Archon Soul: Prologue news & patch notes

• Added Korean language support
• Added a credits button to the main menu

Hey again everyone!

From now until November 21st, the Archon Soul playtest is available for the first 400 players to sign up!

You will be randomly assigned either:

The Pyromancer, who wields the power of many flames.

or...

The Thaumancer, who commands the power of storms.

The demo begins with EVERY spell, rune, and dice body unlocked for that character. The playtest also does not contain the tutorial. With both of these things in mind, it's highly advised that you play the demo first to get a grasp on the fundamentals, if you haven't already:

While I obviously can't make you play with analytics enabled, the purpose of the playtest is to gather data so it's extremely helpful for me as the dev to be able to see the specifics of the runs and to dive further into combat data. I do request that you enable analytics, at the very least for the duration of the playtest. Opting in to analytics for the playtest will not automatically opt you in to analytics for the full or demo versions.

There is a button to send feedback on the main menu and on the pause menu, as well as a button on the pause menu to take you to our bug report submission form. While simply playing the game with analytics enabled is very helpful, I would also love to hear your thoughts!

Have Fun!

-Thomas, PolyGryph

Hey everyone,

We're beginning to move towards the finish line. We'll be taking signups for playtests of the other two major characters pretty soon, and starting to get the game ready for final release. This being the case, until release there will be no more updates to the demo. However we felt it would be a good idea to add a few more Quality of Life features and a few more balance tweaks before the upcoming Next Fest.

General:

• On the dice hover tooltip during combat, dice rune tooltips for faces currently not rolled are now darkened to help highlight the currently rolled dice rune.

• Reduced loading times between areas.

• Increased the number of events offered per area by 1.

• Dice input tooltip descriptions changed for improved clarity.

Balancing, Events:

• Self-Help Guru: Increased the amount of runes gained.

• Get Juiced:  The unit ability gained in this event changed from "Gain 5 Might. Lose 5 Might at the end of turn." to "Make 3 Ethereal Dice."

Balancing, Enemies:

• Writhing Slime: This enemy was gaining twice as much might as intended. This is now fixed.

• The Double Orb fight has been removed from Area 3. Continue Run save data is incompatible with this update for this reason.

Make sure you check us out during Next Fest, and ask your friends to give the game a shot too! We will be taking signups for Playtests starting before Next Fest begins, but we will make a separate announcement for that. Keep an eye out!

Hey there again! I've got a pretty big update to address some of the current balancing issues and added a few quality of life improvements as well. I actually kept a changelog this time so lets get into it:

General:

• Added an option to auto-target enemies when there is only one enemy left. This option is OFF by default, and you can change it in the settings menu.

• Dice input requirement tooltip text appears faster.

• Slightly changed Area 1 pathing options for tutorial seed.

• Increased icon and text size for status effects.

• Improved clarity in event dice selection screens. It will now tell you dice requirements for the input and describes the outcome of your choice.

• Enemies with the Retaliate status will now spawn a text effect when hit.

Balancing, Dice Bodies and Runes:

• Growth Dice Body: Gains more Max HP, from 2 > 3.

• Vitality Dice Body: Gains more Max HP, from 15 > 18.

• Warm Dice Body: Gains more HP, from 5 > 7.

Balancing, Spells:

Now that I have some proper information from the analytics regarding spells, I decided to make a few changes. I'm sure there will be more to come but the focus this time was increasing player options for gaining barrier, as well as fixing the most broken spell in the demo, Rising Stampede.

• You will now receive 3 choices for spells in combat rewards. 2 spell choices was a byproduct of when the game had more floors and more combats, so you could see almost every spell over the course of a run (which was obviously not fun). Now that runs are shorter and with less combats, 3 makes more sense again.

• Dune Drop: Increased number of Charges from 1 > 2.

• It Gets Everywhere: Increased number of Charges from 1 > 2.

• Landslide: Increased damage from 6 > 7.

• Rising Stampede: Reduced dice input requirement from Min 5 > Min 4. It will now permanently gain Repeat 1 only if the spell has not been cast previously this combat.

• Coarse and Rough: Removed consume and added "gain 5 barrier" to the spell's effect.

• Root Burst: Added "otherwise, gain 15 barrier" to the spell's effect.

• Staying Power: Added "gain 10 barrier" to the spell's effect. Requires one more dice to cast, from Min 2 > Any Rune & Min 2.

• Stone Strike: Increased repeat from 1 > 2.

• Pure Water: Increased barrier from 5 > 6.

Balancing, Events:

• Self-Help Guru: Options cost less gold.

• Totems of Sacrifice: Options take less HP and give better rewards.

• The Crown: Gives an extra rune.

• Blades of Shadow: Gives extra runes on success.

• Cursed Blood: Gives more Vampire Runes.

• Eternal Decision: Added an option to leave.

• Fate Weaver: Options cost less gold and max HP.

• Hex Dealer: Gives more gold.

• Chaos Implement: Costs less HP.

• Omnipotence: Costs less HP.

• Vitality Transfer: Gives more max HP.

Balancing, Enemies:

The win rate didn't increase from the last balance update as much as I would like, so most of these balance tweaks are nerfs (thought here are a few buffs). I would like the base difficulty to be slightly more accessible. For people who want a more difficult game, there will be a difficulty system (called Worthiness) similar to Heat in Hades to increase the difficulty in the final version.

• Tiny Ogre: Reduced damage output, barrier gain, and HP.

• Armored Rat: Reduced damage output and HP.

• Hextress: Reduced damage output and HP. Made unit ability easier to use.

• Slime: Reduced damage output. Made unit ability easier to use.

• Punch Wizard: Reduced damage output and HP.

• Hexbeast: Reduced damage output and Might gain.

• Punch Warlock: Reduced HP, increased damage output.

• Spellmaw: Reduced damage output. Made unit ability easier to use.

• Replicator: Reduced damage output and HP.

• Luck Feeder: Reduced damage output and HP.

• Bladed Dancer: Reduced damage output and HP. Made unit ability easier to use.

• Emerald Demon: Reduced damage output and HP.

• Armored Homonculus: Reduced damage output and HP.

• Golden Armadillo: Reduced damage output.

• Arena Hero: Reduced HP.

• Master of the Armory: Reduced damage output and Might gain.

• Writhing Slime: Increased barrier gain and damage output.

• Demon of Misfortune: Reduced damage output and Might gain.

• The Sacrifice: Reduced HP and the amount of starting Retaliate. Made unit ability easier to use.

• Cleric of Beauty: HP increased.

• Ogre Husk: Reduced damage output and Might gain. Adjusted attack pattern to curse dice less often.

• Orb: Reduced HP, barrier gain, the amount of starting Hexproof, and the amount of Weak and Frail inflicted. The win rate for most of the fights with Orb were worse than the final boss. Whoops.

• Trickster: Increased HP. For damage-only attack, increased base damage but reduced randomness range.

• Chaos Mass: Reduced damage output, HP, and starting Hexproof.

• Volatile Being: Reduced damage output.

• Origin of Sickness: Reduced damage output. Increased the heal percentage of its unit ability from 35% > 45%.

• Avatar of the Soul: Reduced number of dice cursed in first attack from 5 > 4. Reduced damage in large attack from 55 > 50.

Thanks everybody so much for playing my game, hope you enjoy the update!

We finally got around to setting up the custom data viewer for the analytics we collect in-game (and as always a huge thanks to the folks that have analytics enabled, it's a big help). This allows us to go more in-depth into the combat and encounters data, rune and spell selection, and what winning and losing runs look like at the end of the run.

Unfortunately the analytics for the spells was messed up, so not much we could glean from that, but this update fixes that error so we should have more accurate data for spells moving forward.

The rune and dice body information was really interesting, and we are looking to dive more into that in the future. However since for the demo version many of the runes and dice bodies are locked, the data set is too incomplete to make any adjustments there. Once we have a more holistic view of the runes and dice bodies we'll look into the data further. Keep an eye out for the playtest announcement!

In addition to the balance changes below, we added a button to the pause menu for submitting bug reports, as the current feedback form is unsuitable for that purpose. The bug report button takes you to a form on the PolyGryph website, and allows you to attach a screenshot or video.

Run win % was much lower than we'd hoped, and looking into the combat data revealed some huge balancing issues in many of the regular combats, and some less egregious issues in the boss and elite combats. Here is a general breakdown of the changes:

-Pierce Armor unit ability has been made more powerful

-Tiny Ogre has been made easier.

-Armored Rat has been made easier.

-The Punch Wizard has been made slightly easier.

-Hexbeast has been made slightly more difficult.

-Punch Warlock was an absolute pushover, so he was made more difficult.

-Spellmaw has been made easier.

-Replicator has had it's HP reduced, but damage increased.

-Armored Homonculus has been made easier

-Spellmite has been made easier

-The 3 Luck feeders combat now only has 2 Luck Feeders

-Luck Feeder has been made slightly easier

-Bladed Dancer has had it's HP reduced, and it's unit ability countdown has been lowered by 1

-Golden Armadillo has been made slightly easier.

-Thorned Demon has been made easier.

-Arena Hero has been made slightly easier.

-Writhing Slime was a huge pushover, so it was made more difficult.

-Demon of Misfortune has been made slightly easier.

-Ogre Husk has been made easier.

-Orb has been made easier.

-Trickster has been made easier.

-The Sacrifice has had it's HP reduced.

-Chaos Mass has had it's HP reduced and damage slightly increased.

-Deathless One has been made more difficult.

-Volatile Being's Slimelings have had their damage increased.

-Volatile Being has been made more difficult.

-Origin of Sickness has been made easier.

-Avatar of the Soul has had their damage reduced.

We also changed some of the names of the combats to more accurately reflect their current buildout, as well as added an additional combat to the combat pool in Area 3. As a result, the update is not compatible with current run save data. This will not affect your win percentage in the collections stat screen.

Thanks for playing the demo!

-Thomas, PolyGryph

Big Update! Pacing, Balance, and More!

Hey all!

Appreciate everyone who has played the game, left comments, rated the game, and sent in feedback! So much was changed for this version that I cant list all of the changes individually, but here are the broad strokes:

Shorter Runs:

In response to feedback about pacing, and from watching content creators' videos covering the demo, I decided to shorten the run length. I was seeing 2+ hour play times to finish a run, and while those runs were typically being commentated on, that's still far too long. I also suspect that the long run lengths were discouraging jumping into another run due to the long time commitment and the frustration of getting an hour and a half into a run and dying. With this in mind, we shortened the total number of floors per major area from 10 to 8. This represents a 20% reduction in total floors.

Even with just a 20% reduction, since those floors were predominantly more time-consuming on average, this has had a major impact on run times. This change also had a knock-on effect of reducing the total number of resources in the run, improving another issue of late-game rewards not feeling as valuable.

Major Combat Balance Changes:

Our analytics were showing some issues with combat balancing. In addition to this, shortening the run length created some additional balancing issues in addition to the issues already present. I felt that the power level of the normal combats was not adequately preparing players for how difficult the elite fights and boss fights should be. Players were being caught off-guard when they breezed through the regular combats and got stomped by a boss or elite. So I rebalanced and/or redesigned all of the combat encounters. Keep in mind this game is meant to be challenging. Here is the general gist:

• Area 1 regular combats are on average harder

• Area 1 elite combats are on average harder

• The Replicator boss HP increased, and damage output decreased. The Replicator's unit ability was made generally easier to use.

• Area 2 enemy combats were mostly kept the same relative difficulty, but were redesigned.

• Area 2 elite combats were mostly kept the same relative difficulty.

• Demon of Misfortune HP reduced, and damage output reduced slightly.

• Area 3 regular combats are on average more difficult.

• Area 3 Elite combats are on average more difficult.

• Origin of Sickness damage output increased.

• Avatar of the Soul was unchanged.

Spells/Runes Balancing:

I always seek to make the game more engaging and interesting. Sometimes that involves making the difficult decision to nerf a fun spell because it single-handedly makes the game too easy (sorry Spell Graft), sometimes it involves noting that nobody ever takes a spell because it's never better than the other options. So I reevaluated and rebalanced many spells and a few dice runes as well.

Your Most Requested Change:

I held out for as long as I could. I really enjoy the "get good" philosophy of roguelikes and resisted adding the ability to cancel out of spells for a long while. My philosophy on that decision was that you can't cancel out of spells that don't target, so why should spells that target be more lenient? Just don't make the mistake next time. But almost every piece of feedback was asking for that feature, so obviously it's a big deal to the player base. So I tried it out.

Turns out I was wrong. It did make the game better.

There is one caveat: Due to the way countdown dice inputs work, it's just not feasible to be able to revert the game state to the state before a countdown spell was cast. So you can't cancel out of spells with countdowns. Turns out you'll still have to "get good" sometimes.

Many Other Small Changes:

There were quite a few smaller changes and bug fixes as well. I didn't keep a changelog (I should probably start doing that tbh), so I can't remember what those changes were.

As always, thanks for playing!

-Thomas