Hello everyone!

I've been working a bit slower these past few weeks, trying to ease myself out of the whole I've dug myself into. Regardless, this next update actually ended up being a pretty big one with a bunch of interesting new content. Its been a little over a year since I really started this project in earnest and I think we are at a sort of transition point here.

The first year was all about reworking the existing systems from RFIII and adding the foundations of all the new stuff that I had planned. The combat got heavily overhauled to put a much larger emphasis on special abilities and movement. A lot of balancing was done to make different builds more viable and I think things are generally in a pretty good place now. Level-Gen was almost completely replaced across the board to create smaller, tighter, more tactically significant layouts. Finally the entire ranked mode and tiered talent tree systems were added.

With all this groundwork now established, the second year of development should be able to focus almost exclusively on adding an absolute mountain of content to the game. This will include a continued focus on adding sub-zones with all their associated new content and mechanics as well as adding at least 2-3 entirely new zones. I want to get at least 5 new classes in the game and probably an equal number of new races. I'd also like to continue to rework all the existing boss encounters and add at least 1-2 more for each major zone. New items, equipment, and misc enemies will also be added along the way.

I'm planning on moving a bit more fast and loose in this phase and focusing on just getting a ton of ideas on the table. I'd rather not agonize over every single new enemy, mechanic, talent etc. and rather just get them implemented and see how they play out. The 3rd and final year will be devoted to polishing and refining everything and so I'll be waiting until then to really call anything 'complete'. With all this being said, obviously these are just rough 'themes' for each year of development and I'll be bouncing around a lot but I think it helps to at least have a rough overarching objective for each development phase.

THE OGRE CAVES:

Immediately following the initial implementation of The-Ogre-Caves last update, we ended up having a great discussion in Discord in which, after a bunch of back and forth, a much more interesting and thematically unified version of The-Ogre-Caves emerged centered around the idea of the Earth element. I may revisit the sub-zone itself at some point to push this concept a bit harder but for now I've completely reworked the boss fight with Thurg-The-Earth-Shaman.

MUD:
Mud has been added as a tile-type and it acts as an unstable liquid that also slows the players movement speed and prevents sprinting or movement based abilities. This mud now replaces all the pits that were previously in The-Ogre-Caves.

SUMMON MUD POOL:
Thurg can now summon pools of this mud directly below the players feet. Over the course of the fight, more and more of the arena will get turned into mud making positioning and moving a real challenge.

SUMMON MUD BALL:
Thurg now summons large, rolling balls of mud directly out of a nearby mud pool which then travel as slow projectiles until they either hit someone (dealing damage) or hit a wall. In either case they burst and create a mud golem.

MUD GOLEM:
Mud golems have SLOW movement speed but will move at NORMAL speed when in mud. They are healed if they take fire damage and will leave a pool of mud when they are killed.

THE DARK TEMPLE:

The final sub-zone (for now) in The Palace of Shadow leading up to the High-Priestess boss. Quite a bit of coding went into this one as we now have a proper darkness mechanic which is really quite neat. Some of you may have gotten a totally intentional sneak peak at this during one of the hot-fixes :P

How this mechanic works is that, when in The-Dark-Temple, any time you gain agro the entire level will alternate between darkness and light. When the level is dark, the player will only be able to see the tiles around him and tiles directly adjacent to a light source. The player will need to remember or guess the positions of enemies or else kite them into one of the pools of light.

In order to facilitate shooting into the darkness I've changed the controls so that right clicking will always fire a projectile at the selected tile regardless of if there is an enemy there or not. I've adjusted a number of abilities to be able to target any tile though there are still some that are missing this change.

Other abilities I'm not really sure how to handle. The biggest question is something like Charge. Anyone have any ideas of how to handle this? If charge can simply target any tile then it turns into a really long 1SP sprint. Do we simply prohibit charging and lunging into darkness? I think almost all of the abilities its easy to just allow them to 'miss' but the movement targeted ones are a bit more tricky.

NEW MONSTERS:
Some tricky coding this week to handle darkness/invis so not as much time to get totally new monsters added. Mostly just going for a healer theme here. The invisibility mechanic took a fair bit of work to get implemented and is a nice addition to the game so will definitely be used on more monsters in the future.

• Sister-of-Shadow: Poison-Melee and Invisibility which she can turn on and off and makes her completely invisible unless she is adjacent to the player. Range attacks can now target any tile so you can hit her with these and trying to move into her invisible tile will simply trigger a melee attack.
• Dark-Elf-Chorister: effectively the same as the orc drummers with a spell blocking Screech, Haste and a group heal.
• Dark-Elf-Battle-Priest: same as the orc battle priest.

NEW CLASS: SUMMONER:

This is the first rough stab at a summoner class and so should be taken as such. I'm sure this will change quite a bit throughout development. As per the 'fast and loose' phase above, I'm planning on adding new classes and races somewhat regularly going forward and trusting that the details will work themselves out given enough time. Similar to how I'll be treating talent upgrades, I may even end up adding more classes than are really necessary and just cutting anything that doesn't look like its working out.

This first draft is based around him, well, summoning things, but specifically summoning temporary spectral minions as opposed to the necromancers permanent skeletons. I'd like to see him sort of building up his minions like pieces on a chess board for each encounter with each summon filling a specific role.

Each minion type currently has an upgrade that allows the summoner to trigger an ability on the minion by clicking on it which uses a turn. I'm not really 'feeling' any of the ones currently implemented but at least the mechanic is now implemented so we can try out different ideas in future updates. Suggestions for these triggered abilities are very welcome.

The Spectral-Weapon also has an upgrade that changes the nature of the summon so this is also a mechanic we can play around with where the summoner may have access to quite a wide range of different summon types through the upgrade system.

SPECTRAL WEAPON:
Summons a Spectral-Blade that moves towards and attacks the nearest target. Summoning the weapon will agro nearby enemies so that you can use this spell to initiate a fight (otherwise your minion would start walking back to you until the target is agroed in some other way).

• Upgrade (Power): raises the level of the summon, increasing its damage and health.
• Upgrade (Spear): turns the blade into a spear that can attack 2 tiles away
• Upgrade (Cyclone-Strike): allows the summoner to trigger a Cyclone-Strike

SPECTRAL SHIELD:
Summons a Spectral-Shield that is stationary and cannot attack but can soak up a lot of damage. This replaces the Enchanters Mirror-Image spell and he has reverted back to Enchant-Item for now.

• Upgrade (Power): raises the level of the summon, increasing its damage and health.
• Upgrade (Long): increases the duration of the summon (placeholder that will be replaced)
• Upgrade (Magnetic-Pull): can trigger to pull enemies towards the shield. An idea that doesn't really seem that useful in practice. I'm sure we can come up with something better.

SPECTRAL ORB:
Summons a Spectral-Orb that is stationary and attacks enemies with a powerful ranged attack. Literally a reskinned Flaming-Battle-Sphere. The Fire-Mage has a new ability (see below)

• Upgrade (Power): raises the level of the summon, increasing its damage and health.
• Upgrade (Long): increases the duration of the summon (placeholder that will be replaced)
• Upgrade (Arcane-Bolt): can trigger to create a damaging bolt between the orb and the player. Again doesn't seem very useful in practice. Suggestions welcome!

SUMMON ITEM:
Summons Scrolls-of-Acquirement. I'm planning on reworking the acquirement menu in general to make it a bit easier to get an item you actually want ex. allowing selection of armor by slot.

SOME IDEAS AND NOTES:

• Upgrades that allow the player to summon multiple minions in a single turn. Might be especially useful for the weaker Spectral-Weapons.
• Upgrades that allow the player to summon without ending his turn so he can setup the 'board' more cleanly. There would need to be some sort of limit here I think.
• Alternate versions like the Sword => Blade upgrade should be considered for all of these. A shield that can attack, an orb that fires shorter range bolts or just repeatedly AoEs?
• I'm sure we can come up with more interesting triggered abilities. These may need additional restrictions such as only once per minion or possibly requiring mana depending on how strong they are.
• The reason I wanted to go with temporary summons for this iteration is that the player actually gets to place his summons for each fight rather than just having a blob of minions that bum rush the nearest target.
• I think either the multi-summon or no-turn summon will be important to allow the summoner to actually place enough minions quickly enough to make this whole idea work.

WALL OF FIRE:
Since the Summoner is taking the Orb from the Fire-Mage this is the new ability I'm trying out for his Tier-3 talent. You select a start point and an end point and a wall of flaming clouds is created. I've left the targeting very permissive for now (it is a tier-3 ability) and based on my limited testing this is actually quite a powerful ability. First, it blocks projectiles and so you can totally shut down groups of archers by placing it in front of them. Second and more importantly it synergizes with Burst-of-Flame since you can trigger it off of the flaming clouds.

I was initially planning on having the wall work in such a way that it was thick (3x3) if you made it 3 tiles long and then would stretch and thin out the longer you made it but based on my testing the current version is already very strong so I'll leave it as is for now. Overall I think its at least as strong if not stronger than Flaming-Battle-Sphere, synergizes better with the rest of his kit and is just thematically more appropriate for the class.

TALENTS:

Just continuing to try various ideas.

• Fire-Ball (Knock-Back): 1-Tile knockback on edges 12DMG => 8DMG
• Discord (AoE): replaces PBAoE with a standard AoE that has no damage component
• Life-Spike (Bolt): Replace projectile with a short 3-Range bolt
• Charge (Free): No SP Cost
• Freezing cloud deals damage on the turn it is casted. It felt odd that enemies could walk right through this without taking damage if they move on the turn its casted. It still seems somewhat odd now that they are double damaged when standing still. The targeting on this is pretty restrictive which is sort of a theme for the Ice-Mage so I'm trying to get it to feel stronger in general.

CLOSING THOUGHTS:

That's it for this update. I'm planning on spending at least the next week doing another one of those standard clean-up updates and try to fix as many lingering bugs and little issues as I can before moving on. I'll be hitting up a number of different sub-zones with the next major update likely spread across the branches. Thank you everyone for your continue support and enthusiasm!

Justin