Dev Update: Weather, VFX, and a Big Systems Pass
The Fight for Beardlandia Demo · published
Hey everyone! 👋 Another big couple of days! Combat looks and feels noticeably different now, and there's a lot under the hood too. 😃
🌨️ Weather in combat
Battles have weather now, and it's one of my favorite additions so far.
Snow falls on the winter map and leaves drift through the forest
Three separate depths, so leaves pass behind the trees and in front of your dwarves at the same time
Every battle rolls its own weather, anywhere from a gentle drift to a full blizzard ❄️
It all lives in the world rather than being painted on the screen, so the camera moves through it as the fight pushes forward
✨ Abilities you can actually see
A lot of abilities were doing their job with nothing on screen. That bothered me for a while, so I went through them one by one:
Mage Staff 🔥 – now casts a single fireball that falls from the sky and explodes on impact, replacing the old three-orb rotation
Ice Staff 💠 – fires a comet that streaks across the field and bursts into frost
Healing 💚 – shows a green burst, with a bigger one for Greater Heal
Revive – something finally happens on screen when a hero comes back
Invulnerability 🛡️ – a shield and a glow, so you can tell at a glance when a unit can't be hurt
Commander's Rally – draws a ring beneath every rallied dwarf
Shadowstep – leaves a mark where the dagger user vanishes and reappears
Barefist 💥 – his Shockwave finally shows the splash it was always dealing, and he now builds a purple aura that grows through three stages as his attack speed ramps
💎 Gems and Remnants are properly separate now
This one was a real bug and I'm glad it's fixed. They shared a single pool, which meant every gem you earned also handed you a hero pull, and every Remnant also paid for your skill tree. They're two currencies now, earned separately and spent separately, the way they were always meant to be.
⚔️ Two losses ends the run
On Normal, losing two battles in a row now ends your run
The first loss keeps the gold penalty and gives you a warning
A win resets the streak, so you're never one bad fight from disaster
Hard mode is unchanged: one loss and it's over
Both endings now fade to black and show exactly what you earned 🖤
🔨 Balance
Knockback rebalanced – it used to hit its cap partway through a run, so half your Strength did nothing for it. It scales all the way to endgame gear now
Longbow's ult 🏹 – fires three real arrows at the backline that carry their own damage, instead of applying it instantly
Ice Staff's ult – hits for less but keeps its freeze
Hero personalities are fixed rather than random – every hero now has a voice that actually suits them
🐛 Fixes
Heroes stand on the ground properly in combat and line up with everyone else in the inventory
Weapons scale with the hero holding them
Hats stay on heads during attacks 🎩
Healers stopped jittering and no longer outrun the party
Attack animations now match attack speed
Mages back away from enemies closing in, instead of walking forward into them
Damage numbers show up for effects that were dealing damage silently
Fixed a crash on the combat screen, and a second one that was waiting to happen
The DEFEATED banner is readable on the volcanic map now
The pause menu no longer claims your progress will be lost, since it saves
Thanks for following along, it genuinely means a lot. See you in the next one. 💛