Hello everyone! Sorry for the late release, got sick in the middle of the week and it set everything back a day. Will be on Discord tomorrow at 2:00pm. Couple of announcements first off:
Accessing the Test Version
Since we're currently going through a series massive updates that make the current version quite unbalanced and unstable I'm using a beta branch for development in order to keep the mess out of the default version. To access it:
Right click on the game name in your steam library and at the bottom of the drop down menu select 'properties'. Then under the 4th, 'Betas' tab enter the password 'secretpassword' and it should give you access to the test-branch. Please let me know if you have trouble accessing it.
I believe we're currently on schedule for finishing this messy phase of development and so this beta branch should be set live i.e. default by the end of June and we will be able to carry on as usual.
Changing to a 2 Week Release Schedule:
I'm going to be switching to a release every 2 weeks from this point forward due to a number of reasons. First off, these updates are getting much larger and more complex, and it just takes a lot more time to get everything working. There are a lot of tasks on my list that simply can't be easily compressed and will be better tackled given this longer period. There's also the issue of what happened this week, where a single bad day can cause me to miss the release date and through everything off. Finally, and most importantly, upon review, I've found that I'm spending way to much time doing 'admin' type stuff in order to release so often and I'm not getting enough time to actually do actual development. My week currently looks like the following:
- Mon - Wed: actual development on the update
- Thur - clean up, testing, debugging, prepping the release
- Fri - more release prep and the actual release (if I'm not behind schedule)
- Sat - hotfix to fix any issues that crop up from the release and discord meetup.
- Sun - planning the next weeks update
So looking at that, I'm literally spending more than half my week just doing 'admin' surrounding the actual release. By moving to a 2 week release schedule I don't really have to do any more of this admin stuff but I gain a ton of days of actual dev work. This should result in much larger, more substantial updates i.e. much more than I would get done in 2 updates given the current schedule.
So 1.31 will be coming out 2 weeks from now and should be a pretty big one. I've got some cool stuff in the works that I'm quite excited about. I'll also be moving the Discord meetup to Sunday at 2:00PM following the Friday of release just to give us all (myself included) more time to actually play through the update.
Now, onto the update!
Completely New World Layout:
Did a ton of iterations on paper to try to get something that was less linear, with less dead ends and back tracking, more loops and shortcuts. Generally its much easier now to pass between zones from any point in the world. Also I'm trying to follow a 'all roads lead to Yendor' plan, where, no matter which way you go, you should always be getting closer to the end game content.
We're still missing the z-axis which will definitely change things around a bit and there are some new zones I still need to add but I believe this is definitely a step in the right direction. There is a lot more room now as well for a lot more of the randomize sub-zoning I intend to work on in the future.
Zone Changes:
Dark Temple Remove/Split
The Dark Temple is being removed/split with much of its content getting merged into Yendor. I've got tons of notes going right now on theming zones that will become important in a month or two when I start actually going over the various areas and really giving them some attention and The Dark Temple was just to close in theme to what I'm intending to go with for Yendor.
The Palace of Brass:
Mostly just a stub at this point but this will eventually be the end game fire themed dungeon with a magic sub-theme. The Core is going to slowly be worked in appearing as a massive, multi chunk volcano with a huge lava lake in the middle. The Palace of Brass will be floating in the middle of this and will be home to one of the games major bosses. Some dark elves from The Dark Temple have been moved here to populate it.
The Glacial Rift:
Again, mostly a stub at this point but will eventually be the end game cold themed dungeon with a light melee / range sub-theme. Home to a primitive but powerful tribe of gnolls and their beastly pets. Will be the location of another of the games major bosses.
Goblins Thematic Rework
Though not really part of this update, the world layout at least has brough the Bloodpick Mines, The Swamp, The Sewers and The Iron Fortress into closer proximity to each other. Based on feedback from I believe MechWarden who had suggested the relationship between these areas, I've decided to unify the goblins in the dungeon thematically. Basically the goblins are the 'clever' race that are running things in The Iron Fortress where they oversee the construction and maintenance of their army of clockwork automatons. There will be little oil rig platforms in the swamp where they are gathering oil to bring to the Fortress and the Bloodpick mines are where they are mining ore.
I had previously been going with a more tribal, primative theme for them, but since this is just to cool of an idea to pass on, I'll be reworking the Bloodpick mines to be more techy in nature with mine carts, cranes, refineries etc. As part of the rework in world structure, the Sewers now empty into the swamp and contain a 'secret' backdoor into the Iron Fortress. This will become more important later on when there's more gating in the Inner Caverns which are currently underdeveloped as this will act as an alternate path into them.
Fountains of Knowledge:
These will be replacing the previous bookshelf rooms and will provide skill points, talent points, randomized skill points and randomized talents. For the randomized skills and talents, these will be based on the zone in which the fountain is found i.e. places like The Orc Fortress will have a much higher chance of giving Melee based skills and talents. They are visible from the world map and provide a nice counterpart to the Attribute Fountains.
Though not yet implemented, the occasional tomes the bookshelves used to drop will be replaced by little mini libraries that can spawn in zones that will contain tomes specific to that zones theme. Another key advantage here is that I can finally use variations on bookshelves as dungeon dressing which will be really useful in a few months when it comes to the per zone overhaul, especially for places like The Arcane Tower.
Treasure Rooms
Those little side rooms full of gold, potions, scrolls etc. are now controlled from the global world level and are visible from the world map. These will eventually be upgraded to be much more zone specific ex. lots of gold rooms in mines, little armories in fortress type zones, potions might be in some kind of alchemist hut vault in the swamp etc.
Crystal chest rooms are also now controlled in this manner and will be changed in the future to feature a much higher chance of containing zone specific equipment rewards.
A lot of these changes are, like many things, laying the foundations for future work. The idea is generally to cluster rewards into thematically appropriate 'clumps' that are visible from afar on the world map so that players can seek them out. A similar approach will be taken to big challenges, either unique enemies, or big densly populated areas like a guard barracks. Basically rather than an endless sea of evenly distributed challenges and rewards I'd like to have these big 'spikes' that players can see from afar and either seek out or avoid. There will need to be various means of 'scouting' i.e. things like scrolls of mapping, actual maps, some kind of NPC that can 'reveal' map chunks so that the player can do this scouting from afar.
Glyph Rooms and Drop Walls:
These are also now controlled globally (though not visible from the world map). Same sort of idea as above i.e. controlling the distribution of big challenges. In the future many of these will become custom 'vaults' with zone appropriate enemies and layouts.
New Uniques:
As in previous updates, these are mostly pretty boring at the moment but will be improved in future passes over the zones. I'm just trying to keep a steady output of them in order to fill the world and get a basic idea of how things will eventually look. They'l all eventually get their own unique vaults as well, likely with a gang of minions.
- The Ancient Polar Bear in The Ice Caves
- Alazar The Magnificent in The Sunless Desert
- The Corrupted Forest Master in The Under Grove
- The Centaur Huntmaster in The Under Grove
New Monsters
- 4 x Dark Elf types moved into The Palace of Brass. I've got a list of abilities that these guys need that have yet to be implemented.
- 3 x Gnolls in The Glacial Rift. Same as above, still need new abilities and a few more types.
New Talents:
The trouble of solo dev is there's just never enough time for all the cool stuff I want to do. I've got tons and tons of notes on massive improvements to combat that I'd like to do in the future to generally make it 'punchier', more dynamic, and just generally easier (and faster) to control. So, while working on all this big world stuff, I can't help myself but to make little tweaks and changes along the way to combat.
Shield Bash
This replaces 'Shields Up' as the warriors default starting talent. The player uses his shield to smash back enemies in an arc standing in front of him dealing damage based on the ENC of his shield modified by your melee power. This effectively does the same thing as Shields Up since the enemies now miss their next attack in order to move towards you but is easier to understand since its proactive rather than reactive. You can also use it to bash enemies into pits, onto traps etc. In the future this will also work well with the knock back damage rework i.e. knocking enemies into walls deals damage.
Changes to Charge
Charge now knocks the enemy back and the player will take his place. If the enemy was up against a wall this will now 'crunch' him causing critical damage.
Mechanics and Balancing:
Slowed EXP/Leveling Rate:
Still just roughly adjusting things here. Generally speaking levels should be quick early on and take longer later. This will be mirrored by the world becoming increasingly non-linear. The end game levels should take quite a while in comparison since the player will likely want to hit up at least a few of the end game dungeons and bosses before tackling Yendor.
Static Recovery Rework:
Regen rates adjusted to not scale based on the players max hp / mp (actually how it was before). Fountains and potions now recover a set amount of HP and MP. The idea here is not to doubly reward characters with high HP / MP by also increasing the rate at which they recover (we dealt with this a lot in early Alpha). Rather recovery rate should be a separate stat that is improved independently. This means there is effectively a fixed amount of recoverable hit points and mana in the dungeon based on the number of fountains/potions + the time restrictions on resting due to world events, which is going to be a big part of the games 'Meta' i.e. where the player chooses to 'spend' these resources will become increasingly important, particularly in the end game.
Added Encumbrance to Weapons
Part of a huge future rework to the way that wielding works that I won't get into here. I'm adding it in now mostly just due to that fact that I was getting annoyed at how easy it was for my caster characters to just casually wear plate armor without suffering any consequences.
Passive Talent Rework:
All passive talents now scale with player level i.e. they get stronger over time. This helps to keep new talents found in books useful even in the end game.
Talent Books Click to Use
Something that I've been meaning to do for a long time. Helps to keep your available talent list from getting flooded (we still need sorting and filtering), and lets you sell books you don't intend on using.
Non-linear Enemy Scaling:
Another thing I've been intending to do for a long time. The old version worked as follows (numbers just for example): A level 1 enemy would have 10 hp and for each level they would gain +2hp. This means that a level 2 enemy is 20% stronger than a level 1, a substantial difference. This broke down though at high levels where say the difference between 19-20 would be something like 48HP vs 50HP, a tiny difference.
The new scaling system for damage and hp is now exponential (with a small base), so that the differences are now 'constant' i.e. enemies would continue to be say 10% stronger each level, right up to the end game. This effectively makes the early game a bit easier and the end game quite a bit harder which I believe mirrors what we've always observed when looking at game record stats i.e. you either die early on or live long enough to completely overpower everything in the end game.
Obviously there's a ton of balancing that still needs to be done with this but I believe this is a step in the right direction overall.
Misc:
Generally just a ton of bug fixes, particularly with chunk generation creating impassable areas or simply not spawning something they were supposed to spawn. I'm sure a bunch of other little things that are buried in my notes and I can't find right now.
Conclusion:
Well that's it for today! Once again, I'll be on Discord tomorrow at 2:00PM and thank you as always for all of your support and feedback! Hope you all enjoy the rest of your week end!
