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.