Permanent Upgrades

Since the last preview post we've been wrapping up work on the remaining elements of the first 3 areas of Beneath which make up the main branch that leads to the first boss and run end. This included setting up the interface for purchasing permanent upgrades and having those upgrades both work and save both locally and to the Steam Cloud. Another change in Beneath is that instead of pressing a button to drop weapons, that button will store and swap weapons so that you can hold 2 weapons at a time and swap between them. This will allow you to save more powerful weapons you've purchased or found for when you really need them. This feature, as well as many of the permanent upgrade options, required having an icon for the weapons you'll find in Beneath. To achieve this we have a process that renders every weapon to an texture in white and from a recognisable perspective and places them in particular positions on a texture atlas. Some of the auto-generated weapon icons
Many of the permanent upgrades are to unlock the ability to find superior weapons in future runs in Beneath. One important element we've considered that we've found to be a negative element of similar upgrades in other Rogue-Lite games is that unlocking more weapons will reduce the likelihood that other powerful weapons you've unlocked will spawn. This is because the range of weapons the procedural level generator can select from has increased. In Beneath we've made sure that every unlockable weapon will always have a consistent random percentage chance to be found in the world and as you unlock more weapons only the lesser weapons of the default range of weapons will then be found more rarely. Other upgrades include things like permanently improving stats for all classes, upgrades to starting weapons and shields, unlocking additional beneficial unique random encounters or increasing the durability of all weapons. Swapping between 2 weapons

Giant Mage

Besides finishing the boss enemies for Beneath which is still to come, we've about wrapped up the last remaining big feature (besides bosses most work from here is related to tweaking/polishing/etc) which was the most complicated enemy in the game, the Giant Mage. We won't show and spoil too much about this enemy because they have a lot of impressive abilities that will be much more fun to discover in game. The main thing that makes them a complicated enemy to create though is their interaction with other enemies. The class hierarchy will be pretty clear when you encounter a Giant Mage with some other enemies nearby like the Interceptor or Minion. They'll drastically change their usual tactics to protect and augment the abilities of the Mages. If you do encounter a Giant Mage without any protection you'd better act fast because they have the power to summon whatever they need. That's not to say they aren't more than capable of dealing with you themselves...

Update 0.8.4 Preview

Since we've reached a Beneath milestone we're going to spend next week working on the next update that will not only feature the Custom Music Packs for the Workshop, but also a huge number of other improvements. Many of these additions are possible because upgrades required for Beneath can easily transfer to existing systems and the changelist for 0.8.4 is by far the largest we've ever had in an update. We'll hold off on posting the WIP changelist as it will definitely change over the coming week, but below are some additions you can expect in the update which will be available in a weeks time.

• Custom Music Packs (workshop upload and Level Editor usage)
• Ability to change music in Level Editor with logic triggers
• Liquid Decals
  
• Thrown sharp weapons stick into level
  
  
• Some thrown weapons can pin enemies
  
• Smite attacks will knock some nearby enemies away
• Shockwave knocks props and weapons away
  
• Invisible paint option in Level Editor
• Ability to duplicate rooms in Level Editor
• Bullet hit decals
  
• New blood spurt effects
• Blood colour tone variation
• Shooting and hitting some fragile weapons will break them