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.