than one weapon. This also comes with the option to examine what you're comparing more closely, and swap what you're comparing with if you had alternatives in your pouch (which immediately equips the new item you're comparing with).
  
• 'You' menu categorized into different submenus, and is now accessible from Nodes, which you can save within. Saving in a Node will save your location in that node. Many of the options are new or reworked features:
  
  1. Settings menu includes display updates from last updates, and also three 'auto' options: AutoLevel, AutoLoot, and AutoBattle. These allow the player to opt out of those mechanics. AutoBattle does not resolve fights instantly, and instead shows the player what options the AI would pick before it does them. The player currently cannot stop the AI mid battle, and it doesn't instantly complete the battle to discourage fightspam.
     
  2. Character skill menu, which now has a list of all the player's current final skills on demand if they want to see the collation of their sources, instead of just telling you that that isn't implemented yet.
     
  3. Inventory with pouch, drawbanes, and a Map feature that lets the player learn the path to any town they've been in before, as well as look up lore and other information on each town they've been to.
     
  4. Society menu which holds Quests, Faction Reputation, and the revamped title system that has upgradable titles. This makes the Arena Champion titles much easier to parse.
     
  5. Saving, which works in Nodes now.
     
  6. A stats overview, mostly put in here so it's harder to press the next option instead of saving.
     
  7. Quitting to the Main Menu.
     
  8. A Glossary of game terms and mechanics. Includes explanations of mechanics and in-game-generated lists of Skills. Archetypes, Feats, Perks, Wounds, Effects, DrawBanes, Seeds, and Weapon Qualities. The scrollable menus implemented in the previous updates are put to good use in some of these. If in a debug testing save, this menu is replaced by a cheats menu. Includes the old Infodump tutorial as well.
     
  9. exit, as part of the '9 is back' reworks, many menus were made to have 9 be 'previous menu' or cancel.
• Wound/Tactics: Added a 'tactics' mechanic which is closely related to some combat actions which now have secondary non-damage affects tied to them. Previously in Trawel, attacks could only express different mechanics through attached wounds. Wounds were overhauled to better display and handle their random chance to not roll (1/10th chance per attack, unless it uses a Keen weapon; the elementalist skills now do not reroll normal grazes), and some slight behavioral updates, especially to bleeding, which keeps getting reworked in the background every update as goals for it change. More impactfully, the wound internal management changed what wounds will roll on which body parts, and a few were cleaned up.
  'Condition Wounds' are now branded as 'Injuries', and apply negative debuffs until the end of the battle, cementing their goal of acting as 'soft hp gates'. Normally HP systems have intense dissonance when a person goes from fully functional at 1HP to completely inactive at 0HP, Injuries help move the combat along by increasing the negative effects they take, and, somewhat uniquely to Trawel, avoid decreasing damage output of the inflicted when thematically possible to prevent combats dragging on forever if both participants have all their bones broken.
  'Tactics' follow the same 'on attack' paradigm of wounds, but cover personal buffs or debuffs. Currently, there is a Dodge Roll, a Single Out, and a 'Challenge to attack me' tactic. Tactics are provided by some Skill Sources, but can also be called as part of a normal skill source attack. For example, Daredevils don't know any tactics and can only use them from their skill attacks, but Armor Masters can single out as a 'tactic action' from their battle menu, which doesn't deal damage, but applies the tactic effect without needing to roll an attack option with the tactic.
  
• 'Yore' boss added to the Dungeon of Fame. Yore's dungeon fight is a mass battle using the newly-detached-from-forts combat conditions, and you must delve his dungeon to disable them if you don't want to fight him at a severe disadvantage. This is meant to be a contrast to the Tower of Fate, which requires you to reach the top to do battle, because Yore's fight room is the first room in the dungeon.
  
• Cloth separated into Patchwork, Linen, and Cotton. All three, plus silk, have received minor stat changes.
  
• Terminal and Graphical have (for now) slightly different display options improvements.
  
  1. Graphical got several options to display time passing 'in real time'. In combat, this was already happening a fixed amount after every attack, but an alternative option to tie this the mechanical 'time delay' of actions was re-added (it was in but disabled and with bad numbers prior), instead of a pause after every action. Out of combat, a new option was added and enabled as the default: to show the world state time passing in features/towns. Theoretically this might display weird since the time could pass before or after an option is chosen, but in practice most of Trawel was configured to add time in an appropriate place, and the game just needed to get told to compute it more often. For example: when waiting for a fight in an arena, the game will now attempt to show 6 hours of waiting in 1 second instead of catching up instantly. Towns were changed to use the forest background, and this makes it much more clear when time is passing, and how much.
     WARNING: In most cases, 6 hours per second is quick enough that you won't be waiting long, but some Arenas only fight once per month, so you'll be sitting there waiting. Considering your character has to wait the time in more seconds conceptually, perhaps this will give you a better sense of scale- having to wait 2 minutes feels like a lot, but for them, that 2 minutes was 43200 minutes.
     
  2. Terminal got 'back out', which will likely reach legacy graphical in a later update. This attempts to leave up to 10 menus/cancel 10 options, and uses modern handling of Trawel menus to know when to stop. In most cases, the 10 is just a safety thing, since not all cancellations progress the game state, but many menus do not accept a 'back out' input in that case. You trigger this by entering '10', and '0' will back out once if you wish to do it step by step, as a safer alternative to spamming '9', which is sometimes a real choice.

That's the major list this week/sprint, dragon out o7

This update applied to both the default (stable?) branch and the beta branch, since stable was more balanced but less bug-free, so I decided that it would be more 'stable' to be updated.

Known Problems: Balance of mass fights is out of whack due to overarching changes to combatant level power scaling. Node Town Features and other Combat Town Features need yet another quality pass, especially now that the new currency system has smaller values for money.

This build used a different upload method than prior windows builds.

If you haven't been keeping up with the beta updates, the last few patch notes have some major changes- but don't worry if you don't have time to read them, the goal of the last month or two has been to get the game in gear for a full, major, version .8 update, which should have a more coherent list of changes, after all the changes finish happening enough to comment on them.

From the last beta, in no particular order:

• The tutorial has been migrated from the 'tutorial text' after each feature to a small blurb when you enter a feature type for the first time. This only applies in QuickStart and if you choose to not disable the tutorial in SlowStart. Old tutorial is mostly used to indicate the type of a place, which may be helpful if a shop calls itself "'A Cut Above'" instead of "Weapons Store".
  
• Saveable display options! You'll see a bit more about these below. The coolest stuff doesn't work in the graphical yet (and likely won't until the engine swap), but if you're playing text-only mode, these will be very interesting. Even the non-interesting ones add a bit of configuration to how the game presents itself, which can be nice.
  
• Level scaling has changed to be on 'effective level'. You can imagine that level 0 is now level 10, and levels are 10x less impactful stat wise, for most purposes. This mostly means a level 2 person is only 1.2x the baseline instead of 2x from level 1. (Note that, in this explanation, level 1 is 1.1x the baseline.)
  
• Some 'non-personable' semi-personable creatures can now shout insults at you and collect money. Only fully 'personable' creatures can loot equipment, and ALL creatures, including wolves, bears, and other beasts can loot aether- but this new class of creature can collect coins/notes.
  
• The Highest Contribution battlescore (which was never viewable without a closer look) has been updated to be the deviation from the expected instead of a number is independent of what the expected average should be. Basically, it now tells you that 'hey, this weapon has one attack is twice as important as if they were all equal' instead of 'there is an attack that contributes 66% of damage'- the latter of which is a lot less concerning if the weapon has 2 attacks, but a bit more concerning if it has 3.
  
• Potion brewing text and internal behavior got cleaned up, along with some other services. Mostly just cleaning house (as covers a lot of the 'fluff' text I write in the updates, there were a lot of maintainability changes and some minor behavior fixes/tweaks, but nothing to write home about, so I don't go too in depth.) Most of the other services changes are minor, but the Witch Hut change came with an expansion of Potions to allow npcs to buy (which was bugged for most of the update) and use the potions, with some funny text if they accidentally let loose BEEEEES.
  

Here are the promised pictures of the new display text styles.
'None', which the graphical uses, since it displays most of the new special data in colors of text. Uses only alphanumeric text besides underscore and percent. Note that some text elsewhere uses tildes, which the old graphical doesn't handle the best, but does display. 'Narrator', the default non-graphical, to ease use with a screen reader, ideally. Uses only ASCII characters that a narration tool will likely read fine. 'Visual', a style meant to be easily viewed as a replacement for graphical coloring. Uses only ASCII characters. 'Unicode', a sample of what could be. The new graphical will likely use something like this but full on sprites instead of unicode. The old graphical could do this, but it is unlikely to receive that legacy support.

These styles add better parity between the graphical's coloring and the terminal's text-only, especially in regards to health. The graphical does still show more information, but that's in a gradient. The other major deviation is how it displays people before you fight them, when asking you if you really want to do battle, although right now that information is mostly cosmetic. 'Visited' color has also been converted into text in both instances, with 'new!', '!', etc to help clear up confusion in node features and when exploring across towns.

There are also some options to reduce flavor and indicator text:

• 'Flavor Text', covering random town flavor events, 'first arrival' flavor describing towns, and random taunting/boasting. All of these have no mechanical impact.
  
• 'Travel Text', which is mostly used to help signal how getting ambushed when traveling works. If you understand that fully, this is a reminder of what town you're going to and not much else.
  
• 'Locational Text' includes the current town and date. If you turn both this and Travel Text off, there won't be any indicators of the current town besides the contents and the option you selected to get there. Dates currently don't do much, but later there might be holidays.
  
• 'Own Name', which makes the game display 'You' whenever it would display your character's name. This lowers confusion on who you are (although one of the messages will now read 'You are you' instead of 'You are Jane'), but is often really grammatically incorrect.
  
• 'Other Combat Text', which just removes most combat text that doesn't include you directly. This makes mass fights a bit more restrained, but people will die and you won't be told. It is the most mechanically impactful of the display options, because there aren't other ways to get this information.
  

Also, in either this beta or the prior beta, legacy conversion code made the old 'there is no completed sprite for this, so display nothing to show it's not done' behavior display the closest sprite instead. Lizardfolk are now mermaids, elves are orcs, bats are wolves, etc etc.

And finally, BEEEEEEEEEs have been bottled. Now you can carry bees with you everywhere instead of having to find them in the wild!
Dragon uncorks her potion, but only angry bees pour out! You uncork your potion as well, but it was also filled with BEEEEEEEEEEES!!!

Continuing with the theme of regutting, many of the things that were partially replaced in the last beta now have enough substance to truly be called a rework.

Firstly, attacks/weapons have a new metric overview. This also came with rebalancing on every weapon and attack. The extremely misleading Highest Damage, Average Damage, and Battlescore have been switched to Impact Chance, Highest Contribution, Average Damage, and Weighted Average Damage.
Highest Damage before was just the theoretical best attack's dps, times it's hit multiplier. This was misleading because that attack might be less common, it did not account for the effects of armor and dodging in practice (10x hit mult would count as 10x damage while 2x would count as 2x, despite doing the same thing).
Average Damage was the same metric, but averaged amongst all attacks.
Battlescore was an attempt to fix this by live-testing against imaginary people, and is the basis for the new system. Battlescore failed because it still showed the misleading stats, and labeled the misleading stats better. It also isn't perfect, but it was better.

One minor issue is that it is fairly difficult to gauge weapons against a wide spectrum of armors and loadouts. This new system, like battlescore, only considers the effects against opponents of the same level.
Impact chance is the % chance of all the simulated attacks had to both hit and penetrate armor.
Highest Contribution is the attack that had the highest Average Damage within it, so a higher Highest Contribution means that the weapon depends on one attack more than others. This isn't a good comparison number, because a weapon that has 3 attacks would be 33% when perfectly even, but a 100 attack weapon would be around 2% if one attack was twice as good as all the other attacks. Still, it's useful if you're really trying to understand it without using it.
Average Damage is what the old battlescore was. It's the average of all the attack's DPS's in a simulated environment.
Weighted Average damage is that, but more common attacks 'count' for more. So if there were two attacks, and one had a 66% chance to happen and the other had a 33% chance, the former would count for twice as much. Note that, in practice, you select the *best* attacks you're presented with- but the chance of you getting an attack that is good is still heavily tied into the chances any one attack will roll into a better attack.

You can use one of the testing screens under Play->Various Tests->Weapon Stat Query to call up the stats for a Weapon at level 1, 10, and 100. This can call any weapon material, and additionally itemizes the results per attack, which adds transparency in auditing the system. (Mostly for me, but anyone who has insights is welcome to use it.)

The 'classless' system is now in enough to play and test. The flow is as follows:
1. When you use quickstart, your character randomly selects an Archetype presented to them on level up. If you do slowstart, you can select from any starting Archetype, so there is no need to startscum (like in some other roguelite/roguelike adjacent games) for better starting classless classes.
2. That Archetype unlocks Feats, which you select when you level up. This is similar to the ancient Skill system before exotic arts were implemented. Each level grants one Feat Pick and one Feat Point. The game attempts to make sure you have at least 2 Archetypes, but you only need 1 to start getting Feats instead, if you want. Archetypes have a list of 'Feat Types' (name very pending). For example, 'Armor Paragon' unlocks 'Battle' and 'Smiths' Feats due to the theme of 'Tending to Your Armor'; 'Virago' unlocks 'Mystic' 'Potions' 'Curses', etc etc.
3. Every Feat and Archetype, as well as Perks you can obtain by completing tasks in universe, gives you Skills, and optionally Attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Clarity for now). Skills don't stack with skills of the same name, but they have direct impacts on how the game is played. A lot of the old skills were used in the exotic arts system under the hood, repurposed from the even older skill system. Some of these were remade, others are original. Archetypes typically grant 1-2 skills, while Feats usually grant 2 and some Attributes on top.
More need to be created, the current selection is 5 Player-useable Archetypes, 8 Player-Usable Feats, and 7 Obtainable Perks.
[h2]Examples:[/h2]
[h3]Archetypes[/h3]
"Hedge Mage: A perpetual novice, hedge mages aren't content to restrict themselves to one school.", gives "Frugal Mage" that increases the aether to money conversion rate in Stores, and "Arcanist", a special skill that grants an attack that can be swapped out between any source of Arcanist you have. (Similar to the old Arcanist Exotic Art, but no longer an entire class that locks you into it.)
[h3]Feats[/h3]
"Unbreakable: Nothing stops them." gives 4 strength, 'Tough as Nails', which gives you a flat % chance to negate wounds, and 'Armorheart', which heals you when your armor blocks an attack. Both of these were under the old Skill system and transferred over.
"Armor Painter: They paint their armor with magical dyes." gives 5 clarity, "Mesmer Armor", which uses clarity to attempt to confuse those who attack the skill user unsuccessfully, and "Armor Mage", which increases your armor slightly based on your Clarity. The former is new, the latter is still being converted from the old system.

There were also many changes to Nodes and other Features, such as Ports becoming a full Docks feature, Witch Huts getting expanded to sell ingredients and have quests to get them, and many small other changes.
For around half of the time spent on this update, Nodes were so broken that they would not run, because they were, as the sprint saying goes, 'gutted'. Almost all the old nodes made it back in, although some got merged, and many got added behavior.

The game also now has a system to add summons, which did not make it in, but the support is there. However, re-balancing has made a level 2 person no longer twice as good as a level 1 person in most things, so all the mass fights that aren't even are now somewhat problematic.

I am unsure if the pace of the sprints will maintain at such a high cadence- I had hoped to push updates more often, but there was just so much that needed to get fixed before it was playable again.
And that is good for motivating me to keep going, but not exactly the best for quality assurance and testing.

We'll see what the future has in store, though. It's been a long early access, and there's still a long way to go before I'm happy with Trawel.

MINOR UPDATE (as of the 13th of August): I was able to get a working linux version on the beta (at least on my linux computer, I doubt it runs on half of the devices, but hopefully it'll run on SteamOS, which I do not have installed unfortunately). I feel like I just endured a great ordeal on par with the "Labours of Hercules", so don't expect it to work *well*, but this should pave the way for updated legacy graphical support in full on these distributions.

Once again, the Stars are Right over homa and unun. Trawel is changing.

The new major beta version, v0.8.X, (the X is expected to change as the update is iterated on) will be open for public testing during August. If interested, please submit feedback on the steam forums here or in the Github Issue tracker.

If you are unsure how to opt-into a Steam beta, follow this community guide.

This Trawel update will focus on modernizing and re-'gutting' the entire game. Trawel was designed to be a lot simpler than it ended up being, and internal growing pains were starting to become apparent.

Here at realDragon (or rather, dragon and friends), we decided to take this as an opportunity to replace core systems, such as attacks, equipment, skills, and the like.
Most of these systems have similar outward expressions at first, but the allowed depth has been vastly increased, so you should find that their mechanics have become a lot more meaningful.

More concisely put, these things will look similar but be more impactful, in both the short and long run.

Other systems are receiving more total reworks, such as the skill system and the 'Exotic Art' implementation, which are being fleshed out as an 'archetype' system, combining both the multiclass concepts into a more classless-oriented outcome.

The graphical is also planned to switch engines for a variety of reasons, which should help the ability to update it and the art in the future. The art style is also expected to change.

Here are some WIPs of a potential style.
Have you ever really looked at your sword? Like, really looked at your sword.

Note that this will likely be revised as the 'cuts' for 'paper dolling' (layering the images on top of each other) are settled under the new swapping and layering methods.

The art/graphical update is not expected to be completed by the time the mechanics of this beta hit stable. Due to the unique data format of Trawel, the old graphical will likely have partial support even after the new one releases.

The Beta will be able to be found on the standard beta branch, which you can access from the game properties menu in Steam. The current version of Trawel has been added as a 'legacy archive' branch, as it is expected there will be at least some breaking changes in how the Graphical and Text portions of the game interact. Most versions of the game can somewhat handle mismatches between the two, and it is possible that the old Graphical won't be updated, but will still work, in which case that branch might receive gameplay updates.

HOWEVER, go forward with the expectation that the old graphical will no longer work past late August, as that is the earliest time the new graphical might release.

Regional prices have also been updated to match platform guidelines shortly prior to this announcement, as stated in the previous news post.
In some regions, the price increases were substantial.
These prices were set automatically back when the price of the game was halved, and have been set automatically once more.

You can view the last committed changed on the source-available github, which has 'nightly' progress, but not stable builds. The github also has an experimental project roadmap.
The Beta is expected to receive an update 1-2 times per week, or more if major errors occur.

Patch notes are also here.

Virtually all major systems in the game have been internally changed.
The passage of time is a lot more complicated, and you might have to pass the argument 'nothreads' if your pc doesn't agree- but it should be fine.
Of particular note, Attacks and Exotic Arts had changes but not enough time to refill their content (which is a recurring issue in Trawel, however this time it was for a different reason than normal- kernel upgrade issues nearly prevented this update entirely).

As per normal, this beta is Windows only, but it probably runs in proton, and if you want you can snag the jar and try to get it working yourself. The biggest barrier to updating linux has been the Graphical, and the new engine will likely have no such issues staying up-to-date, but that's still a ways away. (I was able to somewhat get it working on my own machine, but reliability issues prevent me from being able to push it directly.)

You can check out the roadmap here.

Remember to report issues in the steam forums or in the github issue tracker!

You can find instructions on how to opt-in to Steam betas in the full beta announcement which will be made shortly after this post.

Priorities besides finding crashing are giving feedback on the state of damage vs armor balance, which is currently unknown, and needs work. We're at the point where we don't know if armor is too strong or too weak.

Attributes also got somewhat added, and they properly replaced dodge multiplier on armor, however once again their other interactions are limited.

Expect a focus on finishing the transfer of attack backend, and then a shift to the classless system, over the next week.

(PS: giant pants bug might be fixed!)