The Anticropolis

I mean wow guys, for real.

Welcome to your new snowy wonderland: The Anticropolis. Once the underside of Abys' floating fortress before it fell to become The Catacombs, the Anticropolis is now locked in an everlasting, magical cold. Within, you will find undead that roam freely, and grumbul hunters whose excursions have brought them far from their comforts in the Upper Dungeon. Many fun new deaths await in the frigid depths, including but not limited to: being swallowed whole, crushed by giant icicles, spat upon by ghosts, and torn apart by winged beasts while caught in a bear trap and desperately fumbling for a potion. With it being so cold in the Anticropolis, you'll also have to keep an eye on your temperature to make sure you don't suffer from frostbite: Keep dry, dress warmly, and seek fire.

Wayward Kids

But it's not all bad in the snowy deep; with new enemies also come new allies in the form of other wayward Kids that you can find and form alliances with (after doing them a favor, of course). These Kids are a very early version of what they'll become, with the hope being that you'll eventually be able to to forge relationships with them over the course of a run and encounter individuals multiple times as you both descend and grow stronger. But that's something for later.

For now, they just want stuff (and are very formidable opponents, should you incur their wrath).

Bows and Arrows
You'll also find bows, a new type of weapon, and the first that exists apart from the five weapon archetypes. Bows are great ranged weapons that allow you to strike from afar, but their ammo is limited and precious, requiring you to retrieve your arrows after each fight. Once your arrows are exhausted, you may find yourself ill-equipped to handle the trials of more close-quarters combat.

Bows don’t have any weapon skills of their own like the other weapon types, but they do synergize with both the Focus Strike and Trajectory boons.

What's Next?
Now for a disclaimer: This might be obvious, but this release doesn't mean the Anticropolis is done. Far from it: this is the first version of the AC, with much, much more to come. With feedback from players, it will evolve into something even better. Notably missing in this build are transition stages unique to the Anticropolis. I've already started work on them but they were proving problematic and would delay this release even further had I pursued them to completion, so I've simply excluded them for now. There are also several more enemies and environmental features I have plans to implement, as well as a new boss creature (or two?). Anyway my point is: This is just the beginning.

I've learned a lot of things over the past several months of working on the Anticropolis -- things that I hope to employ going forward to help make the game progress faster, so that another months-long absence of updates doesn't happen again.

The first of these is: Hiring people helps LOADS. I have previously mentioned that I brought on one (1) John Sandoval to help lighten the animation workload on me, and subsequently he did most of the animation on many of the new enemies you'll be seeing in the Anticropolis. And gosh, as much as I love doing animation and pixel art that was a huge load off my shoulders. So this is the part where I implore you to spread the word about Catacomb Kids, since my hiring of people is still contingent upon paying them. I would love to bring on another coder and continue to employ the skills of John.

Another thing I've learned is: If I want to work on ~Secret Stuff~, I have to be economical about it. The Anticropolis' delays were ultimately caused by my failure to spread the work out evenly across prior updates, leaving an utterly massive amount of work to be done with little groundwork laid. When I look at how long it took to get the Upper Dungeon to where it is, and realize I expected to make another 60-70% of that amount of content again for the Anticropolis release, it's no wonder my projected timeline for the area was overly optimistic.

To help mitigate that from happening again, I'm going to be starting work on the Deep Dark immediately, even though I don't anticipate it to be released for at least as long as it took for the AC to come together (the better part of this past year). Even if the going on the Deep Dark is slow, the hope is that by the time I'm wrapping up the AC and ready to dive into the DD, work on the area will already be well underway.

For now though, while I continue work on The Anticropolis my next major goals will be implementing meta progression -- that is, the game progression outside of individual runs -- and the next class, which will be focused around Intelligence.

Thank you all for your immense patience, and I hope you stick around for even more fun in the future!

Tyriq P. <3