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