Hello everyone!

Its the new year and also the start of the next phase of development! Since beginning the project I have planned to break EA into 3 separate, year long blocks. The first block which is now complete was all about rewriting and revising the existing content and mechanics from RFIII to get it in line with my new vision for the game. The block we are now starting will be devoted almost entirely to growing the game and pushing out new content. This is going to be the real meat of development in which I'm intending to build most of the actual game. The final year of development then will be left entirely to polishing, balancing and refining everything. So I intend to move pretty fast and loose this year and just try to get as much content onto the table as possible given that I'll have that last year to actually fix it all up.

Major Year Goals:

• Zones 3 Entirely new zones. The goal is to have 4 x wilderness, 4 x Branch-1 and 4 x Branch-2.
• Bosses A new boss in every single zones + reworking a lot of the existing bosses into more elaborate fights. This should bring the total boss count up to 48.
• Sub-Zones Almost every boss should have an associated sub-zone that replaces a level or two of the dungeon before their boss level. These sub-zones will have their own unique monsters, level assets, graphics etc. which are carried into the boss room. Some bosses may share a sub-zone if they have similar themes so we should end up with something like 40 or so sub-zones. This is primary way in which new content will be added to the dungeon.
• Classes and Races I'd like to get at least 2 new classes and 2 new races added this year. The eventual goal is to get 15 each but this will probably have to wait until the final year.
• Items Approximately 60-70 new items which would bring the total over 400.
• A massive expansion / major rewrite of Vaults-of-Yendor and the Yendor fight itself which are starting to show their age.

New Zones Plan:

The Sunken Sea which is being added with this update will become the 4th wilderness zone. The Under Grove will be moved to Branch-1 and have a bunch of storm themed enemies added building on the Corrupted-Druids. I think the idea of storms works nicely with all the fast moving enemies already in this zone and it finally completes the 4 element balance in Branch-1.

Some of the monsters that don't quite fit the enchanted forest vibe (jaguars, spiders, elephants, gorillas etc.) will be moved into a new Jungle themed zone that will take its place as the wilderness zone.

Finally I want to do a sort of lost world/wasteland zone in Branch-2 full of dinosaurs, giant insects and a race of shamanic lizard men inhabiting lost temples. All of this taken together would give us 4 x wilderness, 4 x branch-1 and 4 x branch-2.

Update 1.21

New Zone: The Sunken Sea:

Obviously bringing a new zone up to the level of those that have already existed for years is not really possible so this should be taken as a first draft or initial sketch of what this zone should eventually include. The bosses in particular are really just place holders until I get the time to do some more elaborate fights.

The main challenge in this zone will be all the water (see changes to water mechanics below). Other then that I've tried to keep the monster abilities relatively simple since this is such an early game zone.

Monsters:

• Sea-Gull: the basic swarm enemy with Swoop to close distance.
• Crab: Melee-Attack, Armored and Scuttle (moves quickly horizontally).
• Hermit-Crab: Melee-Attack, Armored, Grab, Slow Moving.
• Oyster: basic range enemy that also has a stronger melee attack. Slow movement but fast swimming.
• Urchin: basic range attack and an AoE spine burst. Damage Shield.
• Shark: fast swimming with a powerful melee attack. I'd like to get some additional AI where he will submerge and move away from the player if he cannot reach him on land. Should probably also go berserk when passing through blood.
• Squid: Melee-Attack, Tentacle-Pull and shoots ink that blinds the player (reduce vision). Now that blind is working it should probably be included in a few other places in the dungeon.
• Monkey: Melee-Attack, Jump, Steals the players when and runs away with it.
• Pirate-Melee: basic melee unit.
• Pirate-Range: basic range unit.
• Pirate-Bomb: a tankier range unit that throws delayed blast bombs.
• Pirate-Duelist: melee unit with lunge.
• Pirate-Minstrel: the support unit.
• Pirate-Sharp-Shooter: stronger range unit with sniper mode.
• Mermaid-Melee: slow moving on land but fast swimmer.
• Mermaid-Archer: slow moving on land but fast swimmer.
• Mermaid-Priestess: just using the basic priest ability set but should probably get some sort of offensive spell based on water or storms or something.
• Mermaid-Huntress: Spear-Attack and a 1-Range Net
• Siren: Charms the player so he cannot move away.

Bosses:

• Pirate Boss: Currently implemented as a basic melee boss but the plan is to have some sort of fight where he is controlling cannons on a ship or fort. The-Sunken-Sea turns into a pirate town/fort sub-zone when this boss is generated.
• Mermaid High Priestess: A priestess that summons sharks. Should also eventually get some sort of offensive spell based on water or storms. This fight should take place in or around water. The-Sunken-Sea turns into sea caves when this boss is generated.

Major Stuff:

No Water Sprinting:

A pretty major change to the games mechanics that I've been thinking about ever since Centaur got implemented. While this makes the game quite a bit more difficult my primary motivation is the degree to which it increases the games tactical complexity. Water (liquids really) is probably the most common form of walkable terrain besides plain floor. I would guess that something like 10-20% of all passable tiles are some form of liquid. Until now, liquid has mostly just been big patches of unstable terrain with only niche interactions with lightning and fire.

By removing sprinting or any type of fast movement across liquids we drastically increase the movement/positioning complexity of fights in a very simple and intuitive way. This is my favorite way to add complexity to the game i.e. taking some very common element we already have and adding a very obvious, discrete game changing new layer of depth to it. This drastically changes the way that we need to plan our fights across terrain.

As mentioned above, the added difficulty is the side effect of adding this depth not the goal so I'll be working to keep the game balanced by adding more player power in other places throughout development. The current place I'm most looking to do this is increasing the power of items/equipment as I think its quite interesting for these to be powerful and game changing given the random nature of drops.

The details of this change to liquids are:

• Player cannot sprint or use any movement abilities (charge, dash-attack etc.) while standing in a liquid.
• Levitation obviously allows this.
• Monster movement abilities like lunge and scuttle do not work in liquid.
• Fast moving monsters will move at normal speed in liquids (unless they are specifically fast swimmers).
• You cannot Jump, Lunge, or Disengage when standing in water.

Optional Level Requirements for Class Talents:

This is an experimental change to talents in the same spirit as the recent changes (and then revert) to talent attribute requirements. I'm not necessarily sold on this so feedback here is greatly appreciated.

The idea is the players core class talents are also unlocked by simply leveling up with the level requirement set to be a little bit behind where you'd get them if you were putting all your talent points into them. What this does is massively open up character building so that you can try all sorts of different character builds and still be assured of having access (eventually) to your core talent set. The current levels (might be a bit too lenient) are 12Req = XL4, 14Req = XL8 and 16Req = XL12.

Without this change it has always felt pretty much mandatory to put all of your optional talent points into your core attribute, at least until you've unlocked most or all of your talents. You were quite heavily punished for trying to build any sort of hybrid character, especially in the early game where you could easily find yourself unable to upgrade any talents. With this change you can quite easily start say a caster and just push all your points into strength, grab every melee talent and piece of equipment you find and still be assured of eventually accessing your core talents, creating a proper caster/tank hybrid.

No Player Level Cap:

Technically this is a simply reverting the player level cap to 16 but since I haven't changed the experience rates this should never be actually reachable. The primary motivator for this is to give the player some small rewards as they work their way through Vault-of-Yendor which is the hardest, potentially grindiest part of the game. I find it a bit demoralizing to work through this with no rewards at all.

Its unlikely that this will make a major difference to the overall balance of the game since generally your trying to avoid combat as much as possible in Yendor but its still nice to get some reward for your effort and perhaps an extra talent point before the final fight. So this is a change that 'feels' better without actually upsetting any game balance. A win/win in my view.

An unexpected bonus to this change is that the aggressive use of experience potions and fountains (taking big risks and playing fast) is actually now very rewarding as this would allow you to reach a higher final character level. I'm even considering making these more powerful or more plentiful or otherwise tweaking this mechanic to make it more of its own little mini-game. Also while this doesn't make non-clearing runs harder it does essentially make them more impressive as the player is giving up even more potential character power.

Minor Stuff:

Strength HP:

Raised HP gained for each point of Strength 8HP => 10HP (12HP => 15HP for Ogres). Amongst experienced players Strength is pretty solidly the weakest of the attributes and so a bit of a buff is warranted. I highly doubt a few extra HP will change the balance much.

Where it does help is for newer players for whom Strength is actually a very useful attribute to stack due to allowing for more mistakes. So this change helps out newer players without really effecting higher level play.

Mechanics:

• Healing-Shroom and Energy-Shroom are about half as likely to spawn in patches. For Energy-Shrooms in particular they were drastically more useful for classes using cool-downs as they could reset cool-downs multiple times in a single patch. Total number of shrooms in a level is unchange.
• Increased the Energy-Shroom MP/SP restore from 25% => 35% (ex. 12MP => 15MP @35 Max MP). This along with the change above pushes the Energy-Shroom balance more in favor of mana casters.
• Allies will no longer shoot the player if he is in the way (they just won't shoot).

Talents:

Continuing to chip away at the Rangers absolute dominance. Looking at the damage bonuses on his talents they are just crazy compared to every other class with weapon talents. The ranger imo should really have some of the lowest base damage in the game to make up for his range and mobility. Even with these changes his talents still have larger or equal bonuses to all the melee talents.\

• Power-Shot (Base) +6DMG => +4DMG
• Power-Shot (Damage) +9DMG => +6DMG
• Tunnel-Shot (Base) +4DMG => +2DMG
• Tunnel-Shot (Damage) +6DMG => +4DMG
• Tunnel-Shot (Fast) will restore 1SP for every enemy hit after the first (a buff)
• Spectral-Shield: Range 3 => 5
• Lightning-Bolt (Short-Damage): 15DMG => 12DMG and 50% damage Point-Blank instead of at Tip. This was just way to generally useful of a spell that could carry the entire game practically by itself.

Bugs and Crashes:

• Leaving a branch via the exit portal will now update the mini-map
• Blazing Cloak causes a crash when killing a summoner and his summoned in the same turn.
• Auto equipping a charm with [E] was throwing an error.

Thats it for this update! Plan for the next one is to push out another bunch of items and possibly tackle a sub-zone or two or possibly do one of the bosses I already have planned out. As mentioned at the top I'm gonna be trying to pick up the pace a bit this year since I've got a lot of content to get through. Luckily a lot of this already exists on paper or as ideas and so its just a matter of cranking it all out.

Hope you all enjoy the update, looking forward to hearing your feedback!