Attention Crew!
We hope you've been doing well! It's quite a while since our last Captain's Log, and this one in particular is overdue. This log will be talking a bit about 1.0 progress and, more specifically, our endeavors in creating new mod tools. We won't really be discussing new content too much in this log. We've mentioned this before, but we strongly believe that the Black Reliquary Dungeon itself, along with many other end-game features, will best be experienced completely blind.
We'll also be creating another holiday-themed Captain Q & A video!
You can find the question submission form here:
https://forms.gle/zF87cvvQMkAeuWnE6
Lastly, we'll be recruiting more closed testers towards the end of the November. We're looking for less experienced players to help out with balance testing sections of the end-game.
1.0 Progress
So what have we been up to?
To be frank, development of new assets the last couple of months has been very slow.
But that's because. . .
WE'RE DEVELOPING NEW MOD TOOLS!
That's right! We've been holding off on talking about it until we were 100% sure we could see it through, but we're excited to announce that we've been working with gibbed to develop new modding tools for Darkest Dungeon. More specifically, these tools will allow mod developers to hook into the functionality of multiple systems in the game via limited lua scripting. This will also allow us to upgrade Black Reliquary to 64-bit and even get the mod working properly on Mac/Linux. The development of these tools will allow us to add a new level of depth to our end-game, and let us fix many longstanding bugs/crashes that couldn't even be diagnosed before. We'll be publicly releasing the mod tools alongside BR's 1.0 release, allowing other modders to use them for standard Darkest Dungeon modding.
The constraints of modding Darkest Dungeon have been something we've been constantly fighting against. It's hard to get across just how ridiculously limiting Darkest Dungeon's modding capabilities are and how many compromises with gameplay/stability we've had to make. While these new tools likely won't be the perfect silver bullet, it'll make creating new/unique content and fixing/streamlining much of the older content actually possible.
To be completely transparent this does seriously hamstring the development of the 1.0 release itself. In fact, over the last ~5 months we've been putting most of our time/money into developing the foundation of these mod tools, and we've really only just started expanding the functionality of the buff system. Things should move quicker now that a foundation has been established, but the mod tools will need to progress more and we'll need to extensively redo parts of Black Reliquary's backend before new content can continue to be developed.
This might not be what some of our players want to hear, but 1.0's development has evolved into something much more complex than what we original planned. To be clear, the reason we are pursuing these mod tools is because they will let us make a more in-depth and stable final product.
New Champion-Exclusive Enemies
With that announcement out of the way, there are a couple enemies that were shared several months ago, but didn't constitute as enough content for a standalone Captain's Log. So, we'll go into a bit more detail now!
Ghoul Pharmacopola
The Ghoul Pharmacopola is a new Ghoul backliner that primarily functions as an offensive supporting unit. Most noticeably, the Pharmacopola has the ability to give ally Ghouls massive DMG/CRT buffs at the cost of them becoming Frantic.
Kvarotz Makaris
The Kvarotz Makaris is a new Kvarotz Stress-Caster with the ability to summon D'goma (Offerings). D'goma will reduce all healing done by heroes to 0, and can be partially consumed by other Kvarotz enemies to activate Corpse-Requiring skills.
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Thanks again for your support and patience,
-Team Reliquary
