Hello everyone, we have a lot of fixes and QoL additions and combat UI rework, smoothing out the game before our next Major content. Hope you enjoy it, here are the details:
Combat UI Rework
We decided to change combat ui so that cards have more room to spread in your hand in a readable manner, removed the bottom UI under the cards so there is less friction while you play your cards. Inhale/Exhale and other states now show top middle of screen. We further polished how cards react to you hovering over them so they feel smoother.
Option to close Showdown animations
Along with our other polishes our main goal is to make game more fluid and faster. We felt the showdown animations for each time enemy Heroes played cards was slowing down the game too much, We added an option to completly close this in settings.
Tutorial Rework
We decided to completely change tutorial, remove it being another full game scene and instead we added it like popups with gifs that appears in the first combat of the game. Our previous tutorial was very susceptible to bugs or other issues, and took a bit too long to finish. Also the old tutorial got outdated as our combat UI is reworked
Damage Number Animation polishes
Freezes and crashes
Game froze after Dorian's attack: Fixed an issue with his animation forcing game to play Dorians turn twice, breaking the game.
Enemy turn stalled after a hero card: The turn did not continue once a hero card's delayed effect finished. It now continues normally.
Freeze in fights with several heroes (Twins, Gnome Mages, Armament): The hero deck animation failed after a hero died and stopped the enemy turn. The animation can no longer block the turn.
Freeze from Wind on Boulders or Earth on Tornadoes: The search for a neighbouring tile could loop forever at the board's edge. It now always finishes.
Crashes when all enemies die mid-attack
Card reward crash: Clicking fast, or playing on Difficulty 2, could read past the end of the card list. The list is now checked, and a missing reward is replaced with random cards.
Armament and Sohei death cutscene: The fight ended twice and during it the escape button opened the pause menu during the cutscene. The fight now ends once, after the cutscene, and escape button now properly skips it.
On-kill relics on the final boss: Relics like Drinking Horn did not trigger on the killing blow. They now do.
Black Whelplings during the cutscene: With the Black aspect, whelplings (up to 8) spawned while the cutscene played(which was causing several issues). They no longer do.
Armament victory not recorded: Some arena tiles broke the end of fight checks, so the kill could be missing from your progress. It is now always properly recorded.
End Turn stuck with Blue Whelp: After evolving, a card in your hand could fail to appear and End Turn stayed locked. Missing cards are now skipped and End Turn always unlocks.
Your turn never started: When no enemy could act (only houses left, or every enemy stunned), the game could skip handing the turn back to you. Your turn now always starts.
Oldoron's Soul Stone crash: Playing an Earth card could crash the relic. It now only reduces the cost of cards that are really in your hand.
Settings crash on small screens: On screens below 1280x720 the resolution list was empty and pressing OK crashed. Your current resolution is now offered instead.
Broken character select without Steam: Starting the game outside Steam left character select half-built, with panels drawn over each other. It now loads normally.
Saves and progress
Progress replaced by an old backup: If one save file went missing, the game was trying to restore a months-old backup over current progress. It now rebuilds from your current save and backs up before any restore.
Unreadable save replaced with an empty profile: A damaged save file (for example after a power cut) was silently overwritten. A copy of the damaged file is now kept so it can be recovered.
Lost progress when quitting mid-combat: Discoveries and achievement progress from the current fight were only saved on victory. They are now saved every round, on leaving to the menu and on quitting.
Lost cosmetic currency from the end screen(Lair): Difficulty rewards were only saved when you next opened character select. They are now saved as soon as the result screen opens.
Achievements reaching Steam late or not at all: Unlocks only uploaded with the next stat change, and stats uploaded too often. Changes are now uploaded in batches every 2 seconds and on quit.
Gameplay fixes
Wrong boss's mechanics in a run: Daice mechanics could appear and be saved in a Dragon run, and vise versa. Each mechanic tree now only affects its own boss, and wrong entries are removed from saves.
Boss mechanics locked on a new save slot: Achievements earned on another slot did not count. Mechanic unlocks are now account-wide (meaning they are saved between save slots to prevent any future issues)
No rage bar for the Dragon on a new slot: A Dragon without an aspect had no rage bar, button or speciality. It now gets the Red rage bar.
Blue aspect cards missing: Frost cards never appeared in rewards or shops while playing Blue Whelp or Blue Drake. They now do.
Speciality hit the wrong enemies: The immunity check looked at a different enemy than the one being hit. It now checks the enemy on the target tile.
Cards stuck in hand: Ending the turn while cards were still being dealt left extra cards behind (up to 9). End Turn now waits for the card deal to finish.
Cards sinking into the hand: The deal animation finished one frame too early. Each card now completes its deal.
Choose a reward without picking a card: The last card clicked in combat was added to your deck. The selection is now cleared when the reward screen opens.
Second card reward showed the first reward's cards: The old cards were never cleared. Each reward now shows its own choices.
"Show Showdown" setting did nothing(from beta): The toggle was not connected and showdowns never played. It now turns the hero showdown on and off, shows the hero's card during it and hides the hero deck while it plays.
Enemies slid instead of walking: They tried to walk before their attack animation finished. They now finish the attack, then walk.
Phase filter emptied the mechanics panel: Switching characters after filtering hid every node. The filter now works per character.
Leaving the lair with Escape button broke character select: Escape button skipped the lair's exit and left an empty or wrong screen. Escape button now leaves the lair like its Back button.
Several camera shakes at once: A card that hit many tiles started one shake per tile. It now shakes once.
Balance changes
Frost Dragon Aspect: boulder tile: Applying Frost now removes it and grants 2000 armor (was 1000). (Frost not removing boulder was in the way of creating frost tiles, which is a main part of frost dragon espacially because of cards like blizzard and frost breath.)
Poison Dragon Aspect: Applying Poison now turns Boulders and Rubble tiles into Toxic tile.
Royal reinforcements are now split between Royal Guards and Royal Archers.
New Game+: enemies no longer deal their damage to you when they die. (We hear this was just in the way of variety in players builds as you always needed defensives and was just a nuisance.)
QoL & Polishes
Faster combat: enemy turns, attacks and walking take about half as long, and very large fights speed up automatically.
Faster card draw: cards are dealt in an overlapping sequence (a 5-card hand takes about 0.8 s instead of 2 s).
Better hand layout for up to 9 cards.
Territory info now opens after hovering slightly faster
The lair room is now available from the start, without having the need beating Dorian first.
Kinetic Crystal now shows how much leftover AP it has stored.
Main menu: new logo, changed the intro
Character select: new backgrounds for each boss and new art.
New loading screen with an hourglass animation.
New Damage Numbers
New card animation on hero cards, making it clear they are played (the need for this was apparent once you close showdown animation in settings)
Changed Capsule Art on steam
Work in progress polish for next patch: Cards or attacks that deal damage multiple times will have damage numbers poping separately instead of all at the same exact time.
Destroy House event is faster: Houses and fields no longer take a turn, so you no longer have to wait for them.
No more clicking through map panels: Claiming a fountain or territory reward could also travel to the node behind the button by accident. Nodes now ignore clicks while any panel is open.
"Steam not running" warning: It never appeared before. It now shows after the logo intro.
Performance
No more freezes on big elemental attacks
No more stutter when cards hit many tiles: multiple elemental interactions happening same time from cards or any other mechanics would cause small stutters, this has been fixed
Smoother combat and world map: cards, enemies, minions, tiles, mechanics and the UI no longer rebuild text, search the scene or allocate memory every frame.
Smoother world map: hover checks run once per frame instead of once per node.
Faster world map loading: Optimization: Music now streams instead of loading whole tracks
Less memory in the main menu: the logo intro uses less memory.
Smoother result screen: The Victory/Defeat screen no longer freezes for a moment when it opens.
Localization
Remade Chinese localization fully.
Remade Russian localization fully
Remade Ukranian localization fully.
Please let us know if you enjoy the new translations for these languages, so we can update future contents the same way.
Upcoming Major patch and future content plans
We are currently working on 2 patches.
Major patch that will completely change most enemy fights, rebalance enemies, boss mechanics and talents. Change pools for each dragon aspects(frost, black etc..) so they have either less fire cards or less earth cards etc in their pool. Add new couple cards for each aspect on top.
DLC: Full new Map, New playable Boss with 3 unique new elements, 3 different starting decks, unique 30 boss mechanics and new talents. Many new enemy models, fights, new armaments, new map nodes and goals, new systems: "Challenge raids", "Worship Deities". more than 130 new relics, 110 new cards and more.
Our goal is to keep updating base game with major and regular patches, fix every issue it has, continue with polishing and fixing bugs until we get to a place where its ready for a DLC update.
Please let us know any issues you still have, we are adding all we read in our pipeline for next patches
