Another big update, coming along. Sorry for not posting any updates in June or during the summer sale, I’ve been rather busy the past 2 months and couldn’t put as much time into this as I would have liked (rather I spent my free time trying to de-stress from programming all day by playing other games like FFXIV). Anyway, this update includes the culmination of everything I’ve been working on and talking about in the dev blog for the past two months. Particularly, it includes the following features that I’m going to talk to you in detail about!

Seasons and Lunar Cycles

The game time system has been cleaned up a bit internally, and as such I’ve added new seasonal tracking and a lunar calendar to the game. Seasons don’t do anything just yet, but they’re in there as a feature that’ll be used for a future update. Lunar cycles, on the other hand, do have an impact. A lunar cycle lasts 18 days, meaning you’ll hit a full moon and a new moon on average once a month. The closer you are to a full moon the harder enemies will become in dungeons. This adds a new level of challenge and strategy, as you’ll have to decide when do you want to go into a dungeon and when do you want to sleep away a day. As always, the higher level enemy you fight, the more loot that drops, so on full moon days you can guarantee yourself getting more loot, if you can stay alive that is. Additionally, there’s a 5% chance of an eclipse happening on any day. Eclipses convert dungeons into a boss-run mode, where on every floor in the dungeon there is a boss fight. This leaves you with no chance to ally with friendly monsters to take with into dungeons, but it does give you an opportunity to try your might at fighting low level bosses and high level bosses to get the items you need in your quest to serve the goddess. It also gives you a chance to pit your skills and might of your human party against the strongest beasts of your hard drive.

Sleep is Optional

With this update, days now advance whenever you return to town, and you’ll automatically be healed. Sleeping has been a considered a chore and confusing element of the game since I demoed it for the very first time. Removing it is a much needed change. Now the only reason why you’ll need to sleep is to adjust dungeon difficulty, or for other features that may come in the future.

Redesigned Questing

Questing has been completely restructured due to criticism about its seemingly pointless nature and lack of guidance. While the prompts remain the same nonsensical spam email mad-libed humbo-jumbo, quests are a lot more structured and easier to complete. Now, you may only take on one quest at a time. Also, Quests no longer expire. Each quest has its own random seed assigned to it, so now you will achieve your goals by going into the quest’s own dungeon instead of trying to find everything on your hard drive. This makes questing more extensible as well, which means in the future I can add more unique quest mechanics, such as quests starting your character off at level 1 and having to reach a certain level within the dungeon to complete the quest. For Hunt quests and Gather quests, there’s a 10% chance an enemy will be the type you need to kill or will drop the item you need to collect. This is much better than the usual .05% chance you have to get a specific item or monster because of the amount of randomly generated content in the game. These additional features and guides should hold your hand enough to get quests done, but the dungeoning is still hard so don’t expect the game to suddenly be a breeze.

Leveling in Dungeons

Leveling a character now works the same way as leveling up your equipment at a blacksmith. Within dungeons your character can once more gain xp from killing monsters and level up. When you level up in a dungeon, the stat point is assigned randomly, unlike when you train a specific stat. Upon leaving a dungeon, whether willingly or through death, your stats will reset back to the values that you have trained them to be. This makes your dungeon level a completely temporary stat, but the leveling up in dungeons with natural progression should help adventurers make it deeper more safely. And of course, the deeper your go, the more pleased the goddess will be. Because you get more loot that way to crafting things with, of course.

More enemies, More fun

Dungeoning is a lot more dangerous now with the enemy factory adjustments. There’s a heck ton more enemies on each floor now, because there were complaints that dungeons just weren’t dangerous or fun enough. Seeing that dungeoning is the core component of the game that people are going to be playing, it’s probably best that they don’t feel bored in vast dungeons with no enemies.

Bug Fixes

And what patch/update isn’t complete without a few bug fixes. Some of the big ones noticed were

• Craft menu doesn’t match up properly (Today and Required were switched)
• Crafting button was missing, so you couldn’t actually craft.
• Fix enemy AI movement for when there are more than 25 enemies on a floor, This has been plaguing the game for months and was nothing more than a spelling error calling dot instead of dst for distance calulations.

Of course, since this patch introduced new features, there’s bound to be some new bugs introduced. Please report all that you find to either the steam forums or github issue tracker as you find them, so I can squash them as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience and enjoy the update!

[ 2016-07-23 20:39:00 CET ] [ Original post ]