Hello everyone! This will be the final update for 2025 consisting mostly of a whole bunch of bug fixes as well as some other random odds and ends. I'm planning on taking the last 2 weeks of December off work to spend some time with the family, rest up, and prepare myself for the final major push in 2026. I'm actually feeling pretty good about next year as there are actually not that many major things I still feel I NEED to get into the game. This should give me plenty of time for debugging, polishing, balancing, reworking, and just generally trying to get the game into the best possible state for the final release at the end of 2026.
Mechanics:
Reverted the changes to Lunge so that it now moves and targets as before. The initial idea with this, Dash-Attack and Charge was to give them a consistent, bolt-like targeting, but this turns out to just be really annoying to use. IMO playability always outweighs consistency so we'll leave it as it was.
Reverted the changes to water knockback (reducing it by 1). The ONLY time I've ever even noticed this change is when it kills me due to getting constricted by a guy standing it water. A mechanic that is just an edge case way to kill you is not worth keeping.
Reward Rooms:
I've done a big consolidation of what the game refers to internally as 'Reward Rooms'. These would be:
Talent Fountains, Attribute Fountains, Wells of Wishing
Enchantment Tables
Rooms with gold, potions, scrolls, food
Crystal Chest rooms
It turns out that every single one of these can be merged into just Crystal Chests. Talent and Attribute potions replace the fountains, acquirement scroll and enchantment scroll replace the wells and tables. The gold, potions, scrolls and food can simply be in crystal chests which can then be placed in a controlled fashion throughout the dungeon. This gives the player quite a few guaranteed opportunities to make an actual 'choice' when it comes to character building.
Crystal Chest rooms can now contain all of the above as well as the normal equipment they previously offered.
Crystal Chest rooms will now spawn once per zone (except Upper Dungeon). Previously the number of Reward Rooms that would generate was extremely random. There was really no limit on how many or how few could generate as it was controlled almost entirely at the local level generation step. Depending on how this plays I could absolutely reintroduce some randomness to the generation but handle it from the Dungeon-Generator level so that we can give it sensible bounds.
Completely removed Key doors. They were an old feature that never got fully realized. The original idea was that there would sometimes be less keys than doors and so the player would be forced to choose but this has never really worked out properly. Crystal Chests offer this same choice with a much cleaner interface and no back tracking.
Timed doors will now be more common but will only be used if the door is > 30 tiles away from the stairs.
Game Settings:
Added EXP modifier to game settings.
Easy mode has 125% EXP and hard mode has 75% EXP in order to roughly balance the progression with the number of monsters.
Balance:
Troll-Necromancer (Poison-Cloud): 5CD => 3CD
Rotting-Corpse have an extra 'round' of maggot spawning.
Armor-of-Shielding Tier-2 => Tier-3 (extra block points on armor are very very strong)
The Extended-Range charm can now be enchanted. I'm planning on eventually allowing most equipment to be enchanted. A lot of equipment with abilities or special case properties will need hard coded enchantment behavior.
Reduced drops very slightly in the dungeon to account for now guaranteed Crystal-Chest drops.
User Interface:
Added 'Goto Character' to the Goto Menu. This will fast travel you to the character or nearest character (for merchant). When reaching the level you will run right up to him and open the dialog menu. Soooo convienient.
Added descriptions to Vents for damage and 'Vent in: x turns'.
Added Fast-Swimmer to monster descriptions.
Added 'Break LoS to remove the curse' to: confusion, torment, charm and fear descriptions.
Added 'Invuln Phase Blink' to the Soul-Wardens description (is there a better name for this?)
When a monster constricts you there is now a little 'chain' sprite to show who is constricting you.
Changed wording of items/objects/talents 'resets all cool downs' to 'resets all talent cool downs' (not equipment cool downs).
Energy and Power potions add note: 'resets all talent cool downs'
Graphics and Sound:
Elemental Overload sprite. I'd like to eventually have unique sprites for all the 'state change' abilities that monsters use to make it more readable. Similar idea for 'casting' states such as smite, lunge, fire storm etc.
Made the vent sprites larger and more readable.
Vents will now 'light up' on the turn before they actually vent.
Rubble, Grass and Bones now have multiple slightly different sprites that are randomly selected when the level generates. This is purely to help break up obvious tiling effects. Its funny how perception works as I can barely see the difference UNLESS I put some randomized sprites next to a cluster of the old identical ones.
Added a few different blood splatter sprites. Same idea as above. Just trying to very subtly break up repeated tiling visuals.
Different potions now have different bottle shapes in order to make them more readably different.
Added sound to the NPC 'Swoop' agility.
Added animation to the Click-Clock-Keep machines. I'm def planning on adding a lot more animated objects and props just to make the levels more lively. Click-Clock-Keep in particular I think should have a TON of stuff rotating, pistoning, vibrating etc.
Added animated 'pumping' machines to The-Sewers
Added little propeller things to The-Sewers
Added pipes that go into the water to The-Sewers
Bugs and Crashes:
Sneak-Attack (Upgrade) now works with: Poison-Staff, Life-Spike, Assassins-Bow.
Fixed Level-Gen crash with when you set 10% enemies in Game-Settings. Failed in a number of ways. Amusingly one way was that merchants, librarians etc were actually worth EXP and the generator was unable to place them :P
Fixed: Phantom-Bow dealing damage multiple times when knocking enemies back with, for example, power shot.
Fixed: a reflected Phantom-Bow shot was not dealing damage to the player.
Fixed a level gen crash in Click-Clock-Keep: 'No valid tunnel vault for: Straight - 0'
Fixed a level gen crash in Click-Clock-Keep: 'Cannot read property 'isStandardDropWall' of null'
Fixed a vault in Sunless Desert with an Archer on a barrel
Fixed: Clockwork-Overseer crash: 'object already exists at tileIndex' caused when web, vines, blood etc is spilled on a turret tile.
Fixed: Assassins-Bow was not triggering Killing-Strikes
Fixed a hard crash: an NPC with Necrotic-Poison 'swoops' at player and kills itself on a bear trap 'Uncaught Not on tileindex'. This one was a pain in the ass to track down. Thank you everyone who is providing detailed descriptions and screen shots for bugs! These would be impossible to fix without you guys!
Fixed: clicking the 'goto' button on the HUD would close any active dialog window (including the victory popup).
Fixed: upgrading a talent that grants a new ability (like Arc-Lightning-Bolt) had weird behaviour (and error message) if you had previously used an amnesia potion to remove a talent you acquired earlier. This one was also very 'fun' to fix.
Zombie-Bloat (Acid-Slime-Bomb): will no longer target the center on half walls and fences.
Fixed the Invuln status effect glyph which was offset oddly.
The enemy Cleave target indicator will now longer show up on walls and solid objects.
Fixed: getting pulled by a whip/tongue over a pit trap (NOT A PIT!) would result in the players position being messed up on the floor below.
Fixed: Bear-Trap was tearing Celtius-the-Dragons tail off when he charged over it.
Fixed: Bear-Trap will now properly immobilize the dragon if any part of his body gets caught in it.
Fixed: Crash when once of Celtius body parts had Necrotic-Poison and he is killed (maggot spawning)
Fixed: When a dominated healer healed an ally that had been wounded it would not fully heal (woundedHealCap). There was a visual delay. It was weird.
Fixed: Dominated healers would continue to try to heal allies at full hp (woundedHealCap)
Fixed disconnected level in Ice-Caves (no path over pit).
Fixed: Selecting Power-Shot without a range weapon crashes game
Fixed: Dash-Attack through a portal leaves a ghost image of the player (thanks Aolsier for solving a nearly 2 year old mystery).
Unstable enemies will now lose 2BP when hit with physical damage. This is consistent with player behavior.
Fixed scaling of enemy damage shields with custom enemy damage modifier
