HEY!

It's me again, the guy making this game! It's been a minute but I'm back with an update! (Including for Mac and Linux users!! Finally!!!) Full Changelog Here This update adds saving and loading to the game! Currently (and probably forever) you can only save/load between floors, but now if you're having a good run that you don't want to give up because you have a bus to catch -- or whatever it is that interrupts peoples' gaming these days -- you can just save and quit out upon each floor's completion and return to it later!

Saving and Loading

This is something I'd been wanting to add for a long while, but as I worked on the Deep Dark and it became more and more apparent that an average, cautious run to reach the later levels would probably be an hours-long affair, the ability to save a game and resume it later suddenly changed from a nicety to an imperative. I want Catacomb Kids to respect your time, and not demand a disgusting amount of your day to beat. So I took a (longer than expected) detour from working on the Deep Dark to figure out how to add saving and loading to the game. And as I toiled and approached a functional system, through my testing I came to realize something: Playing the same floor over and over again can be really gosh-dang fun.

Game Modes

A lightbulb went off in my head. Besides the long time this game is taking to complete, the number one complaint I get is that it's just too hard. This has never really bothered me much, because some people like hard games, and in any case I'm trying my best to make it hard in a way that feels fair. But my philosophy has always been; if someone wants to like your game, the game should not keep them from doing so. In other words, if someone sees Catacomb Kids and thinks 'that looks like a game for fools and chumps', that's no skin off my back. I'd rather they go play something the would be more guaranteed to enjoy. But if someone sees Catacomb Kids and it seems like exactly their kind of game, they shouldn't be kept from enjoying it because of a lack of controller options, or because of strobing lights, or poor color choice, or awkward ui, or even - in some cases - the game's difficulty. So all of this is to say that, in addition to the classic Permadeath - which is still the default game mode and will remain so for all of time - I've added two additional modes: Continues and Generous.
In Generous mode, you can retry a floor as many times as you want, and can even come back to it after quitting out in the middle of a floor (though it will still force you to play through that floor from the start again). You can't, however, earn Catacoins in this mode, so if you want to farm coins for a super sweet custom kid you'll have to play in the Permadeath or Continues modes.
In Continues mode, you get to retry a floor after you die, but doing so costs Catacoins. Each subsequent death increases the cost until eventually you decide it's not worth it any more or you run out of money. My hope is that this mode might act as a stepping stone between Generous and Permadeath, or as a sort of failsafe mode for people who enjoy permadeath but who would rather get one or two do-overs after dying in a particularly inglorious or anticlimactic way. In every other respect it's just like Permadeath mode, however; Quitting out of the game in the middle of a floor ends your run, and you can still gain Catacoins from your depth and reputations.
In both of these two new modes the gameplay is unchanged in every other way. That is to say; it's still the same hard game where you can get bodied by a room full of grumbuls or trip into a single tile spike pit on floor 1. But I'm hoping that these new modes will serve the manifold purposes of helping to ease people into the game a bit more, letting folks have fun exploring different solutions to the situations they find themselves up against, and in general adding to the different kinds of fun people can have while playing CK. An example: As I was testing Generous mode I managed to make it to the Grumbul Tank with only 2 hp left and a nearly-broken weapon. Needless to say it killed me. I swear I fought that fight at least a dozen times, always starting from 2 hp, always with a nearly broken weapon, taking note of every mistake that ended me until, at last, I emerged triumphant. The thrill! The rush! What a feeling that was! An impossible feeling before this update.

The Loading Screen (Doesn't Suck Any More)

Lastly, because you can only save between floors, I needed to add a "between" for there to be. Previously the game would simply shuffle you automatically on to the next stage when you entered a door, but now you will be presented with a timeline of your run thus far, which will denote significant events like whenever you gain an orb of leveling, learn a new spell, beat a boss, etc. Shoutout to the viewers of my Twitch dev-streams for this timeline suggestion as I was brainstorming how to make the loading screen more interesting. I'm super duper pleased with how it turned out!!

Other Things You Cannot See

Another thing I've been working on a lot lately is externalizing all the text in the game so that it can eventually be localized. This is a mostly invisible change going on in the background, except for the places where I've broken something. The text may look strange in some places but that's almost certainly just a side effect of the fact that I'm tearing out a huge amount of hard-coded text and turning it into something more flexible. Anyway I just wanted to give a brief mention of this here because it's SO TIME CONSUMING, good GOLLY I don't even remember writing half of this stuff. This game has so much text in it! And so much of it is some degree of modular!! What a task I've made for myself. I was hoping to have that done by this update but that definitely didn't happen - I'm maybe halfway there - but just be aware, I guess, that - as I stated above - I don't want the any meta-attribute of the game to get in the way of being enjoyed by folks who want to enjoy it, and that includes (eventually) having a means of localizing the game into different languages. Which languages? Don't ask me that, I'm not there yet. One step at a time. Bouncing back and forth between implementing saving and loading, externalizing the text, and working on the Deep Dark has been where most of my time has been spent this past year - besides my work on UFO 50 and some other projects. I'd put the Deep Dark at around 65% ready for release? So hopefully it won't take too much longer. If you want to see how it's coming along, pop into one of my Twitch dev-streams sometime. It's probably most of what I'll be working on for the next few months. Alternatively, if you want to avoid spoilers, definitely don't check out my Twitch stream! This post is longer than I had intended, so I'll post the patch notes separately for people who just want to look those over! There are a bunch of bugfixes and other changes that I really hope folks enjoy!