Steam December 2018 Release Notes

## **December-30-2018 - Update 1.2**

Starting to work on what will be the main focus for the first month of development: expanding the scope and complexity of the dungeon itself. This will be a rough process that is going to make the balance go a little wild for awhile so bear with me and please report any issues or concerns.

**Dungeon Expansion Overview/Goal:**

I view the game as broken into 3 phases: early, middle and late game.

Early game is floors 1-8. These levels need to be balanced in such a way that they are challenging to all builds without any extreme counters as the player has no chance at this point to acquire special defense or offense. This phase of the game should be linear for simplicity sake

Mid game is everything between floors 9-12 including the branches. This is where the bulk of the expansion will be taking place. Branch zones are important because they can be tackled in any order or skipped entirely. This means that they can be much more specifically challenging and have hard counters to certain builds. I'd like to build up the mid game to be more freeform, where the player has choice/strategy decisions to make regarding the order in which he tackles the various levels.

Late Game is the dive into Yendor for the goblet. The Yendor levels should be very challenging with individual monsters or level features hard countering many abilities. A character should need to have at least some breadth in their build and the player should know how to use it to survive here.

**Dungeon Expansion Implementation:**

So obviously we are currently far away from this goal. The way I will be working on moving the game in this direction is pretty much by doing two things:

1) Adding more content into the mid game. New zones, new branches, new special levels. The overall size (as in number of dungeon levels) of the mid game will be increasing. I will be working at the same time continuously refine the existing zones with the goal of making them distinct from each other and with unique challenges and game play.

2) Because this will be adding more loot and experience into the game, I will be continuously working to make the Yendor levels harder. Extremely good players will always be able to dive Yendor with less preperation, but the goal is to make them hard enough that completing at least some of the mid game is the recommended path.

* A mini branch that spawns on Crypt:4
* Eventually all Tier 3 zones will have multiple mini branches like this that will be randomly selected.
* Has its own unique dungeon generation.
* Has an altar at the far side of the level that, until destroyed, will cause the skeletons on the level to continuously resurrect.
* Theres also the lich king himself and a 3-choice crystal chest at the end.
* The crystal chests will eventually contain a set of items unique to this area.

**Yendor Changes:**

* Rebalanced the spawn tables a bit to make the actual monsters unique to Yendor a bit more common.
* Added the tentacle terror which was implemented but apparently I forgot to add as a spawn.
* Added lava eels since lava can now spawn here.

**UI and Quality of Life:**

* Numpad 5 will now wait/rest/'accept' a spell or attack as would be expected.
* Moving with the num pad will now instantly snap the character as occurs in most classic roguelikes (this will eventually be togglable for players who prefer slower keyboard movement).

**Items:**

* Charm of Swiftness: granting the sprint ability since blink charms were removed.

**Balance Changes:**

* Drachnids will now be immune to unstable in the same way as generic spiders.
* Reduced the max number of spawns from spawners from 5 to 3. Generally they never get a chance to spawn all their mobs and since you get the total exp when killing them they result in massive exp boosts. In the cases where they do get a chance to spawn all 5 waves it tends to just be tedious.

I'm also going to start setting up a section in the forums to post all of my design plans, goals and overall vision for early access so that you can get an idea of where I'd like to take the project.

## **December-29-2018 - Update 1.1**

Just a small update today since I'm still getting everything setup on my side. I've set aside this first week for relatively small content updates so that bug/crash reports can take priority as we get settled in. I'll also be trying to get some of the quick quality of life type stuff that's being suggested implemented in this first week such as full keyboard controls and rebinding.

**Bugs and Crashes:**

* Fixed lunge not ending the players turn (this was not intended)
* Fixed the desert vault spawning 3 priests and a unique (this was intended to be three normal mummys + a priest).
* The desert vault will never spawn twice in a single run.
* Ballistas will no longer be unstabled by their own oil.

**Storm Elemental:**

* A new monster appearing in the Vault of Yendor that can summon a lightning rod behind the player and then cast quick lightning bolts between himself and the rod.

**Pit Paths Generator:**

* A rare generator used in the Vault of Yendor to produce levels consisting of narrow pits and platforms over pits.

**Graphics:**

* I've decided to stick with just my own graphics for the time being in order to maintain consistency as I add new content. I'm unable to emulate TheBlackHands quality or style so I'd rather keep a single style throughout the game and slowly improve it over time.

As a side note, art is something I tend to tackle bit by bit and will often lag behind new content i.e. new content will start with really rough graphics. I find I need to set aside larger periods of time where I focus on art rather than switching back and forth between coding and drawing.

## **December-28-2018 Release**

Hello everyone! We're now live! Feels weird pressing the release button since I've got a feature todo list that's 1000s of items long and growing, but I guess that's the point of early access. Will be pretty much immediately going right back into development so expect daily updates.

I'd say the game is currently at about the 40% complete stage as of this first release so there is an enormous amount of content, balancing and polish coming down the line. I'm planning on spending the first month or so mostly just working on new content since we were in a polishing freeze for so long prior to the web release. Obviously bugs and crashes will be taking priority so please report anything that goes wrong and I'll try to fix it ASAP.

**Updates compared to the web release:**

A lot of my time was spent just getting the game to run on the desktop but I wanted to get some new content done as well for people coming from the web versions.

DUNGEON LAYOUT:

* Iron Fortress moved to tier 3 to spread out the zones a bit more

LEVEL GENERATION:

* Extended the cave level generators so that they can spawn vaults within them. This is currently just used for a few aesthetic vaults and a challenge vault in the desert but will be very useful in the future.
* Cactus's can occasionally spawn in the sunless desert in order to add a bit more color. I'm planning on extending the knock back mechanics to deal damage when you knock back enemies into walls and stuff like cactus and spikes should deal more damage in this case.
* Pine trees can spawn occasionally in the ice caves (adds a bit more color). This is also the start of what I'd call sub-zoning, so slowly adding stuff so that some ice cave levels are alpine forest like and then adding unique enemies, items, objects etc to such a sub-zone in order to get some variety even within a single zone.
* Added a new generator to The Dark Temple that generates temple like levels.
* Added a new generator to The Iron Fortress that generates lava forge type levels.
* These will eventually be extended to have unique content within them.
* Steam vents will spawn on some Iron Fortress levels which knock characters back when they activate and block line of sight.
* Toxic water added to sewers
* Vault of Yendor can now spawn lava.
* New unique generator added to Upper Dungeon

NPCS:

* Added Licky Toads, Chameleons and Tentacle Terrors with the ability to tongue/tentacle pull the player towards them. Will be adding a playable frog race soon with same ability as a talent.
* Added Iron Imps to the Arcane Tower
* Monsters behind glyph doors will no longer wait 2 turns before acting after the door is opened.
* Rare cave bears that spawn in Upper Dungeon and can berserk.

NEW TALENTS:

* War Cry (barbarian): Fills your rage meter, stuns nearby enemies and alerts all NPCs in a wide radius as to your position.
* Head Shot: allows ranged attacks to sneak attack.
* Disengage: deals high damage and backs off a step. Killing an enemy with this talent will have no cool down.
* Lunge: like a short range charge but dealing more damage. Killing an enemy with this talent will have no cool down.

NEW CLASS: DUELIST

* A melee character focused on movement, strafing and kill strikes.
* Still missing a few talents but has Disengage, Lunge + general talents.
* Will only reduce his short cool downs when taking steps.
* Starts with a rapier which will deal crit hits when stepping into range.
* This class is forking off from the barbarian who will be reworked a bit.

RACES:

* Races have been enabled though they are still in a rough stage and need a lot of work. I'd like to have each race have its own set of 2-3 talents that are added to your classes talents at the start of the game.

NEW RACE: GARGOYLE:

* A special challenge class
* No natural hp/mp regen but his attunement to the earth will fully restore him each time he descends to a new dungeon level.
* Permanently flying
* Stone Skin Talent: increases natural protection.

ITEMS:

* Rapier: deals crit hits when stepping into range.
* Crystal Breastplate: reflection
* Elemental Robes: grant associated resistance
* Spikes Shield: damages enemies that melee attack you
* Charm of blinking changed to wand of blinking. I'd like to avoid infinite blinks since they tend to break a lot of the existing content and planned future content.
* Changed wand of draining to a unique AoE spell that immediately drains health from enemies around you. Trying to give the wands and charms their own unique spells separate from talents.

STATIC LEVELS\_AND\_VAULTS:

* 10 more static levels (hand made).
* 2 more configurations for the Vault of Yendor last level.
* A bunch of vaults added to sewers.
* 10 difficult vaults added to Vault of Yendor
* 5 new special challenge vaults in various zones.

LONG COOL DOWNS:

* Barbarians and duelist will tick cooldowns that are larger than 100 normally.
* There was the issue that barbarians paradoxically could not make use of the berserk talent due to its long cool down.
* I'm considering changing these long cool downs to refresh only when the character gains a level or possibly when he descends to a new dungeon level.

BALANCE:

* As a note, pretty much all balance is subject to constant change and iteration.
* Capped skills at 10 to reduce guaranteed power growth along a single dimension (most apparent with casters easily getting huge hit point pools).
* Will be planning to move more of the power into items, talents and attributes, with skills playing more of a secondary role.
* All mages start with generic Magic Mastery talent instead of their specialized ones (which still exist and can drop). This is to help them more readily make use of spells from different schools.
* Power shot and tunnel shot now work with staves. I'm trying to get all talents to be at least somewhat useful for all characters.
* Shock Spell has had its max spread range capped as it was pretty insanely overpowered. Will also show the targeting correctly when aiming it.
* Equipment (non-stackable, non-consumable) spawned in standard chests and on the floor will try to never double drop. This should help mitigate the RNG somewhat by at least not giving you doubles of stuff you don't want.
* Crystal Chest rooms are now more common in order to give the player more chances to make choices regarding their equipment.
* Pit traps (but not big pits) will try to drop the player into a semi-safe position (approximately 10 tiles from the nearest enemy). This is to avoid cheap instant deaths falling into hoards.

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Hello everyone! Game will be releasing at about 6:00pm PST. Just doing some last minute testing to make sure everything is as stable as possible.