Hello everyone! This is the first of what I intend to be a whole series of updates continuing up to the end of the year focused on cleaning up and polishing the entire game. This is basically a mid-project checkpoint in which I'm going to try to make sure that everything that has been added so far is as stable, balanced, polished and complete as possible.

I've been thinking of the overall development plan as being roughly broken into 3 stages with a fair bit of overlap. Stage 1 was implementing all of the new major features and changes that I had planned way back when I was initially planning out the project. This was always going to be a rough first pass with the assumption that I'd be going over the same ground multiple times over the course of the project. We basically completed this stage around the time that the new talent system was implemented.

Stage 2 is really the bulk of development and simply consists of pumping out a ton of new content. New zones, sub-zones, bosses, enemies, classes, races, talents, items etc. etc. We've been in this stage for a few months now and the plan is for pretty much the entirety of next year to be devoted to this sort of work. The final stage is simply the final balancing, polishing, and debugging along with adding in whatever additional features, game modes or 'extra stuff' that seems appropriate.

Since we're still roughly at the transition point between stage 1 and 2 and since the end of the year makes a nice cut off point (which happens to also be roughly the anniversary of the games EA launch) I figured it would be a good idea to do a great big clean up push. Hence the upcoming series of updates.

Clean Up Focus:

I've got 4 main areas that I plan to focus on for these updates.

First is simply cleaning up as many bugs and crashes as I possibly can. This is really the main priority as I'd like to go into the new year with the game as bug and crash free as possible. There are a ton of lingering bugs that are likely going to take a lot of work to fix that I'm not likely to get to during the normal development cycle when my attention is elsewhere. Though its unlikely to happen, the theoretical goal is to completely clear out the bugs-and-crashes forums both here on Steam and in the Discord.

Second area of focus is to tackle all the little user-interface, quality-of-life, and in game descriptions that are currently missing. A ton of content and mechanics have been added that are not really properly documented in game and I'd like to clean this up as much as possible. There is a ton of stuff that, unless you've been following these rambling update posts, you would never know about. I'd like to go into the new year with all of the games existing systems and mechanics clearly and concisely displayed to the player.

Next is a rough pass of balancing over all of the existing classes, talents and races. This is not intended to be anything close to final balance, especially since a ton of stuff still needs to be added but I'd like to at least give what we've currently got a good, quick clean up and smooth out the most obvious rough edges. I'll be making a series of posts both here on Steam and in Discord in the following weeks to gather some feedback for this balancing.

The final thing I'm planning to focus on is to make sure all of the existing level generators are actually 'complete'. I've moved away from having a few big, general purpose, generators towards a giant mess of small, specialized generators that each requires its own totally unique set of map segments. Many of these generators only have the bare minimum of these map segments and in the next few months I plan to complete all of these. Going into the new year when I get back into adding a ton of new sub-zones with their associated level-generators I want to have all of the existing generators content complete.

So that's the basic plan for the next few months. I'm sure there will be a bunch of other stuff that slips in but really the goal is just to get everything cleaned up so that I can start the new year with a really solid, stable and complete foundation.

Update 1.15:

Level Generation:

I'm pretty sure this is something like 200-300 new vaults so expect to see a bunch of new layouts as your playing through the dungeon.

• Upper-Template-Tunnel: completed vaults
• Upper-Template-Mine: 2 x Boss Vaults
• Swamp-Template-Fence-Maze: completed vaults
• Desert-Template-Rock-Pit: completed vaults (added mud pits)
• Orc-Template-Gym: completed vaults
• Palace-Template-Pool: completed vaults
• Core-Template-Lava-Islands: completed vaults
• Ice-Template-Ravine: completed vaults (allowed the whole level to rotate)
• Clock-Template-Warehouse: completed vaults
• Clock-Template-Engine-Room: completed vaults
• Grove-Template-Lake: a new generator w/ full set of vaults

User Interface:

• Added white 'L' glyph to levitation
• Make Life-Spikes glyph same green as poison.
• Show ranked modifiers on win/lose screen
• Made dialog window scale to fit larger text (will be useful in the future)
• Added race to game records
• Allow the player to cancel the descend to Yendor message when you have 2 runes
• For timed ranked games show time at top of screen as Current/Total
• Added turn countdown for Ice-Bomb and Bone-Bomb in their description
• Option to toggle smooth movement w/ keyboard
• Mud Color on mini-map
• Blade-Glyph, Force-Glyph descriptions

Bugs and Crashes:

• Fixed: AoE Confusion could not be cast on top of fences and other low objects (possibly other spells as well).
• Clouds will no longer cast atop players (this may have already been fixed, just confirmed by testing).
• Fixed: many bosses that were previously fearable were not b/c I made them all never flee from battle which was using the same tag as fear resistance. These tags have now been seperated.
• Fixed: Enemy invis can be bypassed with auto-attack.
• Fixed: Darkness can be bypassed with auto-attack.
• Range attacks will only charge the weapon if they hit enemies (Tunnel-Shot and Storm-Shot now charges for each enemy hit)/
• Fixed fence tiles in swamp having odd missing bits.
• Deadly-Melee ranked modifier will now increase melee enemies HP in the same way that the other Deadly modifiers work. This only counts melee enemies with no other tank i.e. tank, swarm etc.
• Game time will no longer appear to keep ticking when checking equipment after win/loss.
• Enemies will no longer summon totems onto traps.
• Polar-Worms will now burrow again.
• Click-Clock-Keeps floor grates were not flipping their frames correctly.

Balance:

• Arcane-Force-Floors Level has 1 less portal as this was taking a bit to long.
• Hunger deals 1DMG on first turn instead of 5DMG and then scales up as before.
• Energy-Shrooms will no longer reset the timer on item abilities.
• Poison Yendors Eel duration 15DUR => 10DUR as he was significantly harder than the other versions.

Conclusion:

That's it for this update. The plan is to get these updates out a bit more frequently since they won't be including any major new sub-zone, class or system that needs a bunch of tweaking / testing. As mentioned above I'll be opening up some threads to discuss current class, talent and race balance in a few weeks after I've gotten through a bit more of my bugs-and-crashes list.

Thank you everyone for your continued feedback, support and enthusiasm!

Justin