[p]Hello everyone![/p][p]We have just passed the midpoint of development. A year and a half down and a year and a half to go! I think its a good time to do one of those 'house keeping' updates focused on clearing off as many bugs, crashes, easy fixes, small tweaks, balancing etc. So this will be one of those 'rolling' updates in which I'll be releasing multiple hot-fixes and just listing them sequentially in this announcement.[/p][p]In terms of what comes after this update. The plan is to focus the rest of the year on implementing the most important new content I'd still like to get in the game. This will leave the entirety of 2026 to purely focus on user-interface, game modes, polishing, balancing, quality of life, art, music etc. I know there's already a ton of stuff piled up that fits into this 'polish' phase which is why I had planned right from the beginning of the project to devote a full third of development time to focus on it completely.[/p][p]The content I still want to get through by years end:[/p]

• [p]An entirely new zone for the Fortress/Palace tier giving us at least 3 zones for every zone pool.[/p]
• [p]3 x new bosses for Branch-II. This gives us at least 3 bosses for every zone. Of course the new Zone-3 would also need 3 bosses so… that's a lot of bosses to make. There are also plenty of older bosses that could use a rework but I'll save that for year 3.[/p]
• [p]2 x entirely new classes. An adventurer class is already planned for the 3rd with randomized starting talents. I'd also like to get something like 10-20 general 'classless' talents into the game. I've got quite a few of these already in my notes.[/p]
• [p]At least 50 new Vault-of-Yendor levels. Mostly focusing on more unique and gimmicky things. We have a pretty solid general pool it would be good to have lots of rare but weird ones as well.[/p]
• [p]A complete, ground up rebuild of the Yendor boss fight itself. Definitely need to rework the various phases we already have and I'd like to ideally have another 5 more for a total of 10 possible versions.[/p]

[p]So its still a pretty substantial amount of work but I think it should be manageable. This will then give me an entire year to just focus on making everything as perfect and refined as possible.[/p][p][/p]

UPDATE 1.29:

Duelist:

[p]Plenty of discussion on the duelist in Discord. Still have some additional things to implement and try out. Our main goal here is to really focus the duelists kit around maximizing movement and multiple attacks rather than raw damage output. In my opinion, non of his abilities should individually deal a lot of damage.[/p][p]Disengage:[/p]

• [p]Disengage (Leap): moves 2 tiles backwards[/p]

[p]Lunge:[/p]

• [p]Lunge (Base): 4DMG => 2DMG. Not sure about this one since its Tier-2 but previously is had the same damage as Power-Strike which is odd to me.[/p]
• [p]Lunge (Damage): removed as I don't want him to even have the option of maxing damage with his core talents.[/p]
• [p]Lunge (Fast): 2CD => 1CD. This replaces damage and probably lets him actually deal more damage over time but at expense of lining up attacks and speed points (perfect duelist gameplay).[/p]

[p]Dash Attack:[/p]

• [p]Dash-Attack (Damage): removed with same reasoning as above.[/p]
• [p]Dash-Attack (SP-Restore): restores 1SP for each enemy hit. Effectively gives duelist a 10CD restore SP ability. If this is too strong then this might be a good place to do 4DMG => 0DMG. So player is deciding to give up damage in exchange for more SP.[/p]
• [p]Dash-Attack (Extended): 4Range => 6Range. Makes Dash-Attack an S-Tier movement ability. As long as you can hit at least one enemy you effectively have a 'blink' on cool-down.[/p]
• [p]Dash-Attack (Fast): similar to lunge, this is effectively a way to get more damage but still playing into the duelists core theme of positioning and SP usage.[/p]

[p]Strafe Attack:[/p][p]Major changes here as the old Strafe-Attack was pretty wonky. I think the main problem with Strafe-Attack-1 was that almost no one actually played around it. It mostly just boiled down to: randomly deal some damage every few turns as you are otherwise moving. Strafe-Attack-2 was just broken in the sense that it invalidates the rest of Duelists kit by letting him transform ALL of his SP into a single turn nuke. Random brought the changes below up but I believe this was from a much larger discussion thread so thanks everyone who contributed![/p]

• [p]Strafe-Attack (Base): once per turn, the player will perform the old strafe-attack while sprinting with SP. So same mechanic but the player is intentionally performing the attack.[/p]
• [p]The game now highlights the target you will attack when you hold shift to sprint. This changes based on where you are moving towards so you can actually predict and play around this.[/p]
• [p]Strafe-Attack (Multi): 2 strafe attacks per turn. We can play with the number but this prevents it from becoming a single turn 'nuke'.[/p]
• [p]Strafe-Attack (SP-Restore): restores 1SP on kill shot, effectively making the sprint free.[/p]

[p]Precision:[/p]

• [p]Elemental Penetration: all attacks ignore enemy resistance. Probably an S-Tier talent for any casters dealing with same element zones or enemies.[/p]

Bugs and Crashes:

[p]Slowly working my way through the back log on these. This stuff is so funny. Sometimes its like a one line fix other times its a crazy deep dive into 5 different files tracing some mysterious exact 'stars align' condition. I'm one of those slightly crazy people that finds bug fixing strangely satisfying :P[/p]

• [p](Bug) Slow-Poison-Arrows (ex Spitting-Viper) will no longer apply poison damage if the player is Invulnerable. Let me know if there are other cases of detrimental status effects being applied while invulnerable.[/p]
• [p](Bug) Skeleton-Warden will not revive skeletons if he is dominated.[/p]
• [p](Bug) The Clockwork Sentry was spawning shredders even when not facing you. This was a fun one. Old legacy code still had the preset, randomized mob spawn tiles tagged with IDs. Sentry uses ID tagged tiles to determine if the player is in its LoS. So this was occurring when the player was standing on the now empty tile where a mob had spawned with the same ID as where the sentry was looking. Fun times :P[/p]
• [p](Bug) Slime Tank slimes will no longer give EXP (otherwise can be farmed infinitely).[/p]
• [p](Bug) Stone Tuned armor will now correctly activate when adjacent to walls.[/p]
• [p](Bug) Circlet-Of-Wind has now been added to drop tables. I must have missed it at some point.[/p]
• [p](Bug) Manfred the Minotaur is now guaranteed to spawn even if his hatch is blocked when starting the fight. Will just flood to find the nearest open tile so that the fight is no unbeatable.[/p]
• [p](Bug) Hover Over Talent: bounding box was not correct. The description showed one talent but click choose the other. [/p]
• [p](Bug) Blink-Shroom (NPC) and Blink-Ally: the guy being blinked must now have clear LoS to the destination tile.[/p]
• [p](Bug) Blink-Shroom (NPC) and Blink-Ally: now uses path distance instead of standard line distance to get as close as possible to player. There was an edge case where you could have a wall separating you and he'd blink close to you but behind the wall which actually increased the distance he'd have to walk to get in range.[/p]
• [p] (Bug) NPC onHit blink (think blink frogs) should work even when immobilized or stunned (its like an innate thing).[/p]
• [p](Bug) onHit blink for Iron-Imps is now set at 50% same as Blink-Frogs.[/p]
• [p](Bug) Fixed Palace-of-Shadow vault that had a wall on a glyph door. Wasn't even a bug. The vault literally had that tile placed there by mistake.[/p]
• [p](Bug) Reverted the delayed shout on enemies. Problem it was fixing was tiny. Causes more problems than its worth.[/p]
• [p](Bug) Fixed trees and stalagmite spawning on top of Ice-Statues in an Ice-Caves level.[/p]
• [p](Bug) Fire-Ball now longer allows you to target solid objects which would just eat the Fire-Ball. I assume I broke this when implementing some of the upgrades awhile back.[/p]

[p][/p]

Misc Stuff:

• [p]Added an 'Are you sure?' dialog popup when trying to esc/close the menu for Fairy level based enchantments. I really don't want to just give them Enchantment-Scrolls as they are guaranteed to be saved until end game at which point all Fairys will always have max enchanted equipment.[/p]
• [p]Dominating an enemy will now make them shout to, and I quote Random595, "prevent ridiculous kidnapping strategies."[/p]
• [p]Enemies knocked by Burst-of-Wind will also agro, again, to "prevent ridiculous kidnapping strategies." Random595: Tough on Crime 2025.[/p]
• [p]Worked a bunch on The-Mess-Hall level generator from The-Orc-Fortress just adding a bunch of fun assets and text and stuff. Will be doing this alongside the debugging for various generators just to give myself a bit of a change of pace. The last Lore update included an incredible duct tape hack that has allowed me to use items that are flagged to never pick up as decoration. So I can put 'stuff' on tables, shelves, really anything. I can now stack at least 2 objects on top of each other without having to rewrite the whole tile/object system.[/p]

[p]That's it for now. As I said at the top I'll be posting fairly regular hot-fixes to this announcement for the next few weeks as I try to make some progress on bugs-and-crashes. We are discussing some talent and class balancing as well right now in Discord so expect to see some more work on the Duelist and probably another class or two.[/p]