Last month we mainly focused on new enemies and a new boss fight but this month contains a wide range of improvements, this bouncing toad fellow is very excited:
We really love this world 3 enemy, it has became one of our mascot!

New mechanics

We have added a giant crystal you can destroy to gain crystals money, it feels very satisfying to do.
We have also reworked the Shards Altar. Old behavior: it used to give you 1 shard for free 3 times when holding button. It took a lot of time and it was slowing run pace. New behavior: you only need to interact once to get the 3 shards but they now cost you crystals to get. You can purchase as many as you want but these altars share a crystal counter price that increases for your whole run!

The altar also has a new look that we did not implement yet One more mechanic we added is related to Fight Rooms (waves of enemies) where Zodiacs can appear and give you extra challenges (more elites enemies, don't get hit during the fight etc). If you success you will get even more rewards but if you fail you won't get anything so be careful! Finally, we added a new enemy that will try to run away and escape, if you can capture it, you will get special rewards!

Difficulty rework & key currency

We have done an important rework with difficulty points. We wanted to have it in our Kickstarter demo but had not enough time to implement it. First thing is that difficulty points that used to be red skulls in the demo are now blue stars and instead of being limited from 1 to 3 points they are now from 1 to 6 and display the actual difficulty of the room instead of a difficulty based on current progression like it used to be. (it was confusing because a first room difficulty 3 was much easier than a last level difficulty 1)
These difficulty points can be used in dedicated altars that can give you crystals or astral keys (we explain keys very soon). You can find these altars in merchant rooms and in first rooms of each new worlds.
You can also unlock the astral keys when defeating fight rooms:
But what to do with these keys? At specific moments you will be able to spend either one key to have a small reward or three keys to have a stone altar or relic altar.
This looks a bit complicated on paper but it plays really well! The design decision behind this change comes from our will to create a link between different room types. We want main rewards to be in Exploration Rooms but we think Fight Rooms (waves of enemies) are really fun too so now to maximize your explorations you need keys that you can find in the other room type. It makes room choices even more strategic too.

More elements

Our art team thinks that world 1 is visually outdated in comparison with next worlds (all worlds are nearly complete) so we started to improve the first assets. Constance, our first intern since the creation of the studio, is making great work about it:
We are also working on "defensive spells", we had gravity ball & 2 more in the Kickstarter demo but they were not good enough but really few people used them so we are completely reworking them. First spell we made is a teleport:
We call them defensive because they do not deal damage to enemies but it can be movement spells, adding effects stacks to enemies and even more: anything that does not deal damage. Also they use cooldown instead of mana points. If you have any suggestions for these spells we would be really happy to know about it in our #suggestions channel on our Discord Server. We are also making a lot of new gambits and relics for Early Access, we know some were not good enough on Kickstarter demo so we removed them and we are working on new ones like these auto-target missiles:
Last small element we added is a "snap-jump" when jumping on platforms: you will get on it much easier.
We aim to have most of these new mechanics in our new demo of the game that should be up around October 2021. Your feedback were very useful during the Kickstarter demo and we really value having your opinion on the game so we created a new channel on our Discord Server. Once you claimed your backer role (directly contact an admin to get it if you backed on Backerkit shop), you can see #playtests-register channel and get a special playtester role there that gives you access to private #playtests channel where we will ask people to join exclusive playtests sessions during the coming months. Don't forget about our Backerkit shop and our Discord Server to discuss about the game development, Have an excellent day, - The Hibernian Workshop Team