Releasing this update took quite a while but is a very important milestone in our development cycle. We completed our AI and characters upgrade and can finally create more interesting mechanics for combat and puzzles in the upcoming game content. To reach this goal we worked very hard on improving visual feedbacks for many of the combat interactions, and you should find easier to understand what’s going on during your games. There is still much work to be done. We will now start focusing much more heavily on the creation of additional content. Our next milestone is to have a fun and varied “challenge mode” very soon, and this means more areas, more bosses and more enemies. Story mode is in development too, but you will have to wait a little bit longer for that.

Special Powers and Playable characters revamp

To add variety and more interesting choices to our characters, we added brand new passive abilities and special powers for each one of the playable heroes. A special power is a brand new ability that can be activated when the player has enough power charges. Every player starts with 0 charges and can collect a maximum number of charges defined by their “Power Charges” stat. Players can get more power charges by eating energy charges. Charges are multi colored “pills” that can often be found inside treasure chests. When a character has at least 1 charge, a fiery mane appears on its health bar portrait, and a number displays how many charges you have. If the number blinks red you cannot eat any more super charges, or you will explode and consume all your available charges. You can activate a Special Power with space bar or LB by default. You can change this from the controls setup interface. As these things go in early access games, this is the first implementation of this new feature, in the next updates we will improve the character selection and in-game status interface to better display how each special power and passive ability works.

Stealth

We added a simple stealth system to our game to hide traps and secrets. Things that are stealth are invisible until a player gets close enough to reveal or trigger them. The distance required to “reveal” stealth is your “see things” stat in meters (tiles). Hidden items sometimes display a small sparkle. Keep an eye out, it could be a trap! This is our first iteration on the stealth system, and will be improved in future updates.

Chest interaction

Interaction with chests was sometimes confusing and we changed it to be more straightforward and more in line with our “throw everything” design vision. You have now a single mean of interaction with chests: pick up and throw them. The only way to open a chest is to smash it against a wall. Chest are now powerful weapons, but be careful where you throw them, because they are full of loot!

Arena mode

With the addition of “superpowers” to the game we tweaked and rebalanced item positioning and spawning in our arena levels. In addition, now rainbow meteors fall on the playfield periodically to spawn superpower charges. For people preferring a more old school match without superpowers involved, we added a small new level called WPD Arena. You can also consider this level a small preview of one of the story mode areas we are working on.

New Enemy AI

For this update we rebuilt our AI system from the ground up. It is now much more streamlined and will allow us to tweak enemy behaviours to create more interesting and recognizable patterns. In addition, many relevant NPC actions are now emphasized using animations and other visual clues. We will keep updating our AI through the entirety of SCMZ development.

New enemies

We added a few extra bad guys, and moved some of the old ones to other unreleased game areas. Lizard People
Lizard People are the inhabitants of the Great Volcano, and really want to eat you and your party. Female Lizard People are twice as big and are highly territorial. And wield giant rock maces. Fire People
Someone calls these guys “elementals”, but I have a friend in the Lavillage who uses a different term... Truth is, these guys are annoying and not very polite, especially if you hit them, as they have the habit of EXPLODING to express their disappoint. Oh, yeah, and they cast fireballs and have a magic trick that makes everyone immune to fire. Not awesome. Undead
Considered a scourge in every self respecting fake videogame world, those guys are not a new entry to the world of WOTF, but now come in several different flavours. Every one of them very harmful for your health. Watch out, they are usually more powerful than regular enemies.

New friends

Some superpowers and throwables can now spawn friendly creatures that will help you in combat!

New and rebalanced items

We added more loot for the Volcano environment and re balanced some of the old gear.

Challenge mode

As we work to complete our basic challenge mode vision, we added 7 more rooms to the Volcano tileset and greatly improved most of the old ones. A couple of the new rooms are exits, a new room category that contains extra loot and of course the door for the next level. Exit rooms are displayed in the minimap and are usually opened when you defeat the level boss.

Reset Unlocks and temporary costs

Due to changes in our whole in-game economy we were forced to reset all your unlocks and dog biscuit points. We gave everyone 1500 points, so you can unlock some of your favorite characters. As we are still in a very likey development phase, this kind of wipes are very likely to happen again. To soften the blow, we drastically decreased the unlock cost for every character. You can find an in depth description of balance and bug fixes here

[ 2015-12-02 19:24:59 CET ] [ Original post ]