Hey Everyone!
This update adds a whole lot of new stuff, improves on existing stuff, and fixes some issues.
The focus for this one was the new Shrines & Boons system, which is another layer of meta progression that also enables you to make defined builds during your runs.
For instance, praying at the Holy Shrine will make Holy weapons drop more often, and enable the Avatar from this Shrine to appear during your run, killing all enemies and granting you a powerful Boon. Boons are special effects that enhances and enables builds, for example by increasing the damage of a specific element, or adding a stat based on how many weapons of another element you're carrying. More advanced Boons may add extra attacks and other new mechanics to your build!
These Shrines also needs to be upgraded via Gold offerings, and "Feats of Strength", which requires you to for example survive a map after having Prayed at the specific Shrine. Upgrading Shrines unlocks new tiers of Boons, and makes the Prayer more effective, further increasing your chances of getting weapons of the matching element.
You can have two Prayers active at the same time, and the final tier Boons are often direct synergies with other elements.
Now to make all of this make sense I've also had to limit the number of weapons and items you can carry, as without limitation it doesn't matter what you pick or in what order you take things as you'll have all of it eventually... and that's no fun! Every run and build the same - yuck. But fret not, you can still carry a large amount of items. Specifically 8 weapons and 10 passive items. This allows you to carry all weapons of your primary element, and most of a secondary supporting element (or just a bunch of random stuff, you do you).
Beyond this I've also focused on general polish, changing up enemy spawn patterns and the overall game pacing, improving most aspects of the UI, a bunch of new sounds, changed some perks... oh and 42 new Scryer nodes to boost your elemental damages!
Anyway - thank you everyone for your support, bug reports, and comments!
I'm eager to make this game worthy of the Chronicon universe - as admittedly I fumbled the 1.0 release - and I'm happy to take your suggestions and wishes of what you want to see in the game.
//Squarebit
==== 1.300 ====
NEW FEATURES:
*SHRINES & BOONS:
*Pray at the Shrines located in the Keep (in the camp) to increase likelihood of weapons with a matching element to the prayer to drop.
*Praying for a specific element also enables Boons of that element to appear during your run.
*Prayers are saved per character, so you can set each character up for different builds.
*Boons are special upgrades that help define builds.
*Boons will appear on set Time and Level intervals during the game, as an Avatar appears and offers you a choice between two of the same tier.
(in Anomaly mode, Avatars do not appear on time but on Boss kills)
*Boon Tiers are Common, Rare, Epic, and legendary.
*Legendary Boons offer special synergies between Elements & other Boons.
*To unlock new Tiers, the Shrines in the Camp must be upgraded & restored to their former glory via Gold donations and by honoring the gods through feats.
*Each upgrade unlocks a new Tier, and increases the likelihood of getting weapons of the matching element.
*ITEM SLOTS:
*There are now weapon and passive slots; 8 weapon slots and 10 passive item slots.
*You must now be more careful with your item picks and can now create synergies and proper builds for your characters rather than just picking everything.
*Beyond more interesting gameplay and build crafting, this also leads to getting more Money Bags & Coal as you'll hit the item cap much quicker.
ACHIEVEMENTS:
*Added 10 new Achievements.
SHADY DEALER EVENT:
*Now only deals in blood... as in, you can only buy his wares with health as a currency. (and it no longer uses weird button prompts)
CAMP:
*Redesigned the camp area by expanding on the keep area and moving all Shrines inside it.
*The Seasonal waypoint is now an orb like the regular one.
*Moved Fungimancer and Killbot to better spots.
ITEMS & WEAPONS:
QUAKE: The Attack Speed upgrades are now smaller.
VORTEX STRIKE: Now has a much larger hitbox.
SCRYER:
*Added 42 new nodes for Elemental Weapon Damage to the Scryer tree.
*Adjusted the positioning of many nodes for mostly aesthetic reasons.
PERKS:
FORCEFUL DASH: Now knocks away enemies at the end of the dash, rather than the start. Enemies are also damaged and stunned for a short time.
WAR MAIDEN MASTERY: Now gives the Chakram the ability to bounce off the War Maiden when no more new targets are found. The Chakram will also reset its targets when doing so, allowing you to bounce it on bosses repeatedly, for example.
GAMEPLAY MECHANICS & MODIFIERS:
*Chests now open much quicker when you have the Chest Randomizer modifier active, or if the loot is depleted and they only drop the Money Bag / Coal.
*Enemy spawn numbers now vary a lot across the map, sometimes giving you some space by producing fewer spawns, and sometimes bursting out a lot of enemies all at once, rather than the old way of just trying to keep an increasing number of enemies active at all times.
*Enemy spawn locations / directions now vary with some randomization added to it.
*You can no longer stun Swarm enemies (like bats).
OPTIONS:
*Added proper windowed resolution support, with most common 16:9 and ultrawide resolutions can be picked from.
*Fullscreen mode also works properly on Ultrawide and non 16:9 resolutions now.
*Because of how the game works with spawns and visibilty, a 16:9 view is always enforced, adding black bars as necessary to fit your screen.
*No more stretchy stuff though!
*Added more options for handling flashes and lights, such as enemy hit flashes, full screen flashes, and the boss red ambience shift.
SOUND:
*Added many new sound effects for the new features (Avatars, Boons, etc).
*Added sound effect for Legendary chests.
*Added new sounds for gold and exp pickup.
*Added menu, UI, and pause sounds.
*Added a low pass filter to music while the game is paused or in a menu, such as chest menu.
*Added direction sound to chest drops so you get an idea of where they dropped via the sound cue.
*Rebalanced audio mix.
UI:
*Updated and improved the character select screen.
*Added icons of all your weapons and items to the chest loot screens, so you can reference what you have when selecting new things.
*Added progress/timer bars for random Slime events, the Corpse Sludge event, and the Shady Dealer event.
*Added some backings to the options menu to make it more legible.
*Improved display of barriers on Healthbars.
*Improved legibility of the Event HUD display.
*Improved the item display in the HUD.
*Changed text positioning on Banish buttons.
*Improved legibility of damage numbers and some UI text such as gold, kill counter, etc, for Chinese and Korean fonts.
MISC:
*Pressing F11 while having any info card displayed will "print" this card to a .png file in the game save directory.
*Enemies who are stunned now stop their animations.
FIXES:
*Fixed being able to attack and pickup stuff as the victory/defeat screens were playing, allowing unintended shenanigans.
*Fixed some item descriptions showing unnecessary decimals (.00) for some values.
*Fixed rare crash that could happen if tabbing out or changing resolution or similar during a run.
*Fixed some UI elements not refreshing when swapping characters.
*Fixed rounding issue with attack speed on some weapons which led to fewer attacks than intended over the course of a full run.
*Fixed some UI sound effects playing incorrectly.
*Fixed item display covering the EXP bar if not having any Banish Tokens.
*Fixed Bone Scythe having its duration upgrade carry over between runs, causing a soft lock if the Overclock was used in a previous run.
*Fixed the Nomad Mastery Perk not correctly assigning the free ranks to Hit Count.
*Fixed bad scaling and poor rendering across different languages of interactable popups.
*Fixed map-found weapons such as Boots of Cataclysm's item cards being weirdly offset on smaller resolutions (anything below 1080p).
*Fixed the same cards mouse hitbox not scaling accordingly as well.
*Fixed same issues for the Shady Dealer random item purchase.
*Fixed Healthbar numbers not displaying correctly with Chinese and Korean fonts.