Happy Bullet Heaven Festival! Hey everyone! I hope you're having a wonderful Decemberyes, I can't believe 2024 is almost over either! I wanted to take a moment to celebrate the Bullet Heaven Festival and reflect on Chess Survivors. Being my first game, it will always have a special place in my heart. Whether you're discovering it for the first time or revisiting it, I hope you feel the love and care that went into every detail. While Im no longer actively working on the game, your feedback still means the world to me. If you have ideas for new abilities, relics, characters, or quality-of-life improvements, please feel free to share them. I may not be able to implement them, but knowing how youd like to see Chess Survivors grow is always inspiringand who knows, I might just add your idea! Thank you for being a part of this journey with me. Cheers! Aarimous P.S. You can follow my game development journey by checking out my YouTube channel

[ 2024-12-05 02:15:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

Some small changes based on recent feedback from players.

• Fixed a bug where the min health could show as negative on the game over screen
• Slightly increased the enemy and elite damage scaling values for endless mode
• Fixed a typo on the credits screen

[ 2024-09-24 21:22:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

Just a small patch to fix an issue reported by a player. Patch Notes:

• The YoYo ability will now show when playing without the turn timer.
• This was previously removed as the YoYo used to have a turn duration, but this ability was reworked to do one full rotation instead of a turn duration.
• This will fix the issue where the Smol Wizard didn't have an ability when the turn timer was disabled.

[ 2024-08-24 14:11:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey there, This patch it directly based on feedback from you players and I think the changed to YoYo and Firewall make the game far more fun to play. Keep the feedback coming and I'll keep making changes. So If you do have feedback, please leave it over on the Steam discussions or over in my discord. Thanks for playing my little game, Aarimous

1.5 Patch Notes

tl;dr; YoYo Ability and Firewall Reworks, QOL changes, random balance stuff, and bugs

Yo-Yo Ability Rework:

• Removed the duration and will now only spin around the character once during the ability phase of the turn.
• Remove upgrades for turn duration
• Changed upgrades for cooldown from 8, 7, 6, 4 4, 3, 2, 1
• Increased the damage from 30,55, 90, 150 50, 70, 110, 175
• Increased the scale upgrades, but I cant remember what the old values were
• Adjusted the logic so that scale increase only increase the distance way from the player at 60% of their value. This is to prevent the yoyo from missing adjacent tiles as the scale increases
• Increasing the scale no long increases the radius as well. The was how it previously worked, but after the AOE update it seems to have made it feel fairly bad.
• Previously the Yo-Yo would spin at a set rate for a set duration of turns, while this made it a fairly unique ability it realistically was just fundamentally flawed with the idea of quick turns and how the other abilities work.
• As such Ive gone a head and changed it, as its no fun when one ability is just clearly better than the rest.
• Plus to get the most power out of the Yo-Yo you needed to sit still and wait, which again is not fun. And I want to make this a fun game.
• Please let me know if it feel bad or weak and I can add more power to it.

Firewall Hazard Rework:

• Removed the rotation effect so now the fire balls will simply spawn on a tile and remain there until their turn durations is over (or they explode due to the player hitting it).
• Previously the firewalls would spawn in and then the line of fireballs would rotate clockwise during the players movement turn.
• My goal was to push the player to think quick, but hearing some feedback from players this goal was not met, and these firewall hazard just feel bad. So I changed them.

Misc:

• Increased the XP per level growth from 4-5 and lowered the base XP amount from 5 to 4. This should have a small impact to the end game level you can reach but I dont think it will be all that noticeable
• Added a new text popup when a movement power up is consumed that will show the type of movement and the amount of turns added
• I have changed the arrow for the pawns movement direction to be a bit clearer
• Added the ability description to the ability tooltip
• Minion with turn durations will now respawn at the start of the players movement phase instead of at the start of the ability phase. Functionally this gives them one more turn to act and should just make it easily to plan your movement around them.
• Changed the Smol Wizard to now start with the YoYo ability instead of Pai Sho
• When using a mouse you can now hover over the ability icons and relic icons to see their tooltips

Bugs:

• Fixed an issue for keyboard and mouse where you cant hover over the relics/abilities on level up
• Fixed Matins names so is not all caps
• Fixed the text for Gambit Level 1 to not have enabled twice
• Fixed the art for the Fish Bowl character to have a non-outline version when in the character select screen
• Fixed a bug where starting a new run could crash the game
• Fixed another bug where the game over screen could cause the game to crash if you didnt win the game.

Endless Mode:

• Endless mode new act modifiers will now increase far more as you go deeper into endless acts. Previously each act would scale the act mods by 33% more and now that is 200%. Lets see if its hard now.
• You no long gain XP again after finishing endless mode
• Long standing oversight that I finally fixed

[ 2024-06-05 13:38:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey there, This is actually a fairly large patch with a lot of little changes here and there. Because of that, I want to do a week or so of testing to see if there needs to be any further changes. You can play this build over on the beta branch. Please let me know either in this thread, Steam discussions or over in my discord. Cheers, Aarimous

Beta Notes (These are subject to change):

- Reworks: - Yo-Yo Ability: - Removed the duration and will now only spin around the character once during the ability phase of the turn. - Remove upgrades for turn duration - Changed upgrades for cooldown from 8, 7, 6, 4 4, 3, 2, 1 - Increased the damage from 30,55, 90, 150 50, 70, 110, 175 - Increased the scale upgrades, but I cant remember what the old values were - Adjusted the logic so that scale increase only increase the distance way from the player at 60% of their value. This is to prevent the yoyo from missing adjacent tiles as the scale increases - Increasing the scale no long increases the radius as well. The was how it previously worked, but after the AOE update it seems to have made it feel fairly bad. - Previously the Yo-Yo would spin at a set rate for a set duration of turns, while this made it a fairly unique ability it realistically was just fundamentally flawed with the idea of quick turns and how the other abilities work. - As such Ive gone a head and changed it, as its no fun when one ability is just clearly better than the rest. - Plus to get the most power out of the Yo-Yo you needed to sit still and wait, which again is not fun. And I want to make this a fun game. - Please let me know if it feel bad or weak and I can add more power to it. - Firewall Hazard: - Removed the rotation effect so now the fire balls will simply spawn on a tile and remain there until their turn durations is over (or they explode due to the player hitting it). - Previously the firewalls would spawn in and then the line of fireballs would rotate clockwise during the players movement turn. - My goal was to push the player to think quick, but hearing some feedback from players this goal was not met, and these firewall hazard just feel bad. So I changed them. Misc: - Increased the XP per level growth from 4-5 and lowered the base XP amount from 5 to 4. This should have a small impact to the end game level you can reach but I dont think it will be all that noticeable - Added a new text popup when a movement power up is consumed that will show the type of movement and the amount of turns added - I have changed the arrow for the pawns movement direction to be a bit clearer - Added the ability description to the ability tooltip - Minion with turn durations will now respawn at the start of the players movement phase instead of at the start of the ability phase. Functionally this gives them one more turn to act and should just make it easily to plan your movement around them. - Changed the Smol Wizard to now start with the YoYo ability instead of Pai Sho - When using a mouse you can now hover over the ability icons and relic icons to see their tooltips Bugs: Grabbing a Magnet on last turn doesn't work as expected Cant hover over the relics/abilities on level up Fixed Matins names so is not all caps Fixed the text for Gambit Level 1 to not have enabled twice Fixed the art for the Fish Bowl character to have a non-outline version when in the character select screen Fixed a bug where starting a new run could crash the game Fixed another bug where the game over screen could cause the game to crash if you didnt win the game. Endless Mode: - Endless mode new act modifered will now increase far more as you go deeper into endless acts. Previously each act would scale the act mods by 33% more and now that is 200%. Lets see if its hard now. - You no long gain XP again after finishing endless mode - Long standing oversight that I finally fixed

[ 2024-06-01 20:18:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

Fixed a bug where the player upgrades (Ability Damage, Melee Damage, and Max Health) were all being calculated way too high. Now they should scale with each act, but then get clamped during endless mode. Cheers!

[ 2024-05-03 20:06:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey there, This patch is a bunch of random changes based on suggestions for you the players. The big one here is a change to how area of effect increases work. I go into more details below, but this is a pretty big nerf to the end game scaling for AOE based abilities. I tried to buff the base stats for impacted abilities/relics, but I likely got it wrong. So if needed, I will do a hot fix patch to fix any balance issues. This is as much your game as it is mine, and my goal is for it to be a fun game that you enjoy playing that respects your time and the money you spent. If that is not the case, please let me know. I will change it to make it better. If you do have feedback, please leave it over on the Steam discussions or over in my discord. Thanks for playing my little game, Aarimous

1.4 Patch Notes

tl;dr; AOE Changes, Endless Balances Changes, Bug Fixes

Area of Effect Changes

• Area of Effect increased will now increase the total size of the effect instead of the radius
• Previously AOE increases would scale the whole size (i.e increase the radius) which if you recall math class impacts the area of a circle by pi * r^2.
• So the more AOE increase you had the more impactful it actually became.
• While this is fun, it does make many of the AOE scaling abilities fundamentally way more powerful than non-aoe abilities.
• So this is a huge nerf to AOE in the game, but I have also gone through and buffed the upgrade abilities for AOE so hopefully they will still be powerful.
• I will buff stuff as needed, so please let me know if things need to be adjusted

Abilities:

All the below abilities were impacted by the AOE changes. As such the upgrade values for AOE have been adjusted. Generally the values were doubled.

• Cribbage
• Playing Card
• Tic Tac Toe
• Dice
• Yo-Yo
• Bullseye
• Bubbles
• Snow day
• Ping Pong

• Adjusted the range values for the Bubbles as it was causing them to shoot to far. This is kinda a bug, but I'll put it here since it is only a numerical change.

Relics:

• Buffed all AOE values for relics that impacted the AOE. This is to compensate for the AOE changes mentioned above. This included the character specific relics.
• Thorny Boots:
• Damage from extra movement changed from 10 5, but the value now scales with act number
• Dwarven Pickaxe:
• Damage from your ending turn on a wall tile changed form 20 10, but the value now scales with the act number

Act 3:

Slightly increased the percent health increased for enemies from +33% to +40%

Endless Mode:

Increased the the rate at which endless act modifiers get increased

Added a cap on the value increases for player upgrades like base ability damage, base melee damage, and max health increase

The increase to XP needed each level will now start to increase as you get further into the endless mode acts.

Bugs:

• Fixed an unintended behavior, where the Spitball Minion and Snowman minion would shoot at the same speed when getting more projectiles. This became clunky at high number of projectiles so now the speed will scale with the number they have.
• Fixed the way AOE values were shown so they show a percent increase instead of just a flat value
• Attempted to fix a bug where changing the song could cause some lag

[ 2024-04-28 16:38:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

A quick bug fix and some small balance changes for endless mode.

• Fixed a bug where you could kill yourself with a reroll when upon leveling up or opening a chest your health was less than the re-roll cost.
• Adjusted the "Endless Mode" act modifiers to grant more life to enemies and less damage. The goal here is to keep combat interesting as the acts scale, but lower the odds you get one-shot.

[ 2024-03-18 18:08:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey there, Thank you for checking out my little indie game. At this point my development on Chess Survivors is basically complete. But I would like to add one last feature to the game. An actual BOSS FIGHT! I have some ideas but I dont have any timeline for when this will be ready. Id love to hear your ideas over in my community discord. I have begun working on my next game. If you are interesting in learning more about my next game please follow me over on YouTube or hang out with me live on Twitch. Thank you again for supporting solo indie developers like me. My goal is to create games that are fun to play, that respect your time as a player, and that are worth every penny you spent. Cheers, Aarimous

[ 2024-02-29 15:49:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

Small patch aimed at adjusting the balance of Endless Mode. Please keep the feedback coming, I'm hoping I can get Endless Mode to be fun and challenging. If you do have feedback, please leave it over on the Steam discussions or over in my discord. Cheers, Aarimous

General Changes:

• Player upgrades (Health, Ability Damage, Melee Damage, and Pickup Range) will now all have some randomness in the values. On average there isnt much of a change, but it should add some additional texture to each run.
• Lowered the value of the Basic Relics which you can start getting once you already get all the relics.
• Changed the Discord link to be my Aarimous Discord as I will be retiring the Chess Survivors discord.

Endless Mode Balance:

• In endless mode I removed chest elites for the spawning pool
• XP needed per level will now scale by 10% more per level, previously it was following the same amount increase as the core game where it increased by 5 each level.
• Endless act difficulty modifiers will now scale each act increasing roughly 10% per additional act
• Player upgrades will no longer be an option for level ups in endless mode
• Act rewards for endless mode are now not always full of rare relics

Bugs

• Fixed a bug where ability properties with endless upgrades would not respect the limits on act upgrades.
• Fixed a bug where some of the text on the game over screen would show incorrectly
• Fixed a bug where after rerolling the relics/level up rewards a scroll bar would appear when it wasnt there before the reroll.
• Fixed some issues with the Portuguese Translations
• Fixed a bug where the stats and info during level up rewards would not correctly display the current base value of the ability

[ 2023-12-28 20:25:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

Small little update to adjust Endless Mode difficulty. If it still sucks, please let me know and I will change it. :)

• Dramatically increased the enemy modifiers your can get for endless acts. In general the values are doubled.
• Updated the Portuguese translations. Huge thank you to Joel Gomes from Muriki Studio who provided me with better Portuguese translations.
• Please reach out if you would like to translate chess Survivors into your own language.

[ 2023-12-26 18:41:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

Happy Holidays! Endless Mode is finally here!! This was a fun feature to add and was been one of the most requested features. I'm happy with where the game is at and I would love to hear your thoughts. I'm making Endless Mode a BETA for now, so please let me know if you think the balance needs to change or if there needs to be structural changes (or if you find any bugs). I read all of your feedback, and basically always make the change. This is as much your game as it is mine, and my goal is for it to be a fun game that you enjoy playing that respects your time and the money you spent. If that is not the case, please let me know. I will change it to make it better. If you do have feedback, please leave it over on the Steam discussions or over in my discord. Here's a devlog showing how I added Endless Mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7lGc23x_mc Thanks for playing my little game, Aarimous

1.3 Patch Notes

tl;dr; New Endless Mode, Quality of Life, Balance Changes, and Bug Fixes

Endless Mode:

• New Game mod you can optional stat once you win a run.
• After winning a run (beating act 3), you will now have the option to start Endless Mode. In this mode you will complete an endless amount of acts. Each act will be 100 turns.
• You will get a normal act reward for completing the act (rare relic and a heal)
• Each act will have a semi random amount of additional difficulty modifiers to enemy health, damage, and what not
• Most abilities will have some properties with Endless Upgrades. You can see these and the ability stats and info panel. Generally these are increases to damage or the number of projectiles.
• In Endless Mode, you will no longer receive the new abilities as level up rewards. My goal with Endless Mode is to give you a way to lean into your current build and take it as far as you can. To do this, I disabled new abilities as a loot option because then endless mode would jus turn into collecting and upgrading as many options as you can. This is just a theory, so if its dumb please let me know.
• The difficulty curve of each endless act will be generally the same, but with different spawning events, map layouts, and as the act continue more enemies will spawn in the given wave.

Balance Changes:

• Lowered the base Reroll Relic health cost from 100 to 80
• Lowered the base Reroll level up rewards damage from 80 to 65
• Two of Diamonds relic: now instead increases the reroll cost now +15 to Level Reroll cost and +20 to Relic Reroll costs. I think this makes more sense as a trade off since the relics also disabled the doubling effect when you reroll.
• Ace of Hearts Relic: Increased the reduction amounts. Level Up Reroll Cost -20 to -30, Relic Reroll Cost -30 to -40. This is to reflect the changes the two of diamonds relic. Now the player will want to get both relics to make rerolling really strong.
• Added another Cooldown upgrade for to the Alien Minion. Previously [15, 13, 10] now [15, 13, 10, 8]
• Added another Cooldown upgrade for to the Spitball Minion. Previously [8, 7, 6, 5] now [8, 7, 6, 5, 4]
• Added another Cooldown upgrade for to the Boomerang. Previously [7, 6, 4] now [7, 6, 4, 3]
• Adjusted upgrade values for Card Shield. Cooldown from [8, 6, 5, 4, 3] to [10, 8, 6]. Max number of [1, 2 , 3, 4] to [1, 2, 3]. This is a nerf as I personally found I would always take this option as it would block a lot of damage. Let me know if this makes the game trash, but Im hoping this wont be too big of a nerf.

Misc

• Lowered the max size of floating text values
• Adding a bit of horizontal randomness to damage texts so if damage comes in quickly it wont all stack up.
• Changed the ability Stats and Info page to now show the upgrades as the amount changed. Previously, this showed the new value and I thought it was just worse. Let me know if you want something different.
• Change the color of the inactive upgrade values, I just like the new color better since its easier to see

Bugs

• Fixed a bug where the procedural map would generate the same as Act 1 if it was randomly chosen for Act 2 or Act 3
• Fixed a bug where the XP granted for normal speed runs was dramatically too low
• Fixed a bug where sometimes the amount of achievements would get stuck.
• Fix a bug where the animation for the Ping Pong ability was ending early
• Fixed a bug where the ability tool tips would not update properly.
• Fixed a bug where the animation for the Ping Pong paddle would not function correctly
• Fixed a bug where the ping pong paddle was dealing damage more than once, I guess this fix is a nerf, but it is still a very powerful ability
• Fixed a bug where the current health could sometimes show the decimals

[ 2023-12-21 17:41:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

• Fixed a bug where the tooltip for certain relics would appear off screen or the tooltip would be too wide
• The total damage dealt will now be rounded to the nearest integer on the game over screen

[ 2023-11-07 22:57:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi all, In celebration of the Bullet Heaven festival I have created 6 new relics. Specifically, I think the new rare relics will add some interesting new builds. I have begun working on my next game as my work on Chess Survivors is largely completed, but if you have ideas I'd love to hear them either in the Steam discussions or over on discord. I always love hearing from player's (I sincerely mean this, your feedback has helped me make this game way better than it otherwise would be, so thank you). From time to time, I will likely keep doing small updates like this to add relics, abilities, or new characters. I hope you enjoy my little game and thank you for playing. Cheers, Aarimous P.S. Please consider subscribing to My YouTube Channel where I share my game development as an solo indie dev.

1.2 Patch Notes

tl;dr; 6 New Relics and a few bug fixes

New Relics:

• Bullet Heaven: (Rare) After taking damage shoot a volley of lasers dealing damage equal to the damage dealt to you. The number of projectiles is equal to half your level rounded up (works once per turn and ability damage modifiers increase damage.)
• The Game Developer: (Rare) Spawn Aarimous, this games developer, who will attach to a random nearby enemies. When you kill the enemy it will now explode dealing damage to nearby enemies equal to 50% of the enemys max health. Will find a new enemy at the start of your next turn.
• Immunity Idol: (Rare) When you would die, heal to 50% of your Max HP instead (works once).
• Mega Magic Mushrooms: (Rare) Level up this many times : 4
• Mini Magic Mushroom: (Common) Level up this many times : 2
• A Shield: (Common) 20% Reduce Damage Multiplier and +50 Max Health

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed the Sneezy Ghost's starting relic to reduce incoming damage by 10% instead of a flat 10. This was missed when I made changes to remove flat damage in a previous patch.
• Fixes the text for Gambit Level 20
• Fixed a bug where when you win a run, if you immediately start another run as another character and lose you still see a +1 to that second character's win stats

[ 2023-11-06 17:51:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; 6 New Relics and Bug Fixes You can play it over on the beta branch. This will be moved to the live branch tomorrow for the bullet heaven fest. Please let me know if you find any bugs or if you want me to add any other quality of life changes. Thanks, -Aarimous

New Relics:

• Bullet Heaven: (Rare) After taking damage shoot a volley of lasers dealing damage equal to the damage dealt to you. The number of projectiles is equal to half your level rounded up (works once per turn and ability damage modifiers increase damage.)
• The Game Developer: (Rare) Spawn Aarimous, this games developer, who will attach to a random nearby enemies. When you kill the enemy it will now explode dealing damage to nearby enemies equal to 50% of the enemys max health. Will find a new enemy at the start of your next turn.
• Immunity Idol: (Rare) When you would die, heal to 50% of your Max HP instead (works once).
• Mega Magic Mushrooms: (Rare) Level up this many times : 4
• Mini Magic Mushroom: (Common) Level up this many times : 2
• A Shield: (Common) 20% Reduce Damage Multiplier and +50 Max Health

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed the Sneezy Ghost's starting relic to reduce incoming damage by 10% instead of a flat 10. This was missed when I made changes to remove flat damage in a previous patch.
• Fixes the text for Gambit Level 20
• Fixed a bug where when you win a run, if you immediately start another run as another character and lose you still see a +1 to that second character's win stats

[ 2023-11-05 16:01:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

• Fixed a bug where you could still progress Gambit levels when the gambit levels are disabled

[ 2023-10-22 14:00:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

• Fixed a bug where the progression XP was incorrectly calculated on high gambit and high game speeds

[ 2023-09-28 13:03:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

• Add a new FPS Limit option of 240 to settings screen
• Fixed a rare bug where the Minion Instability relics could be offered twice. This was caused by the relic being a reward for both progression level 4 & 5. As such level 4 now instead grants the Spawning Ritual Relic
• Empty Heart relic: changed -50 damage taken to -20% damage taken. I missed this relic when adjusting how damage reduction should work in a previous patch.

[ 2023-09-26 12:37:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

Found two other quick fixed right after I published hotfix #2.

• Fixed a bug where healing when you died could leave the game in a "stuck" state and the player would need to force quit to fix it.
• Fixed the speed scaling for chests so it no longer scales with game speed, this was unintended.

Notes from #2

• Fixed a bug where the control mapping for the controller would not properly save
• Add logic to prevent the game from sending useless data to steam after certain amount based achievements are unlocked
• Adjusted debug print statements so the information is more relevant (this is mostly for me when I am debugging things).
• Fixed the enemy on death particles so the fade out effect would properly scale with game speed

[ 2023-09-25 21:26:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

• Fixed a bug where the control mapping for the controller would not properly save
• Add logic to prevent the game from sending useless data to steam after certain amount based achievements are unlocked
• Adjusted debug print statements so the information is more relevant (this is mostly for me when I am debugging things).
• Fixed the enemy on death particles so the fade out effect would properly scale with game speed

[ 2023-09-25 21:14:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

• Attempting to fix an issue where the game would freeze and crash when playing on high game speeds.
• Fixed an issue where the saved game speed was not applied correctly to new game instances

[ 2023-09-25 16:29:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; New Turn Based Mode, Gambit Level Expansion, Game Polish, and Balance Changes Hi all, I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to all the Chess Survivors players who have been with me since the 1.0 release, which was nearly a month ago. As a solo developer, I've been hard at work over the past few weeks, moving beyond the initial hotfixes and focusing on incorporating your feedback into my next update. With the 1.1 patch, I'm excited to introduce two major changes that directly stem from your input. Firstly, I've added a new setting that allows you to disable the turn timer, transforming the game into a purely turn-based experience. Additionally, I've expanded and reworked the gambit challenge system, now featuring a total of 20 challenging levels to progress through. It's truly amazing to see how far our little game has come. I sincerely hope that your enjoyment of playing Chess Survivors matches the immense joy I've experienced in creating it. Cheers, Aarimous P.S. Please consider subscribing to My YouTube Channel where I share my game development as an solo indie dev.

1.1 Patch Notes

Note from the dev: Please DM me on Discord if any of the below changes make my game unfun. I want my game to be fun and I am more than willing to hear you our and I will likely make changes to address your feedback!

New Content

Added a new Run Setting to Enable/Disable the Turn Timer

• This will hide the turn timer and allow the player to take as long as they want during their turn
• Disabling the turn timer will always turn off Steam achievements. I decided to do this because I designed the game around having a turn timer and while Im all for player playing the way they want to play, the achievements might lose their feeling of accomplishment since the game will be significantly easier without the turn timer. I would be interested in refining the turn based gameplay if this is something you players want.
• Disabling the turn timer will also disable any real-time game elements as these were balance around a turn timer and would be over powered without a timer.
  • Yo-Yo Ability
  • Wandering Bot Relic
  • Firewall Map Hazard
• Game speed will still adjust how fast the other game elements move, but will no lower apply to the player's turn.. because well there is no timer with this setting.

Gambit Challenge System Expansion/Rework

• Added new level 15 and level 20 gambit achievements, these will be activated once the 1.1 build is live.
• Reworked the gambit levels gambit levels since there are now 20, generally I made certain mods more difficult. Im open to feedback if certain levels feel to easy/hard.
• Run Setting screen can now handle Gambit levels with multiple mods, this was added to accommodate the Gambit level rework
• Gambit Level Progression will now always be enabled regardless of the game speed, previous you could only progress the Gambit level if achievements were enabled. This is another change made to align with the new turn timer setting.

Other New Things

• Added 6 new maps layouts for Act 2 and Act 3 maps that will randomly be randomly selected (Act 1 will always be a randomly procedural map)
• Added a new system to track wins, losses, and highest gambit levels per character.
  • This will be displayed on the the character select screen.
  • Resetting the records will reset this as well.
• Added a tooltip to show the current ability stats when hovering over the the ability UI element
• Added a display to the pause screen to show all the current Gambit levels and the flavor text
• Added a build summary to the game over screen which will show some basic player stats as well as the relics and abilities you had. I had to move the jokers art to accommodate this.

Balance Changes

• Reduced the spawn chance for rare relics from 10% to 5%.
• Pawn base health increased from 90 to 95
• Rook base health increased from 135 to 140
• Changed the Jak characters starting ability to use the Jak Trap instead of the Yo-Yo. This help makes the new turn timer setting work, and feels a bit more thematic
• Yoyo ability
  • This is a nerf to the Yo-Yo. My goal is for this to be bad early, but good later if you upgraded it a lot and had good relics. As such most of the nerfs are to early stats.
  • Lowered damage values from [40, 65, 100, 150] [30, 55, 90, 130]
  • Lowered duration from [3, 4, 5] [2, 3, 4, 5]
  • Lowered cooldown from [7,6, 5, 4] [8,7,6,4]
• Boomerang ability
  • Damage increased from [55, 80, 110, 175] to [75, 100, 140, 190]
  • Max Number increased from [2,3,4] [2,3,4,5]
  • Cooldown decreased form [8,6,4] [7,6,4]
• Scarecrow minion ability
  • Turn duration fixed to be [10, 15, 20] previously this had 0 and 0 as the last two upgrades.
• Martin Character
  • Lowered melee damage from 70 to 45
  • Martins Relic: Lowered lvl up heal amount for 20 to 15. Added a -25% to AOE multiplier, removed bonus ability power
  • Steadfast Protector: now reduced 25% of incoming damage, previously this was a flat 30 damage, which made the relic really good early, and less good later. This will make the relic have the same power during the whole game.

User Interface

• A new zoom out animation will play when completing the act
• A new zoom out animation will play when winning the game
• Added floating text which will warn the player when there are 25, 20, 15, 10, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 turns left in the act. The goal here is to add anticipation for the act endings.
• Adjusted UI text to read as Act # Turns Left instead of just Act Turns Left
• Lowered the sound effect when you hover over characters on the character select screen.
• Adjusted the font to be a bit sharper at all font sizes
• Changed the button colors to make the green/red a bit less saturated and easier on the eyes

Bug Fixes and Mics Changes

• Fixed a bug where blocked damage would not show correctly
• Lowered the I am the Loot Hoarder achievement from 100 chest to 50 chests
• The Real Knights relic: fixed melee healing base to be 20 not 2. This is was a bug.
• Fixed a bug where the certain run records were not working correctly.
• Fixed a rare game crash where sometimes in act 2 the laser map hazard spawning system would sometimes bug out if a specific spawn outcome was chosen.
• Fixed a situation where the game could get stuck if you leveled up and died/won in the same turn.
• Game speed is now saved as a local setting and will be remembered between sessions. Previously this was always defaulted to normal speed when launching the game.
• Fixed many of the abilities so the animation speed would scale properly with game speed
• Fixed game elements like Movement Coins and XP gems so their animation would scale properly with game speed
• Fixed character animations (in game) so their animations would scale with game speed
• Fixed a bug where the act intro text could sometimes flash on the screen. Not sure if this is actually fixed, but we will see.
• Fixed some bugs with the animations when the player dies
• Fixed some bugs where navigating from the game over screen to the main menu would flash the game screen

[ 2023-09-24 14:10:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; Gambit level adjustments and few bug fixes Small patch to make some changes to higher levels of gambit difficulty and some bug fixes. You can play it over on the beta branch. Please let me know if you find any bugs or if you want me to add any other quality of life changes. Thanks, -Aarimous

Notes #5

• Changed Gambit Level 16 to now increase all enemy damage by 20% instead of adding 15% chance to spawn extra normal enemies.
• Changed Gambit Level 6 and 17 to now reduce starting health by 25% instead of 33%.
• Adjusted UI text to read as Act # Turns Left instead of just Act Turns Left
• Fixed a situation where the game could get stuck if you leveled up and died/won in the same turn.
• Lowered the sound effect when you hover over characters on the character select screen.

Notes #4

• Reduced the spawn chance for rare relics from 10% to 5%.
• Pawn base health increased from 90 to 95
• Rook base health increased from 135 to 140
• Game speed is now saved as a local setting and will be remembered between sessions. Previously this was always defaulted to normal speed when launching the game.
• Fixed many of the abilities so the animation speed would scale properly with game speed
• Fixed game elements like Movement Coins and XP gems so their animation would scale properly with game speed
• Fixed character animations (in game) so their animations would scale with game speed
• Fixed a bug where the act intro text could sometimes flash on the screen. Not sure if this is actually fixed, but we will see.

Notes #3

• Added 10 new gambit levels
  • Reworked the gambit levels gambit levels since there are now 20, generally I made certain mods more difficult. Im open to feedback if certain things feel to easy/hard.
  • Run Setting screen can now handle Gambit levels with multiple mods, this was added to accommodate the Gambit level rework
  • Added new level 15 and level 20 gambit achievements, these will be activated once the 1.1 build is live.
• Added 6 new maps layouts for Act 2 and Act 3 maps that will randomly be randomly selected (Act 1 will always be a randomly procedural map)
• Added a new system to track wins, losses, and highest gambit levels per character.
  • This will be displayed on the the character select screen.
  • Resetting the records will reset this as well.
• Added a tooltip to show the current ability stats when hovering over the the ability UI element
• Added a display to the pause screen to show all the current Gambit levels and the flavor text
• Added a build summary to the game over screen which will show some basic player stats as well as the relics and abilities you had. I had to move the jokers art to accommodate this.
• Adjusted the font to be a bit sharper at all font sizes
• Changed the button colors to make the green/red a bit less saturated and easier on the eyes

Yoyo ability

• This is a nerf to the Yo-Yo. My goal is for this to be bad early, but good later if you upgraded it a lot and had good relics. As such most of the nerfs are to early stats.
• Lowered damage values from [40, 65, 100, 150] [30, 55, 90, 130]
• Lowered duration from [3, 4, 5] [2, 3, 4, 5]
• Lowered cooldown from [7,6, 5, 4] [8,7,6,4]

Boomerang ability

• Damage increased from [55, 80, 110, 175] to [75, 100, 140, 190]
• Max Number increased from [2,3,4] [2,3,4,5]
• Cooldown decreased form [8,6,4] [7,6,4]

Scarecrow minion ability

• Turn duration fixed to be [10, 15, 20] previously this had 0 and 0 as the last two upgrades.

Martin Character

• Lowered melee damage from 70 to 45
• Martins Relic: Lowered lvl up heal amount for 20 to 15. Added a -25% to AOE multiplier, removed bonus ability power

Bug Fixes

• The Real Knights relic: fixed melee healing base to be 20 not 2. This is was a bug.
• Fixed a bug where the certain run records were not working correctly.
• Fixed a rare game crash where sometimes in act 2 the laser map hazard spawning system would sometimes bug out if a specific spawn outcome was chosen.

Notes #2

• Added a new Run Setting to Enable/Disable the Turn Timer
  • This will hide the turn timer and allow the player to take as long as they want during their turn
  • Disabling the turn timer will always turn off Steam achievements. I decided to do this because I designed the game around having a turn timer and while Im all for player playing the way they want to play, the achievements might lose their feeling of accomplishment since the game will be significantly easier without the turn timer. I would be interested in refining the turn based gameplay if this is something you players want.
  • Disabling the turn timer will also disable any real-time game elements as these were balance around a turn timer and would be over powered without a timer.
    • Yo-Yo Ability
    • Wandering Bot Relic
    • Firewall Map Hazard
  • Game speed will still adjust how fast the other game elements move, but will no lower apply to the player's turn.. because well there is no timer with this setting.
• Changed the Jak characters starting ability to use the Jak Trap instead of the Yo-Yo. This help makes the new turn timer setting work, and feels a bit more thematic
• Lowered the I am the Loot Hoarder achievement from 100 chest to 50 chests
• Gambit Level Progression will now always be enabled regardless of the game speed, previous you could only progress the Gambit level if achievements were enabled. This is another change made to align with the new turn timer setting.

Notes #1

• Added floating text which will warn the player when there are 25, 20, 15, 10, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 turns left in the act. The goal here is to add anticipation for the act endings.
• A new zoom out animation will play when completing the act
• A new zoom out animation will play when winning the game
• Fixed some bugs with the animations when the player dies
• Fixed some bugs where navigating from the game over screen to the main menu would flash the game screen
• Fixed a bug where blocked damage would not show correctly
• Steadfast Protector: now reduced 25% of incoming damage, previously this was a flat 30 damage, which made the relic really good early, and less good later. This will make the relic have the same power during the whole game.

[ 2023-09-21 16:24:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; Balance Changes, Game Speed Fixes, and Bugs Small patch to fixes some things I found with testing the 1.1 build. Mainly it was adjusting the game so the various things scale properly with the game speed. You can play it over on the beta branch. Please let me know if you find any bugs or if you want me to add any other quality of life changes. Thanks, -Aarimous

Notes #4

• Reduced the spawn chance for rare relics from 10% to 5%.
• Pawn base health increased from 90 to 95
• Rook base health increased from 135 to 140
• Game speed is now saved as a local setting and will be remembered between sessions. Previously this was always defaulted to normal speed when launching the game.
• Fixed many of the abilities so the animation speed would scale properly with game speed
• Fixed game elements like Movement Coins and XP gems so their animation would scale properly with game speed
• Fixed character animations (in game) so their animations would scale with game speed
• Fixed a bug where the act intro text could sometimes flash on the screen. Not sure if this is actually fixed, but we will see.

Notes #3

• Added 10 new gambit levels
  • Reworked the gambit levels gambit levels since there are now 20, generally I made certain mods more difficult. Im open to feedback if certain things feel to easy/hard.
  • Run Setting screen can now handle Gambit levels with multiple mods, this was added to accommodate the Gambit level rework
  • Added new level 15 and level 20 gambit achievements, these will be activated once the 1.1 build is live.
• Added 6 new maps layouts for Act 2 and Act 3 maps that will randomly be randomly selected (Act 1 will always be a randomly procedural map)
• Added a new system to track wins, losses, and highest gambit levels per character.
  • This will be displayed on the the character select screen.
  • Resetting the records will reset this as well.
• Added a tooltip to show the current ability stats when hovering over the the ability UI element
• Added a display to the pause screen to show all the current Gambit levels and the flavor text
• Added a build summary to the game over screen which will show some basic player stats as well as the relics and abilities you had. I had to move the jokers art to accommodate this.
• Adjusted the font to be a bit sharper at all font sizes
• Changed the button colors to make the green/red a bit less saturated and easier on the eyes

Yoyo ability

• This is a nerf to the Yo-Yo. My goal is for this to be bad early, but good later if you upgraded it a lot and had good relics. As such most of the nerfs are to early stats.
• Lowered damage values from [40, 65, 100, 150] [30, 55, 90, 130]
• Lowered duration from [3, 4, 5] [2, 3, 4, 5]
• Lowered cooldown from [7,6, 5, 4] [8,7,6,4]

Boomerang ability

• Damage increased from [55, 80, 110, 175] to [75, 100, 140, 190]
• Max Number increased from [2,3,4] [2,3,4,5]
• Cooldown decreased form [8,6,4] [7,6,4]

Scarecrow minion ability

• Turn duration fixed to be [10, 15, 20] previously this had 0 and 0 as the last two upgrades.

Martin Character

• Lowered melee damage from 70 to 45
• Martins Relic: Lowered lvl up heal amount for 20 to 15. Added a -25% to AOE multiplier, removed bonus ability power

Bug Fixes

• The Real Knights relic: fixed melee healing base to be 20 not 2. This is was a bug.
• Fixed a bug where the certain run records were not working correctly.
• Fixed a rare game crash where sometimes in act 2 the laser map hazard spawning system would sometimes bug out if a specific spawn outcome was chosen.

Notes #2

• Added a new Run Setting to Enable/Disable the Turn Timer
  • This will hide the turn timer and allow the player to take as long as they want during their turn
  • Disabling the turn timer will always turn off Steam achievements. I decided to do this because I designed the game around having a turn timer and while Im all for player playing the way they want to play, the achievements might lose their feeling of accomplishment since the game will be significantly easier without the turn timer. I would be interested in refining the turn based gameplay if this is something you players want.
  • Disabling the turn timer will also disable any real-time game elements as these were balance around a turn timer and would be over powered without a timer.
    • Yo-Yo Ability
    • Wandering Bot Relic
    • Firewall Map Hazard
  • Game speed will still adjust how fast the other game elements move, but will no lower apply to the player's turn.. because well there is no timer with this setting.
• Changed the Jak characters starting ability to use the Jak Trap instead of the Yo-Yo. This help makes the new turn timer setting work, and feels a bit more thematic
• Lowered the I am the Loot Hoarder achievement from 100 chest to 50 chests
• Gambit Level Progression will now always be enabled regardless of the game speed, previous you could only progress the Gambit level if achievements were enabled. This is another change made to align with the new turn timer setting.

Notes #1

• Added floating text which will warn the player when there are 25, 20, 15, 10, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 turns left in the act. The goal here is to add anticipation for the act endings.
• A new zoom out animation will play when completing the act
• A new zoom out animation will play when winning the game
• Fixed some bugs with the animations when the player dies
• Fixed some bugs where navigating from the game over screen to the main menu would flash the game screen
• Fixed a bug where blocked damage would not show correctly
• Steadfast Protector: now reduced 25% of incoming damage, previously this was a flat 30 damage, which made the relic really good early, and less good later. This will make the relic have the same power during the whole game.

[ 2023-09-20 01:03:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; New Gambit Levels, Balance, QOL, Polish, and Bug Fixes This patch is close to what the full 1.1 patch will be. I plan on publishing the full 1.1 patch on September 30th. Please let me know if you have any changes or QOL things you'd like me to add. If it's a small enough change, I will probably add it. You can play it over on the beta branch. Please let me know if you find any bugs or if you want me to add any other quality of life changes. Thanks, -Aarimous

Notes #3

• Added 10 new gambit levels
  • Reworked the gambit levels gambit levels since there are now 20, generally I made certain mods more difficult. Im open to feedback if certain things feel to easy/hard.
  • Run Setting screen can now handle Gambit levels with multiple mods, this was added to accommodate the Gambit level rework
  • Added new level 15 and level 20 gambit achievements, these will be activated once the 1.1 build is live.
• Added 6 new maps layouts for Act 2 and Act 3 maps that will randomly be randomly selected (Act 1 will always be a randomly procedural map)
• Added a new system to track wins, losses, and highest gambit levels per character.
  • This will be displayed on the the character select screen.
  • Resetting the records will reset this as well.
• Added a tooltip to show the current ability stats when hovering over the the ability UI element
• Added a display to the pause screen to show all the current Gambit levels and the flavor text
• Added a build summary to the game over screen which will show some basic player stats as well as the relics and abilities you had. I had to move the jokers art to accommodate this.
• Adjusted the font to be a bit sharper at all font sizes
• Changed the button colors to make the green/red a bit less saturated and easier on the eyes

Yoyo ability

• This is a nerf to the Yo-Yo. My goal is for this to be bad early, but good later if you upgraded it a lot and had good relics. As such most of the nerfs are to early stats.
• Lowered damage values from [40, 65, 100, 150] [30, 55, 90, 130]
• Lowered duration from [3, 4, 5] [2, 3, 4, 5]
• Lowered cooldown from [7,6, 5, 4] [8,7,6,4]

Boomerang ability

• Damage increased from [55, 80, 110, 175] to [75, 100, 140, 190]
• Max Number increased from [2,3,4] [2,3,4,5]
• Cooldown decreased form [8,6,4] [7,6,4]

Scarecrow minion ability

• Turn duration fixed to be [10, 15, 20] previously this had 0 and 0 as the last two upgrades.

Martin Character

• Lowered melee damage from 70 to 45
• Martins Relic: Lowered lvl up heal amount for 20 to 15. Added a -25% to AOE multiplier, removed bonus ability power

Bug Fixes

• The Real Knights relic: fixed melee healing base to be 20 not 2. This is was a bug.
• Fixed a bug where the certain run records were not working correctly.
• Fixed a rare game crash where sometimes in act 2 the laser map hazard spawning system would sometimes bug out if a specific spawn outcome was chosen.

Notes #2

• Added a new Run Setting to Enable/Disable the Turn Timer
  • This will hide the turn timer and allow the player to take as long as they want during their turn
  • Disabling the turn timer will always turn off Steam achievements. I decided to do this because I designed the game around having a turn timer and while Im all for player playing the way they want to play, the achievements might lose their feeling of accomplishment since the game will be significantly easier without the turn timer. I would be interested in refining the turn based gameplay if this is something you players want.
  • Disabling the turn timer will also disable any real-time game elements as these were balance around a turn timer and would be over powered without a timer.
    • Yo-Yo Ability
    • Wandering Bot Relic
    • Firewall Map Hazard
  • Game speed will still adjust how fast the other game elements move, but will no lower apply to the player's turn.. because well there is no timer with this setting.
• Changed the Jak characters starting ability to use the Jak Trap instead of the Yo-Yo. This help makes the new turn timer setting work, and feels a bit more thematic
• Lowered the I am the Loot Hoarder achievement from 100 chest to 50 chests
• Gambit Level Progression will now always be enabled regardless of the game speed, previous you could only progress the Gambit level if achievements were enabled. This is another change made to align with the new turn timer setting.

Notes #1

• Added floating text which will warn the player when there are 25, 20, 15, 10, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 turns left in the act. The goal here is to add anticipation for the act endings.
• A new zoom out animation will play when completing the act
• A new zoom out animation will play when winning the game
• Fixed some bugs with the animations when the player dies
• Fixed some bugs where navigating from the game over screen to the main menu would flash the game screen
• Fixed a bug where blocked damage would not show correctly
• Steadfast Protector: now reduced 25% of incoming damage, previously this was a flat 30 damage, which made the relic really good early, and less good later. This will make the relic have the same power during the whole game.

[ 2023-09-18 16:50:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; Setting to disable the turn timer and changes to accommodate this setting This patch added a new setting to the run settings screen to disable the turn timer. This has been a long requested feature that I have not prioritized as my focus has been on the core gameplay and game balance. You can play it over on the beta branch. Please let me know if you find any bugs or if you want me to add any other quality of life changes. Thanks, -Aarimous

Notes #2

• Added a new Run Setting to Enable/Disable the Turn Timer
  • This will hide the turn timer and allow the player to take as long as they want during their turn
  • Disabling the turn timer will always turn off Steam achievements. I decided to do this because I designed the game around having a turn timer and while Im all for player playing the way they want to play, the achievements might lose their feeling of accomplishment since the game will be significantly easier without the turn timer. I would be interested in refining the turn based gameplay if this is something you players want.
  • Disabling the turn timer will also disable any real-time game elements as these were balance around a turn timer and would be over powered without a timer. Currently the Yo-Yo and Firewall map hazard are disabled.
  • Game speed will still adjust how fast the other game elements move, but will no lower apply to the player's turn.. because well there is no timer with this setting.
• Changed the Jak characters starting ability to use the Jak Trap instead of the Yo-Yo. This help makes the new turn timer setting work, and feels a bit more thematic
• Lowered the I am the Loot Hoarder achievement from 100 chest to 50 chests
• Gambit Level Progression will now always be enabled regardless of the game speed, previous you could only progress the Gambit level if achievements were enabled. This is another change made to align with the new turn timer setting.

Notes #1

• Added floating text which will warn the player when there are 25, 20, 15, 10, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 turns left in the act. The goal here is to add anticipation for the act endings.
• A new zoom out animation will play when completing the act
• A new zoom out animation will play when winning the game
• Fixed some bugs with the animations when the player dies
• Fixed some bugs where navigating from the game over screen to the main menu would flash the game screen
• Fixed a bug where blocked damage would not show correctly
• Steadfast Protector: now reduced 25% of incoming damage, previously this was a flat 30 damage, which made the relic really good early, and less good later. This will make the relic have the same power during the whole game.

[ 2023-09-12 01:32:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; More game polish and bug fixes My goal with the 1.1 release is to add more polish based on player feedback as well as some bug fixes. I am still planning on adding a new character records system to this patch as well, but I am still working on that. You can play it over on the beta branch. Please let me know if you find any bugs or if you want me to add any other quality of life changes. Thanks, -Aarimous

1.1 Beta Patch Notes #1

• Added floating text which will warn the player when there are 25, 20, 15, 10, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 turns left in the act. The goal here is to add anticipation for the act endings.
• A new zoom out animation will play when completing the act
• A new zoom out animation will play when winning the game
• Fixed some bugs with the animations when the player dies
• Fixed some bugs where navigating from the game over screen to the main menu would flash the game screen
• Fixed a bug where blocked damage would not show correctly
• Steadfast Protector: now reduced 25% of incoming damage, previously this was a flat 30 damage, which made the relic really good early, and less good later. This will make the relic have the same power during the whole game.

[ 2023-09-08 00:22:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

Another round of bugfixes and a few relics changes (mainly buffs) and fixed some values that were a tenth of the intended size. Many of these bug fixes were aimed at fixing the bug where the game could sometimes crash after a run. I'm not sure if this will totally fix it as I was not able to replicate the crashing bug myself. If your game is crashing on you please contact me on the post or over in Discord with any info on what happened right before it crashed. Thanks! Aarimous

Relics

• Ever Sharp Dagger: buffed to now grant +25 melee damage, but also -15 ability damage
• Two of Diamonds: buffed to now also grant -30 to level rewards cost and -20 to relic chest reroll cost
• Retromation's Glasses: Adjusted the attack animation to improve visibility
• Staff of Chaos: Fixed values as they were all a tenth of the intended amounts and adjusted values so it now adds +20 damage for all map hazard types
• Friendly Goblin: Fixed values as they were all a tenth of the intended amounts
• Your Last Gloves: Fixed values as they were all a tenth of the intended amounts
• Lost Diadem of the Queen: Fixed to now add +2 to pierce instead of ability damage per pierce twice

Bugs and Miscellaneous Changes

• Adjusted health bar so missing health is a bit darker to help with clarity
• Adjusted the floating text values to have a max scale
• Decreased the spawn rates of the Firewalls as the amount spawned was a bit much compared to the difficulty of the Meteors and Lasers
• Fixed a bug so the Firewalls now only start pulsing the turn before they trigger
• Fixed a bug where the art of the enemies would sometime not show in the correct
• Fixed a bug where the art color of the enemies would sometimes be stuck in the red attack phase
• On the game over screen the Main Menu and New Run buttons are now side by side. This is so they fit better on the screen.
• On the game over screen the stats no longer auto-wrap. This was causing some UI issues when the player would get large records and unlock new character/relics
• Fixed a bug where the player could still input movement commands when the game was over
• Fixed a bug where the games turn timer wouldnt properly stop when the game was over
• Fixed a bug where On Death animation would sometimes not show the characters art dissolving
• Adjusted the game over screen so it slowly fades in instead of just suddenly appearing

[ 2023-09-04 22:42:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

Small hotfix patch based on player feedback. I am aware of an issue where the game sometimes crashes after a run. If you are seeing this bug please reach out to me on Discord as I could use some help figuring out what is causing the crash.

• Fixed the "Tis But A Scratch" achievement so it will correctly be unlocked when a player wins a game and take at least 1000 damage. There was a bug where the game was looking for exactly 1000 damage
• Ancient Elite Skull explosions now deals 50% of the elites health instead of 100%
• Made the button text smaller for the Reset Progress and Reset Records buttons

[ 2023-09-04 18:44:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

• Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash on leveling up. This was caused by my changes to the Snow Day ability last night.
• Fixed a bug where some of the new achievements were not counting (Enemies Killed, Chests Opened, and Elites Killed)
• Fixed the artwork for one of the relics

[ 2023-09-01 12:19:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

# 1.0 Hotfix 1 A quick little hotfix to address a few bugs and some balance changes Bugs

• Addressed a bug where the default controls would sometimes not map
• Now the Game Over screen the New Run and Main Menu buttons are now disabled until all the XP is earned
• Fixed a bug where the map hazards would always be lasers

Marble

• The 1.0 patch removed the limit for how many marbles you could have a once. I like the change, but it made the marble too good too soon. My goal was to make marble a weaker option to take without supporting relics, and allow it to become a more powerful option with upgrades.
• Lowered the marble damage from [30, 45, 70, 100] [20, 40, 70, 100]
• Increased the marble cool down from [4, 3, 2,1] [5, 3, 2, 1]

Snow Day

• Simply pulling back some of the area of effect scale modifiers. There are plenty of relics that make will increase the AOE and this represent a much more balanced approach.
• Lowered the scale from [1, 1.5, 2, 2.5] [1, 1.3, 1.7, 2.20]

Amulet of Slap Jack

• Pure -1 cool down on a common relic is just too good and almost becomes an auto pickup for any build. So to counter this Im going to add a downside.
• Added -25% to area of effect multiplier

[ 2023-09-01 01:29:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

After nearly 10 months of early access, Chess Survivors 1.0 is now fully released! Thank you to everyone who played my little indie game while I continuously worked on and published over 50 patches. A special thank you to anyone who has given me feedback. This game would be nowhere as good as it is today without your gentle encouragement and support. Over the next few weeks, I'll be working on bug fixes and balance changes based on your feedback. Then I'll make another update here with any post-release plans for Chess Survivors and what's next for me personally. Cheers, Aarimous P.S. Please consider subscribing to My YouTube Channel where I share my game development as an solo indie dev.

1.0 Patch Notes

Note from the dev: Please DM me on Discord if any of the below changes make my game unfun. I want my game to be fun and I am more than willing to hear you our and I will likely make changes to address your feedback!

New Content

• New Map Consumables System
  • Every so often a random consumable will spawn
    • Potion - heals player
    • Magnet - sucks up all current XP
    • Bomb - creates an explosion dealing damage nearby enemies
    • Frost bomb - creates an explosion freezing nearby enemies
• New Character based on my cat Karl
• New Character based on my cat Martin
• 16 new steam achievements
• New run records system which will show you if you beat your previous stat (for now this is only shown on the game over screen)
• New button on the settings screen to reset the player progress
• New button to the settings screen to reset the records

General Changes and Balancing

Health and Damage Numbers

• Multiplied all the health and damage numbers by 10 since bigger numbers are more fun.
  • Adjusted damage text to fit new scale of numbers
  • Adjust health bar size to fit new scale of numbers
• Ability Damage
  • Increased ability damage values across the board with a focus on making single target abilities really scale at the top end of the upgrade path (more info below)

Elites

• Removed Elite Combat Modifiers
  • These include bonus damage (red), reduced damage (blue), and always move (green)
  • These were boring at best and never got the love they deserve. In their current state they dont feel like they are adding to the game.
• All elites will now drop extra XP when killed, the amount scales with acts
  • Previously non-chest elites could drop bonus XP or a Potion
  • With the new consumable system player should no longer need potions from elites
• All elites now have three times the health, and deal 50% more damage than their normal versions

Enemy and Act Difficulty

• Adjusted the health and damage increases for Act 2 and Act 3
• Adjusted the enemy spawning for the first 100 turns of Act 1
• Increased enemy spawn rates in parts of Act 1
• Added randomness to the Act 2 major spawn event to spawn a wave of either Pawns, Knights, Rook, or Bishops. Previously this was always a wave of pawns.
• Adjusted the act modifiers for Act 2 and Act 3
• Enemy health and damage
  • Increased elite health scale from 300% to 400%
  • Decreased king base health from 300 to 200
  • Increased rook base health from 120 to 135
  • Increased bishop base health from 120 to 130
  • Increased queen base health from 150 to 175
  • Reduced bishop attack range from 3 to 2
  • Increased bishop attack damage from 20 to 30
  • Increased Pawn base health 80 -> 90
  • Increased Knight base health 80 -> 85
  • Added randomness to the Act 2 major spawn event to spawn a wave of either Pawns, Knights, Rook, or Bishops. Previously this was always a wave of pawns.

Abilities

Across the board the exact number have been adjusted with the goal of making each ability feel rewarding and fun to select and upgrade. I tried to list them below, but I am sure I missed some changes.

• Jack Trap
  • Reworked this ability as the original version was unfun
  • Sets a trap to your current tile which will trigger when an enemy collides with it dealing damage to the enemy and launching projectiles in random directions. These projectiles will deal damage to other enemies and trigger other traps.
• Cribbage
  • Projectiles now shoot in alternating directions
  • I wanted to make this one a bit easier to use since it will be the first ability a player gets, this ability also resembles the starting ability from Vampire survivors. As such, Im hoping this will act as a good tutorial ability for players.
  • Damage has been reduced since the ability now starts with a base of 2 projectiles and its easier to hit enemies
• Boomerang
  • Reduced the cooldown from [10,8,6] [8,6,4]
  • Increased the damage from [55, 80, 110, 175] [75, 100, 150 250]
• Blizzard
  • Reduced the number of particles from 100 to 50 to improve visual clarity
  • Made the entire effect a bit transparent
• Tic Tac Toe
  • Increased damage from [55, 75, 100, 160] [65, 90, 130, 175]
  • Projectiles now always pierce enemies
  • Reduced cooldown from [4, 3, 2] [3, 2, 1]
  • Increased range from [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] [2, 3, 4, 5]
• Yo-Yo
  • Reduced damage form [40, 85, 100, 120] [40, 65, 100, 150]
• Marble
  • Increased the base pierce now starts a 2 instead of 1
  • Adjusted max number of projectiles to be at 25 at all levels
  • Can now upgrade number of projectiles to 2 in act 1, previously this was locked to act 2

Character Health

• All characters will now gain 20 health when leveling up
• Base health amounts have been reduced by about 50%
• My goal here is to make the early game feel a lot harder, previously it felt like a bad build could easily get by the early game without getting lucky or having good mechanics. This massive health reduction should mostly felt in Act 1. I balanced this around getting to near the same health by the end of the game.
  • Joker 640 350
  • Doll 420 200
  • Evil Monkey 690 333
  • Smol Wizard 540 275
  • Jak 250 120
  • Fishbowl 580 300
  • Ghost 220 185
  • The Real Knight 420 230
  • Koala 500 270
  • Little Robot 630 300
  • Karl 520 260
  • Martin 450 225

Miscellaneous:

• The Real Knight
  • Reworked since the original theme of cant heal, but has a lot of health, ended up being a bit confusing since healing related relics would still spawn.
  • Instead this will be a melee focused character
• Relics
  • Old Smelly Cheese - Removed % max health increase, Added +100 base health increase, Added +20 health gained each level
  • Lucky Crown - Added -5 to Consumable Spawn Rate
  • Magic Carrot - Increased healing amount from 10 to 20
  • Three of Clubs - Increased all damages mods from 30 to 33 (for being on theme)
  • Lost Diadem of the Queen Added +2 to player pierce
  • Ancient Hawacha Rocket Added +2 to range
• Player Base Stats
  • Increased base XP needed to level for 3 to 5. With the elite dropping more XP the player would get to powerful to quickly so I have adjusted this down a bit.
  • Each level the XP requirement will now increase by 4 (previously 3)
• Firewall
  • Increased the spawn delay to match the Meteor and Laser map hazards
• UI
  • Updated the game over screen to show the run stats
  • Update the art of the game over screen
  • Removed XP calculation text as it was just messy
  • Increased the speed the XP bar increased
  • Adjusted other game over UI elements to fit better
  • Update the art on the main menu screen
  • Removed Early Access text from main menu screen
  • Removed the early access developer note from main menu screen
  • Disabled stat tracking as it was useless, and as such removed the data tracking opt in message
  • Fixed the run settings screen to now properly show the arrow you are focused on. This was creating some confusion for controller only players
  • Removed the tutorial and controller screens from ever appearing, but you can still access these from the pause menu.
  • On a players first run they will jump right into playing as the Joker, them on their next run they will see the run settings and character select screen. The goal was just to streamline the process and get the player playing sooner.
  • Updated my logo on the main splash screen to be higher resolution
  • Hide the run timer, there is already enough time pressure during the run and this is just extra clutter
  • Run timer is still in the stats screen and game win/lose screen
• Bugs
  • Fixed a bug where the aliens teleoperation laser was not dealing melee damage to enemies
  • Fixed an text issue where the wrong text would appear for the laser map hazard
  • Adjusted the level up UI so it moving around the popup would properly work with controllers
  • Attempted to fix a bug where the level up screen would sometimes note work when using a controller or for some steam deck users.

[ 2023-08-31 17:01:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; Balance changes Here are the patch notes for the newest 1.0 beta build. You can play it over on the beta branch. Changes based on player feedback. Thanks, -Aarimous

1.0 Beta Patch Notes #5

• Increased enemy spawn rates in parts of Act 1
• Added randomness to the Act 2 major spawn event to spawn a wave of either Pawns, Knights, Rook, or Bishops. Previously this was always a wave of pawns.
• Pawn base health 80 -> 90
• Knight base health 80 -> 85
• Bishop base health 125 -> 130
• Rook base health 120 -> 135
• Cribbage ability base damage [65, 110, 180, 300] -> [65, 90, 120, 200]

[ 2023-08-30 12:54:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; Polish and a few random changes Here are the patch notes for the newest 1.0 beta build. You can play it over on the beta branch. Changes based on player feedback. Thanks, -Aarimous

1.0 Beta Patch Notes #4

• New Records system which will show you if you beat your previous stat. For now this is only shown on the game over screen
• Fixed the run settings screen to now properly show the arrow you are focused on. This was creating some confusion for controller only players
• Added a button the settings screen to reset the player progress
• Added a button to the settings screen to reset the records

[ 2023-08-25 23:08:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; Polish and a few random changes Here are the patch notes for the newest 1.0 beta build. You can play it over on the beta branch. A random assortment of polish and a few changes. Thanks, -Aarimous

1.0 Beta Patch Notes #3

• Attempted to fix a bug where the level up screen would sometimes note work when using a controller or for some steam deck users.
• Updated the game over screen to show the run stats
• Update the art of the game over screen
• Removed XP calculation text as it was just messy
• Increased the speed the XP bar increased
• Adjusted other game over UI elements to fit better
• Lost Diadem of the Queen Added +2 to player pierce
• Ancient Hawacha Rocket Added +2 to range
• Updated my logo on the main splash screen to be higher resolution
• Update the art on the main menu screen
• Removed Early Access text from main menu screen
• Removed the early access developer note from main menu screen
• Disabled stat tracking as it was useless, and as such removed the data tracking opt in message
• Removed the tutorial and controller screens from ever appearing, but you can still access these from the pause menu.
• On a players first run they will jump right into playing as the Joker, them on their next run they will see the run settings and character select screen. The goal was just to streamline the process and get the player playing sooner.

[ 2023-08-23 22:37:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; Balance Changes, Balance Changes, and More Balance Changes Here are the patch notes for the newest 1.0 beta build. You can play it over on the beta branch. I played a bunch of runs and after each round made some balance changes. These are the results of those changes. Some of these are buff, some are nerfs, and some are simply just changes. Feel free to call me our if some of these make the game horrible, I don't want my game to be horrible, so I will gladly make and changes or buffs based on your feedback. Thanks, -Aarimous

Patch Notes #2

Character Health

• All characters will now gain 20 health when leveling up
• Base health amounts have been reduced by about 50%
• My goal here is to make the early game feel a lot harder, previously it felt like a bad build could easily get by the early game without getting lucky or having good mechanics. This massive health reduction should mostly felt in Act 1. I balanced this around getting to near the same health by the end of the game.
• Joker 640 350
• Doll 420 200
• Evil Monkey 690 333
• Smol Wizard 540 275
• Jak 250 120
• Fishbowl 580 300
• Ghost 220 185
• The Real Knight 420 230
• Koala 500 270
• Little Robot 630 300
• Karl 520 260
• Martin 450 225

Boomerang

• Reduced the cooldown from [10,8,6] [8,6,4]
• Increased the damage from [55, 80, 110, 175] [75, 100, 150 250]

Blizzard

• Reduced the number of particles from 100 to 50 to improve visual clarity
• Made the entire effect a bit transparent

Tic Tac Toe

• Increased damage from [55, 75, 100, 160] [65, 90, 130, 175]
• Projectiles now always pierce enemies
• Reduced cooldown from [4, 3, 2] [3, 2, 1]
• Increased range from [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] [2, 3, 4, 5]

Yo-Yo

• Reduced damage form [40, 85, 100, 120] [40, 65, 100, 150]

Marble

• Increased the base pierce now starts a 2 instead of 1
• Adjusted max number of projectiles to be at 25 at all levels
• Can now upgrade number of projectiles to 2 in act 1, previously this was locked to act 2

Old Smelly Cheese

• Removed % max health increase
• Added +100 base health increase
• Added +20 health gained each level

Firewall

• Increased the spawn delay to match the Meteor and Laser map hazards
• Chests are no longer part of the consumable loot pool
• Each level the XP requirement will now increase by 4 (previously 3)

Enemy and Act Difficulty

• Adjusted the health and damage increases for Act 2 and Act 3
• Adjusted the enemy spawning for the first 100 turns of Act 1
• Reduced bonus XP from elites by 50%
• Increased elite health scale from 300% to 400%
• Decreased king base health from 300 to 200
• Increased rook base health from 120 to 150
• Increased bishop base health from 120 to 130
• Increased queen base health from 150 to 175
• Reduced bishop attack range from 3 to 2
• Increased bishop attack damage from 20 to 30

Bugs:

• Fixed an text issue where the wrong text would appear for the laser map hazard
• Adjusted the level up UI so it moving around the popup would properly work with controllers

[ 2023-08-22 23:33:04 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi All, I need your help testing my game! In case you missed this post here, I am fully releasing Chess Survivors on August 31st! As a solo developer (with a full time job) I can only test so much. So I need you help testing the 1.0 release which I just published on the steam beta branch. I go into a bit more detail about why I am fully releasing the game now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAEHFaOysgg This patch contains a ton of balance changes and adjustments to the game which ended up being about 2 major patches worth of changes. I will likely make some additional changes in the coming days as I fine tune the balance. Please sent me a message over on my official discord, the steam discussion board, or even on this post. Thank you, Aarimous

1.0 BETA Patch Notes

Note: these are subject to change for full 1.0 release

New

• New Map Consumables System
  • Every so often a random consumable will spawn
    • Potion - heals player
    • Magnet - sucks up all current XP
    • Bomb - creates an explosion dealing damage nearby enemies
    • Frost bomb - creates an explosion freezing nearby enemies
    • Chest - grants a choice of random relics (this can only spawn once per act)
• New Character based on my cat Karl
• New Character based on my cat Martin

Changes

Health and Damage:

• Multiplied all the health and damage numbers by 10 since bigger numbers are more fun.
  • Adjusted damage text to fit new scale of numbers
  • Adjust health bar size to fit new scale of numbers
• Ability Damage
  • Increased ability damage values across the board with a focus on making single target abilities really scale at the top end of the upgrade path

Elites:

• Removed Elite Combat Modifiers
  • These include bonus damage (red), reduced damage (blue), and always move (green)
  • These were boring at best and never got the love they deserve. In their current state they dont feel like they are adding to the game.
• All elites will now drop extra XP
  • Previously non-chest elites could drop bonus XP or a Potion
  • With the new consumable system player should no longer need potions from elites
• All elites now have three times the health, and deal 50% more damage than their normal versions
• Elites drop a twice as much XP

Abilities

• Jack Trap
  • Reworked this ability as the original version was unfun
  • Sets a trap to your current tile which will trigger when an enemy collides with it dealing damage to the enemy and launching projectiles in random directions. These projectiles will deal damage to other enemies and trigger other traps.
• Cribbage
  • Projectiles now shoot in alternating directions
  • I wanted to make this one a bit easier to use since it will be the first ability a player gets, this ability also resembles the starting ability from Vampire survivors. As such, Im hoping this will act as a good tutorial ability for players.
  • Damage has been reduced since the ability now starts with a base of 2 projectiles and its easier to hit enemies

Miscellaneous:

• The Real Knight
  • Reworked since the original theme of cant heal, but has a lot of health, ended up being a bit confusing since healing related relics would still spawn.
  • Instead this will be a melee focused character
• Relics:
  • Lucky Crown - Added -5 to Consumable Spawn Rate
  • Magic Carrot - Increased healing amount from 10 to 20
  • Three of Clubs - Increased all damages mods from 30 to 33 (for being on theme)
• Player Base Stats
  • Increased base XP needed to level for 3 to 5. With the elite dropping more XP the player would get
  • to powerful to quickly so I have adjusted this down a bit.
• UI
  • Hide the run timer, there is already enough time pressure during the run and this is just extra clutter
  • Run timer is still in the stats screen and game win/lose screen
• Bugs
  • Fixed a bug where the aliens teleoperation laser was not dealing melee damage to enemies

[ 2023-08-21 20:06:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi All, Mark your calendars! Chess Survivors is going to be fully released on August 31st! The 1.0 release will bring a bunch of new relics, new achievements, two new characters themed off my cats, and a massive re-balance across all the relics, characters, and abilities. I go into a bit more detail in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAEHFaOysgg I am excited, nervous, and sad to be wrapping up development on Chess Survivors. Im sad because this game is my first real game and even more, it's been part of my life for over a year now. Ive spent a lot of time developing Chess Survivors, but Id bet Ive spent even more time simply thinking about the game. Needless to say, it will be strange to start a new project, but this game will always have a special place in my heart. Im nervous because I decided to cut many of the features or systems I wanted to add (boss fight, endless more, record system, etc..). This makes me nervous because some of these features are things that would take this game to the next level of polish, but I know its time for me to move onto my next project. Im proud of the depth and content Ive added to Chess Survivors and I think it has more than enough to match the value you would expect from a small indie game like this. Im excited, because I have so many ideas for my next project. Ive become a much better developer and designer over the course of Chess Survivors development and I cant wait to make my next game. Thank you to all of you who have played my little indie game. A special thank you to everyone who has given me feedback or reported bug. Cheers, Aarimous

[ 2023-07-30 03:39:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; 4 New Abilities, Balance Change, Bug Fixes Hi All, The preview build for the 0.11.1 patch is now live. I've still got a bit more planned for the 0.11 patches naming a bunch more relics and 2 characters based on my cats. I'm hoping to get this complete by the end of July. As always, you can message me with ideas or bugs on the Official Discord or via the Steam discussion boards and I will likely implement your idea! Thanks for playing my little game. :) Aarimous

0.11.1 Patch Notes

• Fixed a text bug for The Wise Elder and Tim the Enchanter where the descriptions were not accurate
• Added a Reset button to the keyboard and controller control mapping screens
• Bouncy Ball : pierce increased from [2, 3, 4, 5, 6] to [3, 4, 5, 6]
• Fixed a bug where the enemies would no longer attack a player when the player was sharing a tile with a minion
• Adjusted the portal animation for the Alien Minion so it's a bit clearer that you can reuse the portal
• Adjusted the speed an acceleration of the bouncy ball in an attempt to fix an edge case where the ball sometimes gets stuck on enemies and players.

0.11.0 Patch Notes

New Abilities:

• Snow Day: Create a blizzard over a nearby enemy for a short duration. Each turn the blizzard freezes and deals damage to all enemies inside the blizzard. Dealing damage that would freeze an already frozen enemy will double the damage.
• Scarecrow Minion: Spawn a scarecrow minion in a nearby tile. When enemies enter its range they will target the scarecrow instead of the player. When dealt damage the scarecrow will deal the same amount of damage back to the attacker. Will despawn if killed or after a some duration.
• Ping-Pong Paddle: Smash a ping-pong paddle onto a nearby enemy dealing damage to all enemies beneath it. Damage dealt is increased based on the player's melee damage.
• Bubbles: Blow bubbles at a nearby enemy dealing damage to any enemies they collide with

Balance Changes:

• Koala: Increased the base movement to have range 2
• Nightmare : Increased damage tiers from [12, 16, 25] to [16, 20, 30]
• Nightmare: Reduced cooldown from [3, 2, 1] to [2, 1]

Miscellaneous:

• Adjusted minions ability descriptions to reflect they now spawn nearby the player instead of in an adjacent tile.
• Fixed the text for Lucky Crown so it now properly shows the increase to rare relic spawn chance

[ 2023-07-13 16:23:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

Just a hotfix patch to fix the random character button

• Fixed a bug where the random character button would sometimes fail to create a real character. Instead it would create an empty character with one 1hp, no ability, and the default monkey art. This would only happen if the player had a higher progression level than the current amount of characters in the game.

[ 2023-07-09 15:19:04 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; 4 New Abilities, Balance Change, Bug Fixes Hi All, The preview build for the 0.11.0 patch is now available on the Beta Branch. As always, you can message me with ideas or bugs on the Official Discord or via the Steam discussion boards and I will likely implement your idea! Thanks for playing my little game. :) Aarimous

0.11.0 Patch Notes

New Abilities:

• Snow Day: Create a blizzard over a nearby enemy for a short duration. Each turn the blizzard freezes and deals damage to all enemies inside the blizzard. Dealing damage that would freeze an already frozen enemy will double the damage.
• Scarecrow Minion: Spawn a scarecrow minion in a nearby tile. When enemies enter its range they will target the scarecrow instead of the player. When dealt damage the scarecrow will deal the same amount of damage back to the attacker. Will despawn if killed or after a some duration.
• Ping-Pong Paddle: Smash a ping-pong paddle onto a nearby enemy dealing damage to all enemies beneath it. Damage dealt is increased based on the player's melee damage.
• Bubbles: Blow bubbles at a nearby enemy dealing damage to any enemies they collide with

Balance Changes:

• Koala: Increased the base movement to have range 2
• Nightmare : Increased damage tiers from [12, 16, 25] to [16, 20, 30]
• Nightmare: Reduced cooldown from [3, 2, 1] to [2, 1]

Miscellaneous:

• Adjusted minions ability descriptions to reflect they now spawn nearby the player instead of in an adjacent tile.
• Fixed the text for Lucky Crown so it now properly shows the increase to rare relic spawn chance

[ 2023-07-08 17:39:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

Just a hotfix patch to fix a text based bug.

• Fixed a small bug on the character select screen where the wrong text was showing for the max health for the character

[ 2023-07-06 20:27:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; New Laser Map Hazard, Reroll Rewards, New Relics, Balance Changes Hi All, This patch represents the final map hazard binging us to three (Meteor, Firewall, and Laser). I will likely balance and adjust these in the future, but for now the map hazard feature is completed. This patch also has some balance changes and adjusted based on your direct feedback. Speaking of feedback I recently sent my thoughts on this great thread from bholtz. Keep any eye out for an upcoming post about my plans for the 1.0 release. As always, you can message me with ideas or bugs on the Official Discord or via the Steam discussion boards and I will likely implement your idea! Thank you to all of you who have given me feedback and helped test new features. Thanks for playing my little indie game :) Aarimous

Patch Notes

New Features

• 3 new relics (2 rare and 1 common)
• Added a new reroll button on the Relics and Level Up loot screens
  • When pressed all the items will be rerolled, but it cost health to reroll
  • After rolling the health cost is doubled
  • The button is disabled if the cost would kill the player (aka you can't kill yourself by pressing the reroll button)
  • The cost can not be mitigate, reduced, or scaled, it's a flat amount that is subtracted from the player's current health
  • Rerolling relics costs a base of 10
  • Rerolling level up rewards a base of 8
  • Cannot reroll relics during act rewards or chest that are explicitly full of relics (like after taking Tim the Enchanter)
• Added melee damage increase to core level up loot pool. Amount will scale each so Act 1 is +2, Act 2 is +4, and Act 3 is +6
• Added ability damage increase to core level up loot pool. Amount will scale each act so Act 1 is +1, Act 2 is +2, and Act 3 is +3.
• Adjusted the level up loot that increases player health to scale with each act so Act 1 is +5, Act 2 is +10, and Act 3 is +15. This will keep it in line with the new melee and ability damage increases.

Balance Changes

My goal with these changes was to add power to melee stats and bring some of the more extreme values in line with other relics of the same rarity. My goal isn't for all relics to have the same power level, but I don't want certain relics to be automatic picks. Ideally each time you get presented relics you get to make a decision, or there is a clear best pick for your current build.

• Just a Sword: melee damage increased from 1 to 2
• Gloves of punching: melee damage increased from 2 to 3
• Steadfast protector: damage reduction increased from 1 to 3
• Knights Bane: knight health -2 to -3
• Gift to the Plebs: Pawn health reduced from 4 to 2
• Gift to the Plebs: Knight damage reduced from 2 to 1
• Reckless Axe: Enemy damage scale reduced from +100% to +50%
• Empty Heart: On low health, player Ability Damage increased from 3 to 4
• Empty Heart: On low health, added Player damage reduction of 5
• Old Smelly Cheese: Player max health scale reduced from 100% to 50%
• Lost Diadem Queen: Ability damage per pierce increased from 1 to 2
• Ancient Hwacha Rocket: Ability damage per range increased from 1 to 2
• Ace Spades: added property +1 amount of loot on level up
• Five Head Stoned Ring: ability bonus damage to elite increased from 5 to 8
• Lesser Swipe minion damage from 1 to 2
• Greater Swipe minion damage from 3 to 5
• Minor Scalar AOE acale from 33% to 25%
• Major Scalar AOE scale from 100% 50%

Bugs and Mics Changes

• Fixed the text for core player upgrades which added ability damage
• Players can now move onto tiles occupied by minions
• Player can now consume chests if a minion spawns onto a tile already occupies by a chest
• Enemy health bars will now show when the enemy is at full health
• Fire Wall map hazards:
  • Will now only rotate during the players movement phase. The goal here is to make the fire walls feel avoidable.
  • Now rotate faster, this is to make up for the pause and to push the player towards more action since the walls might hit the player
  • Now last 12 turns, previous they were time based but this now doesnt make a lot of sense since there is a pause in the rotation
  • Added back in some variations in length and number of arms for more interesting fire walls

[ 2023-06-29 14:35:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; Reroll Relics and Level Up Rewards, 3 New Relics The preview build for the 0.10.4.1 patch is now available on the beta branch. Play now on the beta branch. -Aarimous

0.10.4 Patch Notes #2

• Added a new reroll button on the Relics and Level Up loot screens
  • When pressed all the items will be rerolled, but it cost health to reroll
  • After rolling the health cost is doubled
  • The button is disabled if the cost would kill the player (aka you can't kill yourself by pressing the reroll button)
  • The cost can not be mitigate, reduced, or scaled, it's a flat amount that is subtracted from the player's current health
  • Rerolling relics costs a base of 5
  • Rerolling level up rewards a base of 3
  • Cannot reroll relics during act rewards or chest that are explicitly full of relics (like after taking Tim the Enchanter)
• 3 new relics (2 rare and 1 common)
• Changed Relic: Lesser Swipe minion damage from 1 to 2
• Changed Relics: Greater Swipe minion damage from 3 to 5
• Fixed the text for core player upgrades which added ability damage

[ 2023-06-27 20:26:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; A bunch of changes based on player feedback Hi All, The preview build for the 0.10.4 patch is now available on the beta branch. This patch is almost 100% changes based on your feedback! You can message me with ideas or bugs on the Official Discord or via the Steam discussion boards and I will likely implement your idea! I truly love working on it and it's such a blast seeing you find Chess Survivors and enjoy it's unique take on the genre. Cheers, Aarimous

0.10.4 Beta Patch Notes #1

• Players can now move onto tiles occupied by minions
• Player can now consume chests if a minion spawns onto a tile already occupies by a chest
• Added melee damage increase to core level up loot pool. Amount will scale each so Act 1 is +2, Act 2 is +4, and Act 3 is +6
• Added ability damage increase to core level up loot pool. Amount will scale each act so Act 1 is +1, Act 2 is +2, and Act 3 is +3.
• Adjusted the level up loot that increases player health to scale with each act so Act 1 is +5, Act 2 is +10, and Act 3 is +15. This will keep it in line with the new melee and ability damage increases.
• Enemy health bars will now show when the enemy is at full health
• Fire Wall map hazards:
  • Will now only rotate during the players movement phase. The goal here is to make the fire walls feel avoidable.
  • Now rotate faster, this is to make up for the pause and to push the player towards more action since the walls might hit the player
  • Now last 12 turns, previous they were time based but this now doesnt make a lot of sense since there is a pause in the rotation
  • Added back in some variations in length and number of arms for more interesting fire walls
• Relic changes:
  • Just a Sword: melee damage increased from 1 to 2
  • Gloves of punching: melee damage increased from 2 to 3
  • Steadfast protector: damage reduction increased from 1 to 3
  • Knights Bane: knight health -2 to -3
  • Gift to the Plebs: Pawn health reduced from 4 to 2
  • Gift to the Plebs: Knight damage reduced from 2 to 1
  • Reckless Axe: Enemy damage scale reduced from +100% to +50%
  • Empty Heart: On low health, player Ability Damage increased from 3 to 4
  • Empty Heart: On low health, added Player damage reduction of 5
  • Old Smelly Cheese: Player max health scale reduced from 100% to 50%
  • Lost Diadem Queen: Ability damage per pierce increased from 1 to 2
  • Ancient Hwacha Rocket: Ability damage per range increased from 1 to 2
  • Ace Spades: added property +1 amount of loot on level up
  • Five Head Stoned Ring: ability bonus damage to elite increased from 5 to 8

[ 2023-06-26 14:36:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

Quick patch to nerf the fire walls as they felt a bit to overwhelming after getting some great feedback from bholz in the steam discussion (thanks bholz!). I'll likely adjust the fire walls again in the next patch, but for now this should make them feel a bit fairer.

• Fire walls can now only spawn with one "arm". Previously higher level walls could have upwards of 2-3 arms.
• Level 3 walls will now have an addition turn of warning before they spawn
• Fixed a bug where the game would crash when starting a new run

[ 2023-06-24 14:15:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; New Meteor Fire Wall Hazard plus German, French, and Portuguese Translations Hi All, I'm very happy with how the new fire wall map hazard turned out. I'm planning on adding one more map hazard for the 0.10 patch series. This should achieve my goal of giving each run a bit more variance. After that, I plan on working on one more batch of QOL features and content (relics, abilities, characters) which will be the 0.11.x patch series. This will be the final patch before the full 1.0 release which will contain a massive rework of Act 3 plus a subsequent a rebalance of Act 2 (and really the whole game). As always, you can message me with ideas or bugs on the Official Discord or via the Steam discussion boards and I will likely implement your idea! Thank you to all of you who have given me feedback and helped test new features. Thanks for playing my little indie game :) Much love, Aarimous

Patch Notes

• Added localization support for German, French, and Portuguese. Please let me know if anything is poorly translated and I can quickly update it!
• Each run the type of map hazard will now be randomly selected
• Some flavor text will appear at the start of the run based on the map hazard that was randomly selected
• New map hazard: Fire Wall
  • Small fire balls wills spawn that spin around the anchor point
  • Fire wall will de-spawn after a short amount of time
  • If the player collides with a fire ball will explode and deal a small amount of damage to the player
  • Higher level fire walls will have more fire balls and spawn several arms
• Adjusted Little Robots movement pattern to prevent situations where players could get stuck on walls.
• Added End Run button which will kill the player and show the game over screen
• Renamed Main Menu button to be Quit to Main Menu
• Renamed Quit button to be Quit to Desktop
• Changed gambit level 5 to be increase knight health instead of reducing movement cooldown. Although an interesting challenge, this made later gambit levels way to challenging
• Change gambit level 10 to now have a 10% chance to spawn an additional enemy instead of 100% chance. This is a significant nerf, but should allow me to add additional gambit levels.
• Text notification will now appear when gambit levels cause an extra enemy to spawn
• If a controller disconnects during a run the game will now pause

[ 2023-06-23 16:43:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; German, French, and Portuguese Support, New Map Hazard "Fire Wall", Misc Changes The preview build for the 0.10.3 patch is now available on the beta branch. Play now on the beta branch. -Aarimous

Patch Notes #1

• Added localization support for German, French, and Portuguese. Please let me know if anything is poorly translated and I can quickly update it!
• Each run the type of map hazard will now be randomly selected
• Some flavor text will appear at the start of the run based on the map hazard that was randomly selected
• New map hazard: Fire Wall
  • Small fire balls wills spawn that spin around the anchor point
  • Fire wall will de-spawn after a short amount of time
  • If the player collides with a fire ball will explode and deal a small amount of damage to the player
  • Higher level fire walls will have more fire balls and spawn several arms
• Adjusted Little Robots movement pattern to prevent situations where players could get stuck on walls.
• Added End Run button which will kill the player and show the game over screen
• Renamed Main Menu button to be Quit to Main Menu
• Renamed Quit button to be Quit to Desktop
• Changed gambit level 5 to be increase knight health instead of reducing movement cooldown. Although an interesting challenge, this made later gambit levels way to challenging
• Change gambit level 10 to now have a 10% chance to spawn an additional enemy instead of 100% chance. This is a significant nerf, but should allow me to add additional gambit levels.
• Text notification will now appear when gambit levels cause an extra enemy to spawn
• If a controller disconnects during a run the game will now pause

[ 2023-06-19 16:39:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

Small patch to fix some bugs with text translations.

• Fixed translation for meteor showring warning
• Added translation for freeze duration property
• Added a space between value and property text

[ 2023-06-13 13:28:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; New Meteor Shower Map Hazard, Text Warnings, Localization Support, Spanish Translations Hi All, This patch marks a major step forward for Chess Survivors. The new map hazards system will bring new challenges and give players a textured experience where they will need to plan their movement and positioning carefully to avoid hazards and the horde of enemies. I plan to add a few more map hazard types (read more below), so this is just the beginning of the 0.10 patch cycle. This patch also marks support for localization with the first language being Spanish. I made some underlying changes to the game which will allow me to quickly add more languages each patch. I am using Google to translate the text, so please let me know if you come across anything that is poorly translated and I can quickly fix it. As always, you can message me with ideas or bugs on the Official Discord or via the Steam discussion boards and I will likely implement your idea! Thank you to all of you who have given me feedback and helped test new features. Thanks for playing my little indie game :) Much love, Aarimous

Patch Notes

Map Hazards

• This new feature will bring hazards the player needs to avoid.
• Throughout the acts there will be portions where these map hazards will spawn.
• A tile warning indicator will appear on a tile giving the player a few turns to avoid the incoming hazard. This amount of turns will vary depending on the type of map effect.
• Generally as the run progresses the hazards increase in difficulty by either waves with more hazards, larger area of effects, more damage, or some other effect I have yet to design.
• This will give an additional layer of challenge and choice to avoid the hazard or maybe move into the hazard to collect a chest, XP, or to outmaneuver the enemies.
• My goal will be to add a few different types map hazards
• From a design perspective, these map effects will only ever damage the player. I don't think it would be fun for this type of game to stun/slow the player's movement and frankly I hate those sort of mechanics.
• Each run the type of hazard will be randomized and for that run you will only see hazards of this type.
• My goal with this is to add challenge but not overwhelm you with having to figure out which type of hazard is on the screen.

Map Hazard: Meteor Shower

• Spawn a meteor which will fall from the sky dealing area of effect damage to the player if the player is on one of the hazards tiles.
• Warning indicator will appear 2 turns before the meteor spawns.
• Indicator will start to pulse the turn the meteor will spawn.
• Meteors can spawn in small, medium, or large sizes where the size will target more tiles.
• Meteors will spawn in waves and text will appear in the bottom left corner "Meteor Shower Approaching" and will last from 10-30ish turns.
• Meteors deal 5 damage at all levels and act. I will likely adjust, but right now my goal was to implement the feature and I can balance later.
• Meteor showers will always start at the same turns each run, but the actual shower can have some variance in how many meteors it will spawn. This should all the player to learn the spawn times and plan their movement accordingly.

Text Warnings

• In the bottom right corner of the screen text can now appear informing the player of incoming map hazards
• I might eventually expand this to add warning, but for now I like how simple this is.
• Text will be stamped with turn it appeared on, and will fade out after a few turns.

Localization Support

• Added translation support for Spanish. Note: I used google translate, so please message me if something is horribly translated and I can easily change it.
• Reworked all the text in the game to support language translation which also resulted in changing some of the English translations as well
• Added a language selection picklist that will appear the first time you load the game.
• Will now try and default the language to the language set on your OS, if that language is not supported it will default to English.
• Added language selection to the setting screen

Balance Changes

• Pawn base damage 1 -> 2. I want to make the game overall a little harder, and this will brings pawn damage in line with Knights. However Knights move every other turn, so although their movement pattern is more complicated they should have similar difficulty to pawns.
• Updated the Ace of Spades relic so it now removes the act limit to upgrades.
  • Previously, the relic extended the threshold 1 act, but this felt confusing.
  • The new relic feels a bit cleaner, but I might still added another attribute increase it's power a bit more

Bug Fixes and Misc

• Fixed a bug where clicking a button to move past the "Photosensitivity Warning" screen would also press the "Play" button on the menu screen.
• Adjusted the end game screen so it now properly reflect the bonus XP you get from the run settings, previously it was not considering the gambit level for the bonus XP
• Adjusted the Stats & Info screens so the stat values will now be justified to the right. This makes the stats a bit easier to read.
• Moved the pause screen build to be aligned to the buttons
• Fixed some typos

[ 2023-06-12 15:43:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; localization support and random bug fixes/changes The preview build for the 0.10.1 patch is now available on the beta branch. This was a bit tedious, but I can now easily localize the game's text into new languages. I'm using google translate so I expect to be less accurate, but it's better than nothing. Play now on the beta branch. -Aarimous

Localization Support

• Added translation support for Spanish. Note: I used google translate, so please message me if something is horribly translated and I can easily change it.
• Reworked all the text in the game to support language translation which also resulted in changing some of the English translations as well
• Added a language selection picklist that will appear the first time you load the game.
• Will now try and default the language to the language set on your OS, if that language is not supported it will default to English.
• Added language selection to the setting screen

Other

• Updated the Ace of Spades relic so it now removes the act limit to upgrades.
  • Previously, the relic extended the threshold 1 act, but this felt confusing.
  • The new relic feels a bit cleaner, but I might still added another attribute increase it's power a bit more
• Fixed a bug where clicking a button to move past the "Photosensitivity Warning" screen would also press the "Play" button on the menu screen.
• Adjusted the end game screen so it now properly reflect the bonus XP you get from the run settings, previously it was not considering the gambit level for the bonus XP
• Adjusted the Stats & Info screens so the stat values will now be justified to the right. This makes the stats a bit easier to read.
• Moved the pause screen build to be aligned to the buttons
• Fixed some typos

[ 2023-06-09 20:31:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; New Meteor Shower Map Hazard, Text Warnings, Pawn Balance Hi All, The preview build for the 0.10.0 patch is now available on the beta branch. I'm pretty excited about this patch and I think it brings much needed difficulty and texture to the game play experience. My goal is for the game to be hard, but winnable. Over the last few patches I think I've added a bit to much player power in the form of minions, new relics, and the rare relic rework. I will be slowly adjusting the balance as we approach 1.0, but for now I think this patch will be a good step in the right direction. You can message me with ideas or bugs on the Official Discord or via the Steam discussion boards and I will likely implement your idea! I truly love working on it and it's such a blast seeing you find Chess Survivors and enjoy it's unique take on the genre. Thanks for playing my little game. :) Much love, Aarimous

0.10.0 Beta Patch Notes #1

New Features

Map Hazards

• This new feature will bring hazards the player needs to avoid.
• Throughout the acts there will be portions where these map hazards will spawn.
• A tile warning indicator will appear on a tile giving the player a few turns to avoid the incoming hazard. This amount of turns will vary depending on the type of map effect.
• Generally as the run progresses the hazards increase in difficulty by either waves with more hazards, larger area of effects, more damage, or some other effect I have yet to design.
• This will give an additional layer of challenge and choice to avoid the hazard or maybe move into the hazard to collect a chest, XP, or to outmaneuver the enemies.
• My goal will be to add a few different types map hazards
• From a design perspective, these map effects will only ever damage the player. I don't think it would be fun for this type of game to stun/slow the player's movement and frankly I hate those sort of mechanics.
• Each run the type of hazard will be randomized and for that run you will only see hazards of this type.
• My goal with this is to add challenge but not overwhelm you with having to figure out which type of hazard is on the screen.

Map Hazard: Meteor Shower

• Spawn a meteor which will fall from the sky dealing area of effect damage to the player if the player is on one of the hazards tiles.
• Warning indicator will appear 2 turns before the meteor spawns.
• Indicator will start to pulse the turn the meteor will spawn.
• Meteors can spawn in small, medium, or large sizes where the size will target more tiles.
• Meteors will spawn in waves and text will appear in the bottom left corner "Meteor Shower Approaching" and will last from 10-30ish turns.
• Meteors deal 5 damage at all levels and act. I will likely adjust, but right now my goal was to implement the feature and I can balance later.
• Meteor showers will always start at the same turns each run, but the actual shower can have some variance in how many meteors it will spawn. This should all the player to learn the spawn times and plan their movement accordingly.

Text Warnings

• In the bottom right corner of the screen text can now appear informing the player of incoming map hazards
• I might eventually expand this to add warning, but for now I like how simple this is.
• Text will be stamped with turn it appeared on, and will fade out after a few turns.

Balance Changes

• Pawn base damage 1 -> 2. I want to make the game overall a little harder, and this will brings pawn damage in line with Knights. However Knights move every other turn, so although their movement pattern is more complicated they should have similar difficulty to pawns.

[ 2023-06-08 13:47:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; New Minion Ability, New Minion Focused Character, Touch Support Hi All, This patch has both the 0.9.1 changes which were already live on the beta patch as well as some changes I made for 0.9.2. This will be the final patch for the minions (for now). I'm pretty happy with the 4 major content pieces added being the Spitball Minion, Snowman Minion, Alien Portal Minion, and the Little Toy Robot to act as the minion based character. I have a few more ideas like a dummy minion to taunt enemies or some sort of paper airplane minion that would follow the player around. Both of those are TBD and may very well not happen at all. My next major goal is to work on way to make Act 2 feel unique, but more to come on that shortly. You can message me with ideas or bugs on the Official Discord or via the Steam discussion boards and I will likely implement your idea! Thank you to all of you who have given me feedback and helped test new features. I'm getting very excited to be get closer and closer to the full 1.0 release. Thanks for playing my little game. :) Much love, Aarimous

0.9.2 Patch Notes #2

• New Character: Little Toy Robot : it's a cute little robot that has a unique movement patter flipping from king movement to a large burst of forward movement. It has some nice added base stats for minions, but at the cost of very low melee attack.
• Reorganized the character unlock so the less fun characts are unlocked later. This should also reflect a better pacing for new movement patterns and game mechanics.
• Adjusted relic unlocks to be paired up with specific character unlocks. This way each level-up should have more a theme to it. I will likely do another pass at this in coming patches.

0.9.1 Patch Notes #1

• New Minion Ability: Alien Minion : Spawn an alien minion in an adjacent tile. During the movement phase the alien will create a portal making the tile a selectable movement tile. Selecting the portal will teleport the player to the portal. The player deals melee damage to enemies it collides with. When the player reaches the portal it will expand and deal damage to enemies in adjacent tiles.
• Adjusted how the input is handled for mouse and touch screen. For mouse nothing will practically change, but for touch screen it will now function as expected. When using a touch screen the tile selection icon will sometime remain on the tile since touching the screen moves where the game thinks the mouse cursor is, I couldn't easily fix this so for now it's just part of the game.

[ 2023-05-25 01:45:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; New Alien Minion, touch input changes Hi All, The preview build for the 0.9.1 patch is now available on the beta branch. I think this new minion will make the run feel incredible unique if you find it during your runs. Let me know what you think about the balance and visual clarity as I think it might need to be adjusted. I am also working to address a bug where the game will sometimes crash when starting a new run, please let me know if you encounter this bug. You can message me with ideas or bugs on the Official Discord or via the Steam discussion boards and I will likely implement your idea! Much love, Aarimous

0.9.1 Beta Patch Notes #1

• New Minion Ability: Alien Minion : Spawn an alien minion in an adjacent tile. During the movement phase the alien will create a portal making the tile a selectable movement tile. Selecting the portal will teleport the player to the portal. The player deals melee damage to enemies it collides with. When the player reaches the portal it will expand and deal damage to enemies in adjacent tiles.
• Adjusted how the input is handled for mouse and touch screen. For mouse nothing will practically change, but for touch screen it will now function as expected. When using a touch screen the tile selection icon will sometime remain on the tile since touching the screen moves where the game thinks the mouse cursor is, I couldn't easily fix this so for now it's just part of the game.

[ 2023-05-12 13:13:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; New Features, Minion Abilities, Freeze, QOL changes, and Bug Fixes Hi All, The minion patch 0.9.0 is now live after a solid round of testing over on the the beta branch. This patch didn't end up having as many minions and is missing a minion based character, but hey that's life. About 1 year ago I had my idea for Chess Survivors which was the result of asking "what would happen if you took Vampire Survivors + Chess". Since then the game has evolved into something I'm incredibly proud of. Thank you to everyone who has shared their ideas with me and help support this game. It would be nowhere near as good without your help. Thank you! I'm starting to see the light at the end of Chess Survivor's development here are some thoughts on changes I'd like to make before the game get's fully release. Act 2 & 3: You can expect some pretty major changes to the act 2 & 3. Right now all the acts feel very similar and I'd like to change that, but more on that later. Game Over/Win Screen: Winning the game is fun, but right now it doesn't have the celebration of a well earned victory. I've purposely left any sort of story or lore out (since this is a mechanics based game), but it could be fun to sprinkle some things in after you win the game. This might also include some sort of build summary screen so you can relish in your victory/defeat. Personal Run Records: I'd like to add in a system to track your various personal run records like "Damage delt", "Healing", "Relics Collected", etc.. In Game Wiki: As the game's systems have matured and grown I've realized there are some mechanics that are not easily understood from the gameplay. I've tried to fight this by creating simple and interesting mechanics, but sometimes interesting things are hard to explain in tweet's worth of words. For example the new freeze mechanic is easily understood since it visually freeze an enemy and stops them from acting. But what isn't as clear is freezing an already frozen minion will double the damage and not increase the freeze duration. This info isn't incredibly useful, but could have edge case applications. The stats and info screen does actually convey a lot of info, but an in game wiki would make some of these things a lot clearer. You can message me with ideas or bugs on the Official Discord or via the Steam discussion boards and I will likely implement your idea! I truly love working on it and it's such a blast seeing you find Chess Survivors and enjoy it's unique take on the genre. Thanks for playing my little game. :) Much love, Aarimous

0.9.0 Beta Patch Notes #1

New Features

• Enemies now have a small health bar once they take damage.
  • This health bar will appear on the base of the enemy. My goal for this was to allow the player to more easily know which enemies they can melee kill.
  • I think this is a fairly clean implementation, but please let me know if you have any ideas to improve it further
• Ability Cooldown UI
  • Added a new UI element to show ability cooldowns. Again, another fairly simple implementation, but I think this will give the player info on when abilities will trigger.
  • Many have asked for this, but I've been resistant because there is already a lot happening on the screen, so one of my core philosophies has been trying to keep the things as minimal a possible. My goal here is to allow player to get into a flow state.
  • I also think it can be hard to fully utilize abilities when you don't know exactly when they will trigger. This is especially true for abilities with longer cooldowns.
  • How it works:
    • On Cooldown: The icon will be faded and show a number for the turns until it will trigger.
    • Ready: If the ability is about to trigger on the current turn is will be fully opaque, have a brighter background, and an outline.
    • Certain abilities like the Cribbage Peg or Bullseye fire every turn so they will always be in the "Ready" state.
• Player health bar will now shrink/expand based on the players current max health. Small change to make the UI feel more impactful
• Freeze
  • Added the ability to freeze enemies for a duration of turns.
  • A frozen minions will not be able to act while frozen. Dealing damage that would freeze an already frozen enemy will double the damage, but does not extend the freeze duration.
  • Right now the only way to freeze an enemy is via the new Snowman Minion (see notes below)
• Added a new setting to force the mouse cursor to always show, this can be found it he accessibly settings

New Content

• Minions are here! Ive wanted to add minions for a while now.
  • There will be two types of minions duration based, and health based.
  • Both types of minions will take up a tile spot.
  • Minions with a duration will exist in game for a set amount of turns and then de-spawn.
  • Duration minions are not targetable by enemies.
  • Health based minions are targetable by enemies and will exist in game until they run out of health, or the act ends.
  • Minions will have their own ability cooldown and damage scaling properties.
  • Right now there are no relics which will modify these values, but that will change in the next few patches.
• Spitball Minion: Spawn a spitball shooting minion in an adjacent tile. Each turn, the minion will shoot a spitball at a nearby enemy dealing a small amount of damage. After a short duration the minion will de-spawn.
• Snowman Minion: Spawn a snowman minion in an adjacent tile. Each turn, the snowman will throw snowballs at nearby enemies freezing them and dealing a small amount of damage. After a short duration the minion will de-spawn. Dealing damage that would freeze an already frozen enemy will double the damage.
• Added 8 new minion themed relics 3 common and 5 rare
• Added a minions tab to the Stats and Info screen

Balance Changes

• Jak : now that increasing max health also grants current health, I decided to adjust the Jak character so it still feels weak early and strong later
  • Lowered max health from 3025
  • Removed healing on level up
• Joker : max health changed from 65 64. This is mostly a dev change to accommodate the change where health UI size now changes with max health. Im using 64 as the normal size so the health bar will be 256 pixels wide.

Bug Fixes and Miscellaneous

• Stats and Info screen will now only show the special modifiers when you they are enabled, this is to hide spoiling the unique effects certain relics can grant
• Fixed a bug where the Stats and Info screen was causing the game to crash
• Fixed a bug where increasing max health would fully heal the player
• Adjusted the level up screen so the ability/relic icons will be properly centered when they pop in
• Added and adjusted sound bus compressor and limiter to prevent audio spikes and clipping
• Adjust screen changes so they are quicker and take a standard amount of time
• Adjusted the game over screen text sizes and UI width
• Adjusted the game over unlocks to appear after leveling up, instead of all showing at the end of level up animation
• Relic rewards will now show in two columns, this is to allow for more rewards to fit onto the screen
• Adjusted % changes to now show the amount changed from base of 100% instead. For example instead of showing enemy health scaled changed from 100% -> 120%, it will now show 0% -> 20%. I think this should make it a bit cleared what the change is.
• Fixed a bug where minions were not removed at the end of an act
• Act choosing an act reward will now start the act, previously the player would be brought back to the act intro screen and would have to click "Start Act" button. I thought this was a useless click and thus have removed it.

[ 2023-04-29 15:08:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

Added some new relics for minions and some other changes to UI and bugs. Going to work to get this moved over to the main build this weekend. -Aarimous

• Added 8 new minion themed relics 3 common and 5 rare
• Added a minions tab to the Stats and Info screen
• Stats and Info screen will now only show the special modifiers when you they are enabled, this is to hide spoiling the unique effects certain relics can grant
• Fixed a bug where the Stats and Info screen was causing the game to crash
• Adjusted the game over screen text sizes and UI width
• Adjusted the game over unlocks to appear after leveling up, instead of all showing at the end of level up animation
• Relic rewards will now show in two columns, this is to allow for more rewards to fit onto the screen
• Adjusted % changes to now show the amount changed from base of 100% instead. For example instead of showing enemy health scaled changed from 100% -> 120%, it will now show 0% -> 20%. I think this should make it a bit cleared what the change is.
• Fixed a bug where minions were not removed at the end of an act
• Act choosing an act reward will now start the act, previously the player would be brought back to the act intro screen and would have to click "Start Act" button. I thought this was a useless click and thus have removed it.

[ 2023-04-28 18:27:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; New Features, Minion Abilities, Freeze, QOL changes, and bug fixes Hi All, The preview build for the 0.9.0 patch is now available on the beta branch. Thank you for you patience over the past month, I took a small break from development work to play POE and relax with my cats Karl and Martin. Over that time I've slowly been working on this patch. I would still like to add a new character and some minion specific relics before I fully release this patch. Other than that I plan to start working on an in-game wiki to explain some of the details around mechanics such as elite mods or the new freeze mechanic. You can message me with ideas or bugs on the Official Discord or via the Steam discussion boards and I will likely implement your idea! I truly love working on it and it's such a blast seeing you find Chess Survivors and enjoy it's unique take on the genre. Thanks for playing my little game. :) Much love, Aarimous Here's a devlog showcasing my work on part of this patch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RrzKI999E4

0.9.0 Beta Patch Notes #1

New Features

• Enemies now have a small health bar once they take damage.
  • This health bar will appear on the base of the enemy. My goal for this was to allow the player to more easily know which enemies they can melee kill.
  • I think this is a fairly clean implementation, but please let me know if you have any ideas to improve it further
• Ability Cooldown UI
  • Added a new UI element to show ability cooldowns. Again, another fairly simple implementation, but I think this will give the player info on when abilities will trigger.
  • Many have asked for this, but I've been resistant because there is already a lot happening on the screen, so one of my core philosophies has been trying to keep the things as minimal a possible. My goal here is to allow player to get into a flow state.
  • I also think it can be hard to fully utilize abilities when you don't know exactly when they will trigger. This is especially true for abilities with longer cooldowns.
  • How it works:
    • On Cooldown: The icon will be faded and show a number for the turns until it will trigger.
    • Ready: If the ability is about to trigger on the current turn is will be fully opaque, have a brighter background, and an outline.
    • Certain abilities like the Cribbage Peg or Bullseye fire every turn so they will always be in the "Ready" state.
• Player health bar will now shrink/expand based on the players current max health. Small change to make the UI feel more impactful
• Freeze
  • Added the ability to freeze enemies for a duration of turns.
  • A frozen minions will not be able to act while frozen. Dealing damage that would freeze an already frozen enemy will double the damage, but does not extend the freeze duration.
  • Right now the only way to freeze an enemy is via the new Snowman Minion (see notes below)
• Added a new setting to force the mouse cursor to always show, this can be found it he accessibly settings

New Content

• Minions are here! Ive wanted to add minions for a while now.
  • There will be two types of minions duration based, and health based.
  • Both types of minions will take up a tile spot.
  • Minions with a duration will exist in game for a set amount of turns and then de-spawn.
  • Duration minions are not targetable by enemies.
  • Health based minions are targetable by enemies and will exist in game until they run out of health, or the act ends.
  • Minions will have their own ability cooldown and damage scaling properties.
  • Right now there are no relics which will modify these values, but that will change in the next few patches.
• Spitball Minion: Spawn a spitball shooting minion in an adjacent tile. Each turn, the minion will shoot a spitball at a nearby enemy dealing a small amount of damage. After a short duration the minion will de-spawn.
• Snowman Minion: Spawn a snowman minion in an adjacent tile. Each turn, the snowman will throw snowballs at nearby enemies freezing them and dealing a small amount of damage. After a short duration the minion will de-spawn. Dealing damage that would freeze an already frozen enemy will double the damage.

Balance Changes

• Jak : now that increasing max health also grants current health, I decided to adjust the Jak character so it still feels weak early and strong later
  • Lowered max health from 3025
  • Removed healing on level up
• Joker : max health changed from 65 64. This is mostly a dev change to accommodate the change where health UI size now changes with max health. Im using 64 as the normal size so the health bar will be 256 pixels wide.

Bug Fixes and Miscellaneous

• Fixed a bug where increasing max health would fully heal the player
• Adjusted the level up screen so the ability/relic icons will be properly centered when they pop in
• Added and adjusted sound bus compressor and limiter to prevent audio spikes and clipping
• Adjust screen changes so they are quicker and take a standard amount of time

[ 2023-04-22 18:34:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

A few small hot fixes based on player feedback. Let me know if you find any other bugs! Thanks, Aarimous

• Fixed a bug where the Gambit Level description was not updating when increasing the level
• Fixed a bug where the Level Up and Relic descriptions where not always updating
• Fixed a bug where the in game setting screen window was too small

[ 2023-03-17 18:22:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; New character, ability, relics, plus a ton of small balance and QOL changes Hi All, This patch ended up being a blast to design and develop. I think the new ability and character might be the best designed combo I've built so far. I'm even starting to see the path to fully releasing this game. I'll be working on a new video over on my YouTube channel which will outline the timeline and final items on my ToDo list. As always, you can message me with ideas or bugs on the Official Discord or via the Steam discussion boards and I will likely implement your idea! Thanks for playing my little indie game :) Much love, Aarimous

Patch Notes

New Content

• New Koala Character unlocked at level 8. This one has a unique twist on movement patterns and will start with the new boomerang ability.
• New boomerang ability. Description: Toss a boomerang in a random direction dealing damage to enemies it collides with. Each turn the boomerang move further along its path, catching it will enable bonus damage of +50% and allow you to toss it again that turn.
• New 4 relics (2 rare and 2 common) I won't spoil them here :)

Relic Rarity

• Act rewards now give you a choice of 3 rare relics
• Chance to loot a rare relic does not increase each act. Instead its now a flat 10% chance for the entire
• Lucky Crown relics now increases chance to spawn a rare relic by 10% (previously 5%)
• Rare relics on the main game UI now show with a rare color in the background
• New colors for relic rarities

Max Health Increases

• Increasing to max health now also grants that much current health
• Previously getting max health increases felt bad that it didn't give any intimidate reward, so I changed it and this should end up being a nice little buff for the player and specific characters

Floating Text Numbers

• Blocked damage appears as floating blue text for both enemies and players
• Updated player healing floating text animation
• Updated damage floating text to scale with amount of damage
• Enemy floating damage text is now yellow when greater than 10, and orange when greater than 15
• Setting to enable floating text now applies to damage, heal, and block texts

Player Progression XP

• Gambit levels now grant 10% Player Progression XP increase pre level (previously didnt effect Player Progression XP)
• Playing on normal speed no longer grants 10% bonus Player Progression XP
• Playing on chill now grants -15% Player Progression XP (previously was 0%)

Bug Fixes and Misc

• Fixed a bug where the player was healing after killing an elite
• Fixed a bug where the level up screen could case the game to crash, not sure if anyone actually had this bug. But I found it while testing other features
• Removed Give Feedback buttons from Main Menu and Pause screen, I wasnt checking the form and nobody was really posting there
• Level up screen now prevents player from clicking the upgrade until the upgrade is visible
• Slightly adjusted the timing for when upgrades to popup

[ 2023-03-16 12:26:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; New character, ability, relics, and a ton of small balance/QOL changes Hi All, The preview build for the 0.8.0 patch is now available on the beta branch. This patch has a lot of changes so I'm hoping to get a few days of testing before I move it to the main build on March 16th. I'd still like to add in a few more relics to this patch as well as a screen to show current seen/unlocked content but too be determined if I'll get that ready by my deadline of March 16th. Much love, Aarimous Here's a video on my 2nd channel where I talk about path to releasing Chess Survivors this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKO6DqODjuw

New Content

• New Koala Character
• New boomerang ability
• New 4 relics

Changes

• Increasing to max health now also grants that much current health
• Rare relics on the main game UI now show with a rare color in the background
• New colors for relic rarities [*[ Act rewards now give you a choice of 3 rare relics
• Lucky Crown relics now increases chance to spawn a rare relic by 10% (previously 5%)
• Chance to loot a rare relic does not increase each act. Instead its now a flat 10% chance for the entire game
• Blocked damage appears as floating blue text for both enemies and players
• Updated player healing floating text animation
• Updated damage floating text to scale with amount of damage
• Enemy floating damage text is now yellow when greater than 10, and orange when greater than 15
• Setting to enable floating text now applies to damage, heal, and block texts
• Gambit levels now grant 10% Player Progression XP increase pre level (previously didnt effect Player Progression XP)
• Playing on normal speed no longer grants 10% bonus Player Progression XP
• Playing on chill now grants -15% Player Progression XP (previously was 0%)
• Removed Give Feedback buttons from Main Menu and Pause screen, I wasnt checking the form and nobody was really posting there
• Level up screen now prevents player from clicking the upgrade until the upgrade is visible
• Slightly adjusted the timing for when upgrades to popup

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where the player was healing after killing an elite
• Fixed a bug where the level up screen could case the game to crash, not sure if anyone actually had this bug. But I found it while testing other features

[ 2023-03-11 16:03:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

Fixed a bug where ability bonus damage and ability damage multiplier stats were being applied twice when calculating ability damage. This patch also has some change as part of 0.8.0

• Increasing max health now also grants that much current health
• Rare relics on the main game UI now show with a rare color in the background
• New colors for relic rarities
• Blocked damage appears as floating blue text for both enemies and players
• Updated player healing floating text animation
• Updated damage floating text to scale with amount of damage
• Enemy floating damage text is now yellow when greater than 10, and orange when greater than 15
• Setting to enable floating text now applies to damage, heal, and block texts
• Gambit levels now grant 10% Player Progression XP increase pre level (previously didnt effect Player Progression XP)
• Playing on normal speed no longer grants 10% bonus Player Progression XP
• Playing on chill now grants -15% Player Progression XP (previously was 0%)
• Removed Give Feedback buttons from Main Menu and Pause screen, I wasnt checking the form and nobody was really posting there
• Lucky Crown relics now increases chance to spawn a rare relic by 10% (previously 5%)
• Chance to loot a rare relic does not increase each act. Instead its now a flat 10% chance for the entire game

[ 2023-03-05 04:33:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

Fixed a bug where I had not turned the Steam integration back on... I turned it off during development and completely forgot!

[ 2023-03-04 20:35:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

This is a small patch for some changes I was working on last night after work. In general, this should make the dice ability feel better to use, looks cooler, and be more performant. Dice Change:

• New explosion animation that looks SOOO much better (IMO). Under the hood I also made a new system where I can create explosions like this easy for other event, which means there will be some new relics with this in the next patch.
• Updated the abilities UI art as the only one looked like cheese
• Dice will now blow up after 1 turn, previous it was after 2 turns. The delay just felt clumsy and now the player should be able to make the next turn faster if they want the dice to blow up before it fully comes to rest.
• Tweaked the damage numbers, but I can't remember exactly what the old number were
• Dice damage now increases with the dice roll, goal here is to make rolling a 6 feel really good since it deal more damage and is way larger than rolling a 1
• Dice explosion now scaled based on player AOE multiplier, previously it was unaffected
• Dice explosions now scale at only 1/3 the dice roll, but have a larger base scale about. This means that rolling a 1 still effects nearby tiles, but rolling a 6 doesn't blow up the half the screen. If you want to blow up the entire screen you will need to find relics grant AOE multiplier.
• Fixed a bug where the first time a dice was spawned it lagged out the game
• Fixed a bug where the dice spawning would sometimes cause the screen to tear or show random white particles. You'll be happy to know this was user error and I had the wrong setting checked for the dice in the Godot game engine.

[ 2023-03-03 16:05:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; New character, new ability, more Gambit levels, new relics, particles, and keyboard key bindings

Note from the Dev

Hi All, This patch is a bit of a mixed bag, but adds in more content as well as more quality of life features you would expect in a full $3 game made by a solo dev like myself. I've also dropped last number from my patch versioning so #.#.#.# to #.#.# (0.7.0 and not 0.7.0.0). My goal here is to more accurately communicate when I've completed the scope for the next patch. Speaking of next patches, I've scoped out my goals for Chess Survivors to be fully release. This works out to be 3 more major patches and then a massive final patch to get us to 1.0.0 launch. I will be making a separate post later this week with an updated timeline and general description for each major patch. Godot (the engine I built the game in) just dropped a massive 4.0 update, I strongly considered upgrading Chess Survivors to it. But I've against that, in order to focus on getting this game completed in a timely manner. Watch my most recent video for more info on this decisions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o93piWUrm7E As always, thank you for playing my little indie game, it warms my heart to read your positive reviews and hear your ideas in the Chess Survivor Discord. Much love, Aarimous

Patch Notes

New Content and Features:

• Added 5 new Gambit Challenge levels
• New achievement for winning the Game on the 10th Gambit level
• New character The Real Knight unlocked at Level 7
• New Achievement for winning the game as The Real Knight
• New ability nightmare
• 5 new relics some of which are unlocked through in game progression XP
• New button to play as a randomly unlocked character
• Added new run settings like total damage delt, total healing done, and number of enemies killed
• Added settings to players can now remap keyboard controls and controller controls. Please let me know if there are any other control mapping things I missed.
• Added on death particles to enemies which will explode out based on the angle of impact from the entity that delt damage to the enemy.

Balance Changes:

• Lowered the player progression XP needed to progress player levels
• Reworked Steadfast Protector relic to now always provide 1 damage reduction. Previously reduced 3 damage when not moving. This felt clumsy and overly complicated.
• Sneezy Ghost increased base health from 20 to 22

Bug Fixes and Misc:

• UI Fix: Healing will now only be applied up to the max heal. So if you are already at full heal the green healing text will no longer appear. This is only a display change as this is already how healing worked.
• Fixed a bug where the Ability Damage Scale moodier was not correctly applying to some abilities
• Attempted to fix a bug where the Dice ability was creating strange visual glitches when spawning. This ability still does lag the first time it spawns, but that will be addressed in a future patch.
• Fixed an issue where the main menu music and in game sound track were not changing correctly
• Probably some other bug or changes, but at this point I cant remember them

[ 2023-03-01 17:19:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; New character, particles, and keyboard key bindings

New Beta Build

Hi All, This is the first wave of changes for the 0.6.6.x patch. I also made a devlog on my YouTube channel so go check that out as well. Please checkout the new character and let me know if you come across any bugs or have feedback for balance/game play. All the best, Aarimous https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zSlukHqLKE

Steps to enable a Chess Survivors beta build:

1. Right click on Chess Survivors in your Steam library 2. Select Properties from the popup 3. Navigate to the Beta tab 4. Select the Beta branch

Beta Notes 0.6.6.0

• New character The Real Knight added unlocks at level 7
• Changed the Smol Wizard base movement so it is unique from The Real Knight
• Added on death particles for enemies
• Added a screen to change the keyboard key bindings

[ 2023-02-04 14:35:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; Reworked setting screen, new abilities, new relics, bug fixes, and performance improvements

0.6.5.2 Live Now

Hi All, I feel comfortable with the 0.6.5.2 build after a week of beta testing on the new beta branch. Thank you to any played on the beta branch. I will put out a new branch for 0.6.6.0 once it is ready (TBD). My plans for the next patch is to add in a few new characters, controller mapping and keybinding, and hopefully a few new relics. I'm feeling recharged and ready to keep working on Chess Survivors, and can't wait to add more content and features. All the best, Aarimous Note: I have removed the "Kill 5000 Normal Enemies" and "Kill 1000 Elite Enemies" achievements as they were simple not fun. I will be adding more achievements in future patches.

Patch Notes 0.6.5.2

• Made the following settings local (warning this will cause old values to be defaulted): Enable YoYo Sounds, Enable Xp Sounds, Enable Melee Sounds ,Enable Melee Sound , Enable Fast Loot Screens, Enable Damage Text, Enable Damage Vignette Red Color, and Enable Vignette Pulsing.
• Added a new stetting to shuffle the music
• Fixed a bug where the menu music was not starting when navigating from certain Menu buttons
• Fixed a bug where certain on/off modifier were not displaying the correct info

Patch Notes 0.6.5.1

Along with all the changes from 0.6.5.0, I have also included some accessibility settings, a rework of the settings screen, performance fixes, and bug fixes. I will also be removing the Enemy Killed and Elite Enemy Killed achievements so those will no long work on 0.6.5.1.

Setting

• Reworked the setting screen to have 3 new tabs
  • General
  • Sound
  • Accessibility
• Added a setting to Enable/Disable Damage Text
• Added a setting to Enable/Disable the Damage Vignette Red Color
• Added a setting to Enable/Disable the Vignette Pulsing

Process Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that was causing an excessive amount of particles to spawn
• Reworked the Game Over code to ideally fix the crashing issue

0.6.5.0 Patch Notes

tl;dr; New ability called Nightmare, combined the Tic ability and the Tac ability to be Tic-Tac-Toe

New Ability

Added a new ability called Nightmare. This was another great idea from one of you players. This ability is themed around dealing damage to specific nearby tiles. My hope is that this will reward careful movement to deal large burst of damage to a targeted location.

• Added Nightmare to the base ability loot pool.
• Nightmares description: Automatically target nearby tiles based on normal knight movement patterns. On cooldown, spawn projectiles on the targeted tiles dealing damage to any enemies on those tiles. The targets will then be rotated clockwise.

Reworked Ability

The Tic ability and Tac ability are boring. I had originally created these hoping to add a hidden interaction Toe which would trigger if you got both abilities (get it Tic-Tac-Toe). I think this is still a great idea, but that doesnt solve the core issue here, Tic and Tac are just too close to the same ability. My design goal for abilities is for them to feel unique or at provide meaningful tradeoffs for early power vs risky late game scaling. So my solution is to combine Tic and Tac to be one new ability called Tic-Tac-Toe. The feels way more thematic and makes the ability stand out on its own. Previously Tic and Tac felt like nice to haves but never part of the core build.

• Remove Tic from the ability loot pool
• Remove Tac from the ability loot pool
• Added Tic-Tac-Toe to the ability loot pool.
• Tic-Tac-Toes Description: Fire a burst of projectiles around the player for 3 turns in a row. First burst is Xs in the diagonal directions. Second burst is Os in the cardinal directions. Final burst is both Xs and Os. Number of Projectile modifiers have no effect.

New Relics In a future patch I plan to do a massive update to the relics system. But I had a nice request from one of you beautiful players to add these two relics and it wasnt to hard so here you go. Go find out what they do. :)

• Added Gift to Plebs to the base relic loot pool
• Added Gift to Protectors to the base relic loot pool

Bug fixes:

Im sure there were some bugs fixed, but I cant remember them.

[ 2023-01-20 20:34:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; You can now test the newest Chess Survivors builds using Steam's beta branch (more info below)

New Beta Branch

Hey there, Back in December I released the 0.6.5.0 patch which introduced the Nightmare ability and Tic & Tac rework. Unfortunately, this patch also introduced a bug which caused the game to crash and I was unable to quickly fix this major bug. Because of this bug I ended up reverting the game back to the previous build. Now, as Chess Survivors has grown it has become more challenging for me to fully regression test the various systems since Im a solo indie developer. Moving forward I will be utilizing Steams beta branches to push new changes to. Im hoping some of you will opt into playing the new branch and report any major bugs to me via the Chess Survivors Discord or the bug report forum. Thank you for your support and patience as I continue the early access development of Chess Survivors. Over the holidays I was able to get some much needed rest and am feeling recharged and ready to dive back into Chess Survivors. My next goal will be to add in a few new characters and additional Gambit challenge mode levels. Cheers, Aarimous

Steps to enable a Chess Survivors beta build

1. Right click on Chess Survivors in your Steam library 2. Select Properties from the popup
3. Navigate to the Beta tab
4. Select the beta branch you want to play

Beta Patch Notes for 0.6.5.1

Along with all the changes from 0.6.5.0, I have also included some accessibility settings, a rework of the settings screen, performance fixes, and bug fixes. I will also be removing the Enemy Killed and Elite Enemy Killed achievements so those will no long work on 0.6.5.1.

Setting

• Reworked the setting screen to have 3 new tabs
  • General
  • Sound
  • Accessibility
• Added a setting to Enable/Disable Damage Text
• Added a setting to Enable/Disable the Damage Vignette Red Color
• Added a setting to Enable/Disable the Vignette Pulsing

Process Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that was causing an excessive amount of particles to spawn
• Reworked the Game Over code to ideally fix the crashing issue

[ 2023-01-15 00:49:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

I am reverting the live build back to the previous version. I've had a few reports of a game crashing bug after dying or wining a run. I will push the patch back out once I feel comfortable with the stability.

[ 2022-12-23 02:05:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

TEMPORARY DISABLED DUE TO GAME CRASHING BUG

0.6.5.0 Patch Notes

tl;dr; New ability called Nightmare, combined the Tic ability and the Tac ability to be Tic-Tac-Toe Hi All, This patch was focused on adding a new ability and reworking the Tic and Tac abilities. My next goal will be to add more Characters to the game. This new ability was based on an idea from a player so please share your idea over in the Chess Survivors discord. A quick note, Ive recently started a new job and have had less time to dedicate to the development of Chess Survivors. I fully plan to execute on the roadmap I posted previously, but please adjust your expectation for the frequency of major patches. As always, thanks for playing my little game. Stay safe out there! Cheers, Aarimous

New Ability

Added a new ability called Nightmare. This was another great idea from one of you players. This ability is themed around dealing damage to specific nearby tiles. My hope is that this will reward careful movement to deal large burst of damage to a targeted location.

• Added Nightmare to the base ability loot pool.
• Nightmares description: Automatically target nearby tiles based on normal knight movement patterns. On cooldown, spawn projectiles on the targeted tiles dealing damage to any enemies on those tiles. The targets will then be rotated clockwise.

Reworked Ability

The Tic ability and Tac ability are boring. I had originally created these hoping to add a hidden interaction Toe which would trigger if you got both abilities (get it Tic-Tac-Toe). I think this is still a great idea, but that doesnt solve the core issue here, Tic and Tac are just too close to the same ability. My design goal for abilities is for them to feel unique or at provide meaningful tradeoffs for early power vs risky late game scaling. So my solution is to combine Tic and Tac to be one new ability called Tic-Tac-Toe. The feels way more thematic and makes the ability stand out on its own. Previously Tic and Tac felt like nice to haves but never part of the core build.

• Remove Tic from the ability loot pool
• Remove Tac from the ability loot pool
• Added Tic-Tac-Toe to the ability loot pool.
• Tic-Tac-Toes Description: Fire a burst of projectiles around the player for 3 turns in a row. First burst is Xs in the diagonal directions. Second burst is Os in the cardinal directions. Final burst is both Xs and Os. Number of Projectile modifiers have no effect.

New Relics In a future patch I plan to do a massive update to the relics system. But I had a nice request from one of you beautiful players to add these two relics and it wasnt to hard so here you go. Go find out what they do. :)

• Added Gift to Plebs to the base relic loot pool
• Added Gift to Protectors to the base relic loot pool

Bug fixes:

Im sure there were some bugs fixed, but I cant remember them.

[ 2022-12-22 14:01:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi All, In this update I discuss my plans for the next major patch. As a solo dev, I am also going to share some personal notes to hopefully set your expectations correctly. I appreciate all your feedback and can't wait to bring you the next major update. Cheers, Aarimous

What am I working on next?

New abilities, relics, and characters. Its just too easy to assemble a good build with the current amount of abilities and relics. This is a problem, but Ive held off on any major changes to loot as I think simply adding more things will fix this. With more things the loot pool will be larger, thus making the chance of seeing any given ability or relics lower.

Why have the updates slowed down?

Two reason:[olist]

My goal for the first few weeks after the launch was to fix bugs, add small QOL changes, and balance the game. I believe I have achieved this goal. You can see more info about all these changes in the patch notes I've previously posted. I think I've done a fairly good job documenting all changes as well as providing my reasoning.

Personally, I took a small break for the Thanksgiving Holiday. Ive been grinding very hard on Chess Survivors in the run up to the early access release (and post release updates). As a result I burned myself out a little bit and needed to get some rest and relaxation. On top of that I started a new job and consequently have less time/energy to dedicate to Chess Survivors. This does mean moving forward changes will be less often, but that also means I will have more time to think about and design good systems while also adding meaningful content.[/olist]

When will the next major patch drop?

To be honest, Ive been playing a bunch of the new World of Warcraft Dragon Flight expansion and am planning on becoming a degenerate Path of Exile player for the new 3.20 league (let's goooo). As I said above, I burnt myself out on programming, playing these games is helping me relax and just have some fun playing games instead of making them. That being said, Ill try and get the next major patch out by the end of the year.

[ 2022-12-05 22:03:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; Nerfs to Yo-Yo and Marble, setting to turn off the Gambit Challenge Mode Hi All, Small patch to remove some power from the Yo-Yo and Marble abilities. Both of these abilities are designed to be risky early, but can scale well into the late game. However, both the early game and the late game felt too strong and as such were basically auto includes in any build. I have some plans for a upcoming to patch which will add more abilities. I will also review all the abilities to ensure they are up to my standards for design and balance. Cheers, Aarimous

Yo-Yo

I want Yo-Yo to scale with number of projectiles and size. As such I've toned down the base damage numbers. The current number were just silly high (and probably something I set initially but never when back to review).

• Damage [4,8,12,20] -> [3,4,6,8]

Marble

Marble simple scaled too well and was basically an auto pickup. As such I've pull away a lot of early game power. Most notably the pierce now starts at 1. To compensate for this large nerf, I've increase the base number of projectiles to 2.

• Pierce [3,4,5,6] -> [1,2,3,4]
• Damage [3,4,5,6] -> [3,4,6]
• Number of Projectile [1,2,3,4,5] -> [2,3,4,5]
• Cooldown [4,3,2] -> [4,3,2,1]

Miscellaneous

• Added a checkbox to enable/disable the Gambit Challenge Mode

[ 2022-11-22 23:19:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

Fixed small bug where the first time you unlocked Gambit Mode you would first see the level 5 mod. You should now see the 1st level, well first. Cheers, Aarimous

[ 2022-11-19 12:27:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; New Gambit Levels which allow you to add more difficult modifiers to the game as you beat each level Hi All, This patch contains the first real feature for early access, the Gambit Difficulty Mode. This system is designed to progressively add more challenge to Chess Survivors without making the base game too challenging. I've had a hard time trying to make the game challenging but not impossible for all players. My hope with this system is that the base game will be winnable within your first few runs, and then you can start pushing more difficult runs as youd like. Im only releasing this mode with 5 levels, but I do have plans to add up to 20 (or more) levels. Cheers, Aarimous

Gambit Level

• Added a new system to the game for player who want to push more difficulty
• Gamit Levels are unlocked once you beat the game on Normal of faster difficulty modes
• Each gambit level will make the game harder in a different ways
• Levels are all additive, meaning if you are on level 3 your run will also have the mod form level 1 and 2
• Beating the game on your current highest level will unlock the next level as long as you are on normal or faster speeds
• New achievement for beating the game on Gamit Level 5
• Only 5 levels are available now, but more will be coming

[ 2022-11-18 23:20:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi there, Retromation just released a great YouTube video playing Chess Survivors. I had a blast watching it and you kind find the video below. This is a small patch focused on fixing the bugs and performance issues I saw watching the video. I'm currently working on challenge levels which will push more difficulty for those who find the current balance too easy. That mode should be available soon. Best, Aarimous https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1FN69GHEAY

• Fixed a bug what was causing the marble ability to not respect max number cap. This resulted in wayyy to many marbles being spawned ultimately making the ability over powered.
• Fix a performance issue where some particles were only getting cleaned up at the end of acts. This was not noticeable for most build but was very clear if you maxed out skills like Pai Sho Tile or Marbles.
• Fixed and issue where the Pai Sho Tiles were not getting cleaned up when the flew off the screen
• Cleaned up the text on the act intro screen, all the colors where annoying and the healing
• Renamed scale to multiplier for various mods. I think this is a lot clearer for how those mods will change the various stats.
• Adjusted button click volume for all buttons
• Renamed the "New Game" button to "Start New Run"
• Probably some other stuff..

[ 2022-11-18 21:40:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; Character stats are now relics you start with, balance changes to Bullseye, Dice, and Playing Card Hi All, In this patch I wanted to update the character's special stats to be relics. I've actually wanted to make this change for a while, but I didn't want to make this sort of a change until the game was released. This was because my main goal for release was to have a stable game and this change is more of a QOL change than a gameplay change. Other than that balanced a few base stats on the abilities. Cheers, Aarimous

Character Special Stats Rework

The goal with this change was to remove the memory game that was need to know which special stats your character started with

• Reworked the characters special stats into a special character relic.
• This currently doesnt have any game play changes, but is a quality of life improvement.
• Before there was no easy was to figure out the exact special stats the character had. Which meant the player had to rely on their memory, creating an artificial barrier to understanding how to min/max their build.
• Currently these relics are not part of the general relic loot pool, but that might change in future patches.
• Updated the relics colors. The previous colors were placeholder which never got updated. I have now adjusted those. These colors dont have any game play effect yet, but eventually will. More to come.
• Update the relic tooltips to show the relics name.

Bullseye

• Slight nerf to bullseye scaling values.
  • Act 1 [1, 1.1, 1.3] [1, 1.1]
  • Act 2 [1.5] [1.22 , 1.4]
  • Act 3 [2] [1.6, 2]
• It seems this is currently the meta build. I love that there are broken builds out there I didnt think of, but I want to make sure these build are not easily obtainable every run. My goal with the Bullseye ability is that is is pretty weak at low levels, but very powerful if you get the correct relics and upgrades. Which typically requires you to make it to Act 3.

Dice

• Dice will now explode after 2 turns (previously 3)
• Cooldown reduced at all tiers [5,4,3,2] [4,3,2,1]
• Increased Number of Projectiles [1,2,3] [1,2,3,4]

Playing Card

• Smoothed out scale upgrades [1,1.33, 1.75, 2.33, 3, 3.5, 4] [1, 1.5, 2.33, 3, 4]

[ 2022-11-16 21:29:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

Fixed a bug where the level up popup was granting a choice of 9 upgrades. Sorry about that, I was doing some testing for the popup's width and forgot to revert it.

[ 2022-11-15 03:02:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

Controller Movement

I took a pass at improving the controller gameplay (which also improves the keyboard controls). The old system was pretty dumb and more or less just sucked. I'm calling this new system "Smarter Movement". This dramatically improves both the d-pad/keyboard and stick movement. I've also lowered the input delay for those controls so it should feel more snappy. In the future I will add settings so you can manually adjust sensitivity. I'll likely make a separate post later this week exampling the exact logic for the "Smarter Movement"

Misc

The loot screens now expands to the edge of the screen before a scroll bar appears. In practice that means you need to be looting 10 items for a scroll bar to appear (which is not currently possible).

[ 2022-11-14 22:47:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

Some additional Relic change in addition to the ones from 0.6.2.0 patch. Less Ring of More Things: Damage Scale Reduced -33% -> -10% Amulet of Slap Jack: Removed Damage Scale Reduction Five of Spades: Added mod which grants 10 max health Larry's Crossbow: Added mod which grants 1 bonus damage to abilities Doug's Crossbow: Added mod which grants 1 bonus damage to abilities Witch's Brew: Added mod which grants 7 max health

[ 2022-11-13 20:23:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr; Buff abilities, Lower Level Xp Amounts, Added New Setting, QOL Changes, Bug Fixes

Note for the Dev

Hi All, The goal of this patch was twofold. I wanted to take a pass at making Act 3 a little easier. I previously buffed the characters and nerfed enemies. So in this patch, I took swing at buffing some of the lower win rate abilities. Additionally, I removed a few upgrades tiers. So now it should be easier to fully upgrade certain abilities. My other goal was to start adding in more QOL settings like disabling potentially annoying sounds, and making loot screen fast. See the notes below for specific changes and reasoning. What am I working on next:

• Improved Controller Support
• High Contrast Mode for Moveable Tiles
• Challenge Leveling System
• Rework Character "Special Stats" to instead be a starting relic

Cheers, Aarimous

Patch Notes

General Balance:

The goal here was to push more power into the late game. I'm doing this by lowering the XP Per Level growth. In practice this means you will get to a higher level easier.

• Reduced Xp Pere Level Growth from 4 -> 3
• Reduced the Number of Kings that Can Spawn in Act 3

Ability Buffs:

In general I smoothed out many of the upgrade tiers. My hope here was to make it easier to max out the upgrades on a given ability, allowing builds to scale better.

• Yo-Yo:
  • Range is now equal to the scale and AOE bonuses. Range was only good if you also got scale. In practice this made range upgrades basically worthless and either made the ability worse or the upgrade was just a dead upgrade. To fix this scale will simply also scale the range. I might need to add in a min/max this effect but for now it seems good (even if you get all the AOE upgrades).
  • Removed range property upgrades
  • Adjusted damage tiers was [4,6,10,12,20] -> [4,8,12,20]
• Dice Bomb
  • Increased the base explosion size
• Jack Trap
  • Increased damage upgrades from [3,5,10,14] -> [6,8,12,20]
  • Added new Scale Upgrades to Jack Trap [1.33, 2, 3]
  • Lowered the cooldown for upgrades from [5,4,3,2,1] -> [4,3,2,1]
• Cribbage
  • Increased base damage
  • Removed upgrade tier froma Act 1
  • Inceased base scale

Relic Changes:

• Minor Scale
  • Increased AOE Scale from 25% -> 33%
• Staff of Bigger Things
  • Reduced AOE Scale from 33% -> 25%
  • Added a Max Health Scale mod 10%

QOL:

• Added the abilities description to the stats and info page
• Act upgrades will now show as a darker gray if they are locked
• Added a note about upgrades being locked by act
• Added the ability to turn off sound effects for:
  • Yoyo
  • Xp
  • Enemy Spawning
  • Melee
• Added a setting for fast loot screens (this applies to Level Up, Relic Chests, and End of Act Rewards

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug where the Pai Sho Tile were getting delete if there were no enemies in range
• Fixed a bug where the Pai Sho Tile particles were not showing
• Fixed bug that was causing some Bouncy Balls to get stuck on the player character

[ 2022-11-13 19:07:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

• Fixed some spelling mistakes
• Added a translation item for the "Ever Sharp Dagger"
• Made some small balance tweaks to make Act 2 and 3 less punishing from getting hit. This mainly means less damage, but more health.
  • King base damge 6.0 -> 5.0
  • Act 2 Damage scale reduce from 25% -> 20%
  • Act 2 Health Scale increased from 40% -> 50%
  • Act 2 Elite health scale reduced from 20% -> 10%
  • Act 3 Damage scale reduce from 33% -> 20%
  • Adjusted Act 3 spawn rates slightly

[ 2022-11-11 23:19:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi All, This patch was aimed at game stability and balancing out the early game. I'm blow away by how many people have picked up the game. I'll continue to work on bugs all weekend. If you are interested in helping me out please join the discord (I'm pretty quick to respond). Cheers, Aarimous

Character Balance

After checking the gameplay stats I wasn't happy with the win rates of the characters. To address this I've increased the number on many of the base stats for the characters. The Joker got a lot of love because this is suppose to be the tutorials character and the win rate was very low. I'll key an eye on the stats moving forward.

• Joker Health increase from 50 -> 65
• Joker Melee Damage (5 -> 6)
• Added Joker healing per level up (0 -> 2)
• Added Joker Bonus Range (0 -> 1)
• Added Joker Bonus Melee Kill Healing (0 -> 1)
• Wizard Health increased form 54 -> 58
• Wizard Melee Damage increased from 0 -> 3
• Jak Max Health Per Level Increased (2 -> 4)
• Jak Healing On Level Up Increase (1 -> 3)
• Doll Ability Damage Scale Increase (25% -> 40%)

Enemy Balance

In addition to the above character balances, I wanted to pull a little base damage out of the enemies. Don't fear the will be challenge levels in the near future which will allow you to make the game harder for those who want it.

• Reduced Pawn Base Damage from 2 -> 1
• Reduced Rook Base Damage from 4 -> 3
• Reduced Bishop Base Damage from 3 -> 2
• Reduced Queen Base Damage from 4 -> 3
• Slightly tuned down some of the spawn rates during Act 1

General Balance

Some general changes to smooth out the early game and allow more player unlocks.

• Reduced XP Lvl Base Amount from (4 -> 3)
• Lowered XP needed for Player Progress Levels. Each level took 100 for XP, this is not only 50.

Bugs and Misc

Fixed a few random bugs, one of which was causing some crashes.

• Attempted to fix an edge case where the Bullseye ability would sometimes cause the game to crash.
• Fixed bug where Yo-Yo sounds were not playing
• Fixed bug where the level up descriptions were not showing right away
• Update the enemies act order to prevent race conditions
• Update the end of act cleanup steps to prevent race conditions

[ 2022-11-11 19:13:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

• Fixed an strange behavior when switching between a controller and a mouse. This was causing the movement indicator to disappear. This should be resolved now. I will be improving the controller movement handler for both d-pad and joystick. Stay tuned for more updates.
• Update a typo for the Dwarven Pickaxe relic

[ 2022-11-10 23:41:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

Fixed an issue where the loot screen (Level Up & Relic) wasn't working correctly when using a controller.

[ 2022-11-10 22:32:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

• Fixed a small issue where the gameplay data popup was showing behind my little early access note.

[ 2022-11-10 16:58:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi All, Chess Survivors is now officially in released into Early Access! This is my first game and I'm so excited to keep working on it over the coming months. This post is going to cover why I decided to release into early access and what the general roadmap will be. Cheers, Aarimous

Why Early Access?

Chess Survivors is my debut game as both a developer, designer, and publisher. As such, there is almost a guarantee that many of the systems will need to be reworks or improved upon. I am a solo developer which is where you come in. I'm hoping you can help me brainstorm ideas for how to improve my game.

Early Access Roadmap

This list is semi-ordered, but will change based on player feedback and what I want to work on next.

QOL Improvements, Bugs Fixes and Balance:

This will be ongoing based on player feedback. But one of the big things I want to do right away is to rework the gamepad controls.

Challenge Levels

This will allow the player to push more difficult content with me having to make the base game harder. I'll be taking inspiration for Ascension levels in Slay the Spire.

More Abilities, Relics, and Character

I've designed these three systems to be easily extendable and as such will be adding a ton more of each. I have plenty of ideas, but I'd love to hear yours as well.

End of Act Boss Fights and Map Diversity

Right now the acts just end, I think it could be fun to have some sort of random act boss appear that challenges you. I'd also like to add in some map diversity so each playthrough feels unique.

Mod Support and other Steam Features

I'm not sure how to add mod support, but this is a good learning opportunity. Let me know if you have any tips or tricks.

Miscellaneous and Scope Creep

I'm not afraid to further invest my time into this game. I think there is plenty of room in the design space to make all the systems incredibly deep and enjoyable.

[ 2022-11-10 15:36:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey there, With the upcoming early access release of Chess Survivors on Thursday Nov 10th, I've be disabled the demo. It was a smashing success (for me), mainly because it helped me gather valuable feedback, participate in the Stream next fest, and do a lot of testing for steam things like achievements, gameplay stats, and cloud saves. Over this weekend I hosted a small closed beta which helped stabilize and smooth out the game's difficulty curve. I cant wait for you to play play Chess Survivors. In other news, I've launched a Discord server for Chess Survivors. This will be crucial for brainstorming ideas, reporting bugs, and sharing fun gameplay moments. Id be thrilled if you joined. Ill be posting a roadmap and update closer to the early access launch on Nov 10th.
Much love, Aarimous

[ 2022-11-07 14:11:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

0.5.0.2 FPS and Physics Quality Options

• Added FPS options to setting screen
• Added Physics quality to setting screen
• Fixed buttons on "About" screen to link to press kit and YouTube channel

[ 2022-10-28 15:54:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

0.5.0.1 Small patch to fix some bugs

• Fixed a int division issue causing the marble's to no move
• Added the right mouse click to the input mapping so it passes the turn
• Added a 60 FPS cap, before the game was running at 500-600 FPS which is way overkill for a game like this. I will eventually added a setting to allow the player to lower/increase this.

[ 2022-10-27 13:55:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

Tl;dr Reworked characters, new tutorial & controls screen, new run settings, updated game over, achievements test, stats test, new music, added player progression, pickup range added to movement coins, bugs, and misc polish

Note from Aarimous

Wow, we are now about 2 weeks away from early access launch and I've more or less got all the early access features added. This patch adds a bunch of those features and reworked systems to the demo. My goals with these changes were to smooth out the player game loop and gameplay interactions (more details in the patch notes). Over the next two weeks I'll be adding more characters, relics, and abilities to the game. Finally, I'll be doing a closed beta from Nov 1st - Nov 5th. Email me (aarimous@gmail.com) if you are interested in the beta. Cheers, Aarimous

Detailed Notes

• Character Rework
  • Updated Art, I've updated all the character's art so they now have a blue and red color scheme as well as clearer direction. My goal was to make them visually distinct from the other gameplay elements and give them a cohesive style.
  • Reworked character select screen. Player will now choose a character (based on player progression) at the start of each run. Each character a defined starting ability. This removes the RNG base starting conditions from the game. I found the old system to be fairly restrictive from a design perspective, this change will allow me to create unique characters that have more powerful and synergistic effects.
  • Characts are now slowly unlocked as the player plays the game and gains progression XP
• New Tutorial & Controls Screens
  • Update these screens to now each have one screen making it cleaner and easier to understand
  • Added these screens to the pause menu
• New Run Settings
  • Added a run settings screen that appears before each new run
  • Added a slider that will allow the player to change the game speed. Various speeds will grant progression XP bonuses and slow speeds will disable achievements
  • Eventually more settings will be added, but right now this is a good enough screen. I'm hoping the XP bonuses will push players to play on the faster speeds, but I also want to allow for slower play for those who want it.
• Player Progression and Updated Game Over Screen
  • Added player progression with persistence so the player can unlock more complex character and relics
  • Chess Survivors has no meta-progression, but I want the player to feel like they are making progress each run. This system will do that as well as allowing me to have "tutorial" characters and more complex characters as they play the game more.
  • Updated the game over screen to show XP gained and any new unlocks
• Steam Achievements and Gameplay Stats
  • Added simple steam "test" achievement to ensure this works
  • Added gameplay stats tracking for game balance. There is also a setting to turn off gameplay data. Note: no personal data is being collected
• Miscellaneous and Bugs
  • New music added to menu and game loop
  • Added settings screen to main menu and pause screen
  • Added "Join Discord" button
  • Added Bug Report button
  • Movement coins and Potions now get picked up in same range as XP gems. My goal here was to make movement coins easier to grab as before they were cumbersome
  • Show "new" on relics and character the player has never seen
  • Updated loot/relics screens to have cleaner UI
  • Update controller support for various screens
  • Minor game optimizations to reduce/remove any lag spikes
  • A ton of bug fixes that I can't even remember

[ 2022-10-26 16:03:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

Tl;dr Longer turns, Turn timer colors, Acts feature/i]

Note from Aarimous

This patch was aimed at allowing for the player to make the game loop move slower. There are moments as I play the game where another beat or two would have allowed me to make a better move. And as the person who has played this game the most, that means the average player has that feeling a lot. To address this issues I've changed the total game timer down to 4.5 second, which means the player will have about 3.5 seconds to act. I've also refactored the game underlying difficulty handler to now support acts which will be part of the game come early access release. Cheers, -Aarimous

Detailed Notes

• Turn Timer
  • Total Turn Duration 3 -> 4.5 seconds The goal of this was to allow the base game to have a few extra "beats" so the player can make a better selection. Ideally this doesn't change to much as most turns are quick and easy, but some might take longer to parse and this should allow for that.
    • Player Turn Phase now lasts at most 3.49 seconds
    • Movement Phase now lasts 0.11 seconds
    • Abilities Phase now lasts0.45 seconds
    • Enemy Turn Phase now lasts 0.45 seconds
  • Turn timer now ends slightly earlier than the actual phase. As the player might rush to pick a tile and I wanted to create some coyote time to allow for that
  • Turn timer is now brighter and changes color once the turn get's close to the end
• Misc
• Act Feature : added in acts which will have an act intro as well as rewards for Act 2 & 3. Nothing will change for the demo
• Steam Integration: added in the SDK for a steam integration which will allow achievements and other key steam features in future patches
• Added a level up queuing system. This allows for multiple level ups to happen back to back. More or less just a tech debt fix that shouldn't change the demo
• Adjusted music: toned down the base and "sound effects" in the music as they felt too much and were distracting
• Updated the max time between songs to allow for some more downtime between tracks
• Performance improvements to the A* pathfinding, before the game was doing a lot of extra calculations resulting in small but slightly noticeable lag spikes

[ 2022-10-11 21:13:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

A quick little patch to make the demo slightly easier as the current demo is a little overturned. Hoping these small adjustments to enemy attack and health will make the horde of chess based enemies a little easier to manage. Cheers, Aarimous Balance Changes

• Pawn Damage Base 2 1
• Knight Damage Base 2 1
• Bishop Damage base 5 3
• Knight Health Base 10 9
• Rook Health Base 15 13
• Bishop Health Base 15 13
• Elite Always Act Mod Health Scale 400% 300%
• Elite Damage Mod Health Scale 600% 400%

Other

• Added two new songs
• Changed Game Over text to say "You died, Checkmate" when the player dies

[ 2022-10-04 20:52:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

Tl;dr Replaced music, added a new bullseye ability, more relics, polish, and bugs

Note from Aarimous

This patch was aimed and adding some content and polish for the upcoming steam next fest. I am happy where the demo is currently and will be turning my focus onto Act 2 and 3 in perpetration for the early access release in November. As always please reach out with any bugs or feedback. Cheers, -Aarimous

Detailed Notes

• Bullseye Ability
  • Added a new ability that is tied to the players movement instead of a cooldown
  • Create a small target around you dealing damage to any enemies within its area. The target is created whenever you moves tiles and is slightly larger the further you move.
• Music
  • I've removed the two current songs and replaced with 3 that sound wayy better IMO
• Bug, Balance, and Misc
  • Balanced the abilities and relics again. This will be continual and not really worth noting the specific values.
  • Added the tutorial screen with images
  • Removed screen aberration as it wasn't adding the effect I wanted to
  • Adjusted the screen shake to use a different type of shake
  • Added new splash screen and warning
  • Updated text labels for character info
  • Tuned enemy health numbers as they felt too squishy
  • Added attack sounds for player melee
  • Added screen shake for player melee
  • Added relic rarity, this will allow me to create powerful relics but put them behind rarity so they don't appear every run
  • Added more relics
  • Bugs fixes and other stuff that I can't remember

[ 2022-10-02 17:13:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

Tl;dr Small updates to add in better pathfinding for enemies as well as a turn order for enemy actions

Note from Aarimous

This patch is aimed at improving the enemy actions so they can be "smarter" plus act in a more cohesive manner. In practice this mean pathfinding using A* as well as a slight turn ordering so the closest enemies act first. There is also a nice bug fix here that was causing non-pawn enemies to spawn only around the origin tile. All these change should make the game slightly harder as the enemies are now not complete idiots when it comes to navigation. Cheers, -Aarimous

Detailed Notes

• Enemy Pathfinding
  • Non-Pawn enemies now use an implementation of the A* pathfinding algorithm to move towards the player
  • Pawn still act like pawn so they don't need pathfinding as their movement is by design pawn-like and very "railroaded"
  • The result of this is that enemies are now able to move around wall and hunt down the player.
  • I find this particularly interesting with the knights as they will now move in a patter that results in them being able to attack the player. Prior to this patch they knights might result in a situation where they will get near the player but never be able to attack.
  • This is not a perfect system and there are likely many "sub-optimal" moves the enemies will make. But I'd argue the player shouldn't really notice the edges cases.
  • This will be improved upon further.. soonTM
• Enemy Turn Order
  • During the enemy phase of the turn enemies now act in "closest to the player" fashion.
  • Enemies actions are slightly spaced out to
  • The result of these changes now allows all enemies to move. Before there were many situations where enemies were blocked by pieces that would move after them.
  • This is a small change but I think it makes the game feel a little better as there is a cool wave effect that happens during enemy movement.
  • Please report any lag this sorting might have created. Thus far I haven't felt anything. But I am just one money with a computer.
• Bug, Balance, and Misc
  • Fixed a bug where the non-pawn enemies were spawning near the origin. This combined with the old enemy movement caused a lot of enemy time if the player moved far away from the starting tiles.
  • Many bugs were fixed most of which are small and not noteworthy
  • Adjusted ability upgrade numbers, I want the early game to feel harder so most of the easily targeting abilities got their starting damage lowered. This should give more power to early relics that grant bonus damage. It will also make early damage investment feel a lot better as it will enable abilities to one shot.
  • Added new relics

[ 2022-09-27 21:38:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

Tl;dr Small updates to the UI, tutorial, new animations for consumables, balance changes

Note from Aarimous

The goal of this patch was mostly to stabilize the game after the past few major patches. I also wanted to take a moment to work on balancing out the various components so not one thing feels dramatically over powered. From here, I'll continue to balance and polish the systems as we approach the Steam Next Fest. Cheers, -Aarimous

Detailed Notes

• Polish
  • Starting game screens, level up, and relics screens have all been updated to feel better to use.
  • This included some sublet on hover animations and on load sound effects
  • These screens have also been updated to allow for better keyboard and controller animation
  • Improved "more info" and "descriptions" when hovering over a new ability or ability upgrade. Ideally this will make it easier to understand the info that is provided
  • Added a tutorial prompt and icon based controls to the tutorial
  • Added UI translations for properties and text (English only)
  • Coins and Potions now have a nice animation on consume
  • Chests have an exciting animation on consume
  • Healing now has a sound effect
• Bug and Balance
  • Many bugs were fixed most of which are small and not noteworthy
  • Balanced the various character to ensure each feels unique and fun to use
  • Adjusted ability upgrade numbers
  • Updated many of the relics to have similar or in many cases better modifiers

[ 2022-09-23 20:03:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

Join me Aarimous a solo indie dev as I celebrate the Steam Next Fest and play the demo for my upcoming game Chess Survivors. You can ask me anything, literally anything I am an open book. Cheers, Aarimous

[ 2022-09-23 19:48:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

Join me Aarimous a solo indie dev as I celebrate the Steam Next Fest and play the demo for my upcoming game Chess Survivors. You can ask me anything, literally anything I am an open book. Cheers, Aarimous

[ 2022-09-20 21:04:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

Tl;dr Elite enemies, controller support, more relics, chests, health potions, enemy spawn animations, level up animations, character info screen, and bug fixes

Note from Aarimous

This patch marks the implementation of all the demo features Id planned out. This is a small but meaningful milestone and should now allow me to focus on Act 2 and Act 3 of the core game. The goal of this patch was to add in a way for players to gain more relics and the solution was to add in elite enemies. You can read more details below about the elites, but they can drop chests which will grant the player a choice of relics. Other major changes are controller/steam deck support which actually feels pretty good to control. All in all the game dev is going very well. Cheers, -Aarimous

Detailed Notes

• Elite Enemies:
  • Elites will have bonus health, be larger, and have one of three combat mods. They can also have a chest buff which will grant even more bonus health, but the enemy will drop a chest on death.This is a key system that will be expanded upon further with new combat mods and additional depth. The mods right now are simple, but sometimes simple is nice.
  • Combat Mod: Damage, enemy deal 2x damage to player, enemy has 4x health
  • Combat Mod: Take Less Damage, enemy takes -1 damage, enemy has 3x health
  • Combat Mod: Always Act, enemy will act each turn and cannot be slowed, enemy has 3x health
  • Reward Mod: Chest, enemy drops a chest on death, enemy has 1.5x health
  • Reward Mod: Misc, enemy either drops a health potion (healing 33%) or drops 8xp (multiplied by act). This misc mod only applies when the elite doesnt have the chest mod
• Controller Support
  • This was a long time coming, but I wanted to ensure I had a good approach. There are some edge cases that likely need to be handled but Id love to hear your feedback. I think the recommended way of playing will be mouse, but this surprisingly feels pretty good.
  • Players can now use WASD or arrow keys to move around the cursor to moveable tiles. The player then needs to press (enter) to confirm the movement. This also works for a controller using either sticks, or D-pads. A/X will then confirm movement.
  • Screens have been updated to allow button navigation with controllers.
• Consumables
  • Ive added chest and health potions that can now drop only from Elite enemies. They act the same way as the movement powerups where the player needs to enter the tile to consume.
  • Chests will grant the player a choice of a random relic
  • Health potions will heal the player for 33% of the max health. These dont drop often so I wanted to ensure they feel rewarding, but this could be changed in the future as the player can scale the healing with relics.
• Character Info Screen
  • Pressing C will show a screen of the current player/game stats. This is a great QOL for me as well as a QA of the relics and various game elements. My goal was to give players all the numbers so they can create truly broken builds.
• Polish
  • Enemy now spawn in and have a slight animation/sound which makes them look like they are dropping
  • New sound effect for level up screen. This just makes it feel better
  • Small delay and light show on level up, again to make it feel more impactful
  • Enemy moves now slightly squish and stretch
  • Player move now slightly squish and stretch
  • Relics now show in the UI and have a hover for the tool tip
  • Update the relics descriptions and mod values
  Bug fixes
  • As always a bunch of bug changes to numerous to mention
  • There are plenty of known issues, but if you find any please go report them in my discord.

[ 2022-09-18 00:50:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

Tl;dr New ability, character perks, updated enemy visuals + improved clarity, ability upgrade mini-rework, performance improvements, balance changes, bug fixes

Note from Aarimous

This ended up being a much bigger patch than I was trying to make, but I got carried away and was able to accomplish more than I had planned for (what a great problem to have). One of my goals was to dramatically improve the clarity for enemy intention. This was done through new artwork and outlines that only show the enemy will act (attack/move). Another issue I wanted to address was the upgrade system for abilities). From a design perspective the old purly RNG based ability upgrades held me back from being able to properly balance the ability. This was due to the fact the player could earn all upgrades within the first act which often resulted in the player becoming overpowered too quickly. The new system now gates various upgrades by act (more details below), which should allow me to both add in powerful late game upgrades and also allow me to properly balance the difficulty of the various acts. The next patch will be focused on adding more content to the consumables system which basically only has movement powerups. Thanks for taking the time to read my patch notes. I actually enjoy writing these as Ive been a POE player for the past 2 years and have alway enjoyed the candor and detail they put in their notes. Cheers, -Aarimous

Detailed Notes

• New Marble ability:
  • Fling a marble around the player dealing a small amount of damage to enemies it collides with. The marble remains as long as it can still pierce more enemies. Scale modifiers do not affect the size of the marbles.
  • The goal with the ability was to create something that looked visually different from the other abilities and also had some fun gameplay functions. The original idea for this came while remaking my game in 9 lines of code for my post recent YouTube video.
• Character Perks
  • You can now play as the Creepy Doll and the Evil Monkey. Characters also have unique starting stats damage, health, healing, melee damage One major difference is also their base movement patterns.
  • The goal here is to have the player create their starting conditions with three key choices. These changes were to add in the character choice and make that decision feel like it matters and will add to the flavor of the run. None of the actual numbers are final and will be changed over time.
• Updated enemy visuals + improved clarity
  • New art for the enemies which make the fatter and have a new color so they stand out more. A white outline will also show when the enemy intends to act.
  • Its long been known the the visual clarity of enemy movement was trash. This is my attempt at fixing that, so Ill be interested to see if this fixes it or if I need to go further. Im still hesitant to go so far as to show the enemy tiles of influence as that would remove some of the key challenge of parsing the enemy movement and just turn the game into move to the non red tile.
• Ability upgrade mini-rework
  • Ability upgrades are now gated behind the current act.
  • This is a huge nerf to early player power because now you cant get the crazy upgrades like going for 4->8 playing card projectiles in Act 1. This has always existed as a problem, but with the introduction of relics, player power far outpaced enemy difficulty. I also decided to keep enemy health amounts flat and only increase at the start of a new act. Soo, the player power had to be pulled back. Back in August I tried to rework the upgrade system to fix this issue, but the pure RNG system was just better for my vision. As mentioned, enemy power will increase at the start of each act, which would also be a good time to adjust player power, so naturally (and with low effort) I was able to create a system for gating the upgrades. From a design perspective this will also allow me to balance the acts around the abilities and also push crazier power into later acts.
• Performance improvements
  • Refactor the map system to use the Godot tile map system.
  • When moving large distances there was a large lag spike. Probably not noticeable to all, but I knew this would eventually be a big problem. Should have no game play effects, other than certain ideas for future systems just became harder at the cost of major performance gains. IMO worth.
  Balance changes
  • Adjusted some ability values to accommodate the above changes
  Bug fixes
  • As always a bunch of bug changes to numerous to mention
  • There are plenty of known issues, but if you find any please go report them in my discord.

[ 2022-09-02 23:48:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr You now get choice of starting ability and a choice of a random starting relic. Game has been slightly balanced around new relic power.

Note from Developer

This patch was aimed at adding a new relic system. The goal with this system is to give the player relics which will dramatically change their run and a baseline for a powerful build. Right now you can only get one relic at the start, but eventually you will have more ways (in future patches). With new systems my goal is to slowly add changes and then adjust the game's difficulty accordingly. As always everything is subject to change. Please let me know if you find any bugs or feel certain things are brokenly good/bad. Cheers, Aarimous

Detailed Notes:

• Relic System:
  • Many base game stats have been moved into global modifiers which will allow for relics that will alter the various stats (player damage, enemy health, healing)
  • This shouldnt have any gameplay effect, but will allow for more interesting relics and abilities
  • Update to game starting conditions. The goal here is to create uniqure runs each time by giving the player a few small but meaningful choices to give their run a flavor.
  • Players now get to choose a starting ability. Right now there are only 3 starting abilities but eventually there will be more.
  • Player gets a choice of a starting relic. Relics are new items the player can earn (right now only though the stat) that will dramatically change or boost the player stats. Many of the relics will also have a negative. The goal is to allow for really powerful relics that will not always be the optimal choice due to the downsides.
• Balance Changes:
  • Enemy health no longer scales over the demo (act 1). I want to make it clearer to the player when the enemy health increases. So, at the start of each act a popup will show any and all enemy buffs.
  • During some of the enemy spawning phases Ive added a boost to the initial spawner budget. Im hoping this creates some more spikes of difficulty earlier on in the run instead of just at the end.
  • Adjusted some number for abilities and relics
• Bug fixes
  • To be honest, I havent tracked very many of the bugs that Ive fixed. Ill try and keep a better log for the next patch notes. :)

New Devlog

[previewyoutube=dfLSGkKC2ug;full][/previewyoutube]

[ 2022-08-24 20:51:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr QOL changes to the turns and player clicking, game is now number of turns to survive, number balancing, minor tweaks/bug fixes. Note from Developer This patch was aimed at smoothing out the players turn. Previously the enemy actions occurred mid turn which created a giant information spike. This resulted in the turn feeling too quick since the player didnt have enough time to process the new information. The new turns should smooth that out and allow the player to play at their own pace, while also keeping them from taking too much time. Now that the game loop is feeling a lot better Im planning on tackling the relic system which will give powerful global buffs to the player. I think the game is starting to feel really good, and Im excited to keep iterating and improving it. Cheers, Aarimous Detailed Notes:

• Updated turn timer. The goal here was to smooth out the turn without removing the fun challenge that a quick turn timer brings to the game
  • Turn is now broken into 4 phases:
  • Player Select: 70% of the turn where the player can select a tile, selected a tile ends this phase
  • Player Move: 5% of the turn where the player character moves
  • Ability: 12.5% of the turn where the player abilities fire and resolve themselves
  • Enemy Turn: 12.5% of the turn where the enemies move or attack
• Turn length set to 3 seconds. Although in practice the turns are much shorter as the player will end he turn early most of the time.
• Players end the Player Select phase upon selecting a tile. The goal here was to keep the game feeling snappy instead of making the player wait around for the next turn. I also wanted to make each click matter.
• Players can end turns early by pressing the spacebar. In some cases the player might not want to move so this will allow them to pass the turn in that case without needing to wait too long.
• The old on select indicator now shows when a player hovers the piece. This is to bring visual clarity to the tile the player is going to click on. Im hoping this prevents a few miss clicks as the clicks now cause an action to happen.
• XP Value Tweeks. With the smoothing out of the turn the game felt a lot easier to compensate, the amount of XP needed for levels had been increased.
  • Base XP needed for first level set to 5 (previously 4)
  • XP per level growth up to 4 (previously 3)
• Player health has been increased to 50 (previously 15) and enemy attack damage has been increased. With the addition of melee kills healing 1 health, enemy damage felt too easy to heal from and the player could easily finish the demo. The old number also didnt give a lot of wiggle room for balancing.
  • Pawn damage 2 (previously 1)
  • Knight damage 3 (previously 1)
  • Rook damage 5 (previously 1)
  • Bishop damage 5 (previously 1)
• Game clock was refactored to now allow for scaling the game faster/slower and the game will adjust accordingly. This also means that I had to rework some of the ways the abilities fire (cribbage, playing card, yoyo).
  • Game length is set to be 600 turns
  • Demo is set to be 200 turns
  • Added a run clock to show the player how long the current run has been for. This should create a speed run for those interested.
• Movement Powerups change. The old power ups would override your movement pattern which was interesting, but felt bad. So the aim here was to make them feel more useful. Clarity and scaling will be addressed in future patches.
  • Now append their power ups to the current set.
  • Movement Power ups color matches XP gems
  • Movement power ups now spawn less frequently
• Miscellaneous:
  • Movement Powerups now
  • Player now has red damage text when taking damage from enemies
  • Cleaned up some unused signals
  • Reorganized the games folder structure
  • Added buttons that link to a google form for feedback
  • Tuned the difficulty curve slightly
• Random Bug Fixes:
  • Fixed a bug where the end screen's main menu button was redirecting to steam page
  • Fixed a bug where the health could be negative on the UI
  • Probably some other bugs Ive forgotten about
  • Fixed a bug with Jack Trap where it wasnt getting removed from the tile when an enemy trigger it

[ 2022-08-05 19:36:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

tl;dr melee kills now also give +1 health, left-click or spacebar now undo movement selection, changed the game music, slightly adjusted the difficulty curve for first knight wave, updated the menus, added an about screen, and fixed some bugs.

Note from Aarimous (Developer)

The aim of this patch was to address some small quality of life issues as well as some game breaking bugs. From here my plan will be to overhaul the turn timing to smooth out the experience without removing the unique challenge that quick-turn movement brings. I believe this is a balancing act between allowing you enough time to process and react, but not so much time that you get to plan too much. From there Ill be working on a relic system which will grant the player powerful buffs and enable unique builds. Finally, I have plans to revisit many of the systems such as the upgrades, enemies, and consumables. Thank you for playing the demo, I still cant believe that I actually have a game on steam. Cheers, Aarimous

Detailed Patch Notes

• Changed the game's music to now switch between two songs.
  • The old music was too intense, repetitive, and far too short. The goal with these new songs was to find music that is good enough until I can find/commission better music.
• Left-click or Spacebar now undo movement selection
  • Simple quality of life thing so players are not punished by a mis-click
• Melee kills will now restore 1 health to the player.
  • This was an idea brought up by the YouTube creator Retromation. We will see how this feels, but right now I think this is a nice little reward for players who take the time to melee enemies. Eventually the melee damage will be something the player can scale, so I could see this healing also becoming something they can scale.
• Slightly adjusted the spawn rate of Knights during the first phase they appear. Spawn pawn weight increased from 3->4.
  • The goal of this was to smooth out the number of knights that can appear at once. The curve seems to increase too quickly from pawns to knights. This change is very small but should result in spawning pawns 80% and knights 20%. Previously this ratio was 75% pawns and 25% knights. The whole curve will be continually adjusted over time.
• Updated menus and added an About Screen
  • [Added a lot of new buttons for Wishlist, Aarimous socials accounts, press kit, and main menu. This should make the game feel a little more polished and make it easier to navigate the game
• Minor Bug Fixes
  • Added a screen manager so that popups & pause screens can overlap. There were some bugs that resulted from the player pressing the pause screen and unpausing it which created bad game states.
  • Fixed a bug where the movement tile would not be updated when a player was killed. This resulted in fewer tiles being movable to should be.

[ 2022-08-02 21:48:20 CET ] [ Original post ]