Patches/2021-12-14

#### Sharebear

Sharing is caring, and this new hero bearly even wants to fight. You'll have extra gold at your disposal, but so will your opponents.

#### The Sphinx

The Sphinx asks you a riddle every time you level up: which spells will you be casting for free?

#### King Midas

Everything he touches turns to gold, but beware - you'll be forsaking Treasures in exchange for this power.

### Hero Changes

#### Sad Dracula

* Old: Your first character has Slay: +3 attack -> New: You attack first, and your first character has Slay: +2 attack.

Sad Drac got a little faster in this patch, which makes it more likely you Slay. The bonus got reduced a little as a result, though it's a lot more consistent of a build-around now.

#### Apocalypse

* Old: 50 Health -> **New: 45 Health**

Apocalypse presents a fun challenge each game - can you survive until 6 and stabilize with a new squad of high-level characters? This challenge was a little too easy to beat at 50 health, so it's moving to 45.

#### Skip, the Time Skipper

Skip will now show all level 3 characters on turn two. This is to make up for the inability to lock level 3s on turn one.

#### Morgan le Fay

* Old: 40 Health -> **New: 45 Health**

Morgan needed a little extra cushion so you can more effectively make use of her hero power, and five extra health will provide just that.

#### Beauty

* Old: 40 Health -> **New: 45 Health**

Lastly, Beauty is another hero that we identified as needing a little help (and health). She's more likely to survive into the lategame now, where her Pumpking dreams become reality.

### Balance Changes

#### Dwarven (Re)forge

We are giving Dwarves an overhaul in this patch, with multiple changes to the tribe (and even one deletion - Bossy is no longer with us). The experience of facing Dwarves in the midgame and them having multiple 20/20+ characters was happening a little more often than we liked, so these changes will pull back on that experience, while giving Dwarves some power in other spots.

#### Tweedle Dee

* Old: 3 cost 3/2 with Last Breath: Summon a 2/3 -> **New: 4 cost 6/1 Summon a Tweedle Dum with my attack and health swapped.**

Tweedle Dee mostly sat around tweedling his fingers, and rarely made it into anyone's team. This change makes him more dynamic, and rewards you for finding ways to buff his stats.

#### Angry

* Old: 4/10 -> **New: 5/15**

Angry was more Annoying than Angry, and this change makes it more likely his ability triggers.

#### Princess Wight

* Old: +1/+1 for each Dwarf you have bought this game -> **New: Your Dwarves have +1/+1.**

Princess Wight was one of the biggest offenders in the midgame, both figuratively and literally. This change makes her a Dwarf "Lord" without putting such a large character into the mix.

#### Lordy

* Old: Counted Princess Wight in his ability -> **New: No longer counts Princess Wight.**

The Princess Wight text was clunky, and the new version is less likely to be in your final lineup.

#### Bossy

* Cut

Bossy and Princess Wight now overlap too much, and Bossy is the one that ended up getting fired.

#### Crafty

* Old: 1/1 with +3/+3 per Treasure -> **New: 2/2 with +2/+2 per Treasure**

Crafty was another culprit when it came to oppressive stats in the midgame, and the new version is a little better early and a little worse later.

#### Grim Soul

* Back in the pool!

Pollywoggle fans across the world rejoice - your best bud is back!

#### Lancelot

* Old: 7/7 -> **New: 9/9**

Lance has been hitting the gym lately, and is a little buffer as a result.

#### Shadow Assassin

* Old: 2/1 that gets +1/+1 when you slay -> **New: 2/4 that gets +1 attack when you slay.**

Ranged characters with tons of health are extremely difficult to defeat, and we identified Shadow Assassin as one of the characters that most contributed to hopelessness when facing a Slay comp late. This new version has better initial stats, but won't grow health like the previous one.

#### The Chupacabra

* Old: Slay: Give me and the characters behind me +1/+1 -> **New: Give me and the characters behind me +2 attack.**

Chups was one of the Slay characters that got out of control the fastest, especially when backed by Baba Yaga. This change gives you a substantial reward for slaying, but doesn't increase health, making the team a lot easier to disrupt.

#### Riverwish Mermaid

* Old: 4/4 -> **New: 4/8**

Mermaid is a fun character, and we want her to be a little tougher so she sticks around more often. She wished for more health, and that wish was granted.

#### Great Pumpkin King

* Old: 5/5 that didn't summon characters for your level 2 Evil characters -> **New: 10/10, now summons 1/1 Cats for each level 2 character that died.**

Pumpkin King is the centerpiece of one of the most fun lategame comps, and giving it a buff helps make that comp come together more often.

#### Broc Lee

* Removed from pool.

Our level 4 slot had too many characters in it, and nobody likes eating their vegetables.

#### Exploding Mittens

* Removed from pool.

Mittens may return in some other form, but this version dragged out fights for way too long, especially with effects like Mimic.

#### Copycat

* Old: 2/12 -> **New: 2/8**

There wasn't enough tension as to whether Copy Cat would survive at 2/12, so by moving it to 2/8, we make it a little more likely the opponent can disrupt it.

#### Monster Book

* Old: Level 5 with 10/4 stats -> **New: Level 4 with 7/3 stats**

Monster Book is a lot of fun, so we made the required reading a little easier to get.

### Matchmaking Improvements

We’ve improved matchmaking - matches will be more balanced now. This effect will be even larger immediately after a rank reset, where previously we had some instances of unbalanced lobbies.

To support this, point gains will be variable for all ranks above Squire.

### New Animations

We'd like to welcome Kass, our new VFX artist, to the team, and show off two awesome new animations she made! Now there's even more reason to choose Mirror Mirror, and Fog really sends a message.

* Mirror Mirror
* Fog

*(Editor's note: see the card pages' galleries for their animations.)*

### New Art

* Black Prism
* The 9th Book of Merlin
* Noble Steed
* Ring of Revenge

### Engineering Chat

Hi, I'm John, the lead engineer at Good Luck Games. A large portion of the changes this patch deals with upgrades to our networking code, so I wanted to talk about the technical changes we've been making to Storybook Brawl over the past few weeks. As we move to full release, we have been focused more on optimization and stability and this patch is the first of those results.

Our networking code was acceptable for early access, but we needed to improve our networking to meet player expectations with full release and have a strong foundation to build upon for the future.

In this patch, we've overhauled much of the network code to optimize the data sent between the server and clients, and we've upgraded all of the networking libraries we use to their newest versions to implement all the hard work done by our external partners.

[\* We use Unity's Netcode for GameObjects for any of you curious devs \*]

Some of the issues we aim to improve with these changes:

* General lag when performing actions like rolling
* More stable connections between clients and server
* Resolving issues with some users not being able to play at all

Additionally, this is completing some of the foundational work required to implement future features like spectator mode and porting to mobile platforms.

As an example of one of the major improvements we've made, I want to explain how we've reduced the amount of data being sent when cards are sent from the server to the client.

Before this patch, whenever we created or updated a card we would send the complete card to the players which contains this data:

```
[Card - Previous(Robin Wood)]
Display Name - Robin Wood
ID - SBB_CHARACTER_ROBINWOOD
Cost - 6
CardType - Character
Tribes - Good, Treant
Base Attack - 7
Base Health - 10
Current Attack - 7
Current Health - 10
CardText -"Ranged. At the start of each brawl, give the strongest enemy -15 Attack, and your weakest character +15 Attack."
ArtId - SBB_CHARACTER_ROBINWOOD
Keywords - Ranged
....

```

Sending the whole card was a useful starting point because it allowed the game server to be completely responsible for the construction of cards, but much of this data rarely or never changes during a game. Strings like the game text and the card ID also creates very large payloads of data for each card. Given the complexity of our brawls, players can be sent hundreds to thousands of these updates during EACH brawl, so optimizing this data was a big focus.

In this patch, instead the client and server have an agreed upon set of card templates that removes the need to send the unchanging card values. The new card data looks like this example:

```
[Card - New(Robin Wood)]
TemplateID - 145
Cost - 6
CardType - [REMOVED]
Tribes - Good, Treant
Base Attack - [REMOVED]
Base Health - [REMOVED]
Current Attack - 7
Current Health - 10
CardText -[REMOVED]
ArtId - [OPTIONAL]
Keywords - Ranged
.....

```

This change, along with others like sending smaller numeric types for values like cost should massively reduce the data we are sending across the wire. We hope these upgrades improve your enjoyment of Storybook Brawl, but given the scope of these changes and the difficulty testing every network scenario some may be negatively impacted. We certainly aren't done improving and optimizing the game, and will be working hard to provide a great experience for everyone.

### Bug Fixes

* Fixed: Loki and Genie's Wish casting XP spells at level 6
* Fixed: As Peter Pants, If you have lonely prince in your shop and buy a princess, an additional +1/+1 stack is being added to frog prince after the transformation.
* Fixed: Mousing over enemy characters no longer increases your odds of attacking them. (This was a joke; this was never a bug.)
* Fixed: Click and hold without releasing finger off the click causes button to be pressed when mouse is moved away from button and finger is released
* Fixed: If Lonely Prince is added to your shop because your hand is full and you would buy a princess upon transforming into the frog prince its cost will revert back to 2
* Fixed: Black Prism doesn't cast on all characters if the spell was cast from hand