Hi folks,
We just released a new version of DemonCrawl! v1.95 focuses on balance changes and stability.
Perhaps the most significant change is a buff to all Mastery Dolls. With a pricetag of 30 coins, we found that most Dolls were not paying off as quickly as we would have liked. Now, these items will activate at the start of every stage, and their effects scale based on your current number of mastery charges as opposed to your max charge count.
This should create some interesting opportunities where you have to decide between keeping your charges for empowered Doll effects, or spending them on a clutch ultimate ability.
Additionally, v1.95 allows us to start and end holiday events without needing to push a client update. This change was motivated by a recent hardware failure that caused the Easter event to last a lot longer than intended.
Here is the new schedule for DemonCrawl holidays going forward:
- Easter: In real life, this holiday can take place anywhere between March to May, depending on the year. The in-game event will take place on either the first two or last two weeks of the month of Easter.
- Summer: July 1st - July 14th
- Halloween: October 15th - October 31st
- Birthday: November 1st - November 7th
- Christmas: December 15th - December 31st
Finally, we rewrote the borderless windowed implemention using native GameMaker functions, which should fix an issue with the taskbar appearing in front of the game on some operating systems.
Full patch notes are below. Mac and Linux builds are expected to follow in 24 hours. Enjoy!
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New Features
- New passive item: Varnish - "Favor all armor items. Whenever you equip armor, fortify it by 3."
- New passive item: Whittling Knife - "Favor all Doll items. Whenever you gain a Doll, gain a mastery charge."
- New passive item: Birthright - "Gain a random favored item at the start of each stage. You are even more likely to find favored items."
Quality of Life
- Added dictionary definition for "evasion"
- Replaced hacky Borderless Windowed method in favor of native GameMaker functions
- Special Events can now be applied without requiring a client patch
- Updated GameMaker runtime to the latest version
Balance Changes
- Mastery Dolls buffed: all Mastery Dolls now activate at the start of each stage, in addition to whenever you activate your mastery
- Related to the above change, Dolls now consider your current number of mastery charges instead of max mastery charges
- Altar of Blood buffed: "Automatically discharges whenever you take less damage than the max stage power. The max stage power becomes the amount of damage taken."
- Apple Bonsai buffed: status duration reduced from 40 turns to 10 turns
- Grappling Hook buffed: "Reveal the corner cells."
- Mud buffed: "For the next 100 turns, gain a Minion whenever you use a magic item."
- Divine Mud reworked: "For the next 500 turns, gain a Minion whenever you use a magic item. The next time this activates, get an additional Minion."
- Scrap Hopper buffed: "Destroy target chest. The next time you open a chest, gain souls equal to your number of Scrap Hopper status effects."
- Horoscope price reduced from 10 to 7 coins
- The Gambler now has a several-turn "buffer" when he spawns to prevent him from immediately losing coins
- Guild cost of Scientist increased slightly
- Negative evasion now gives monsters a chance to strike repeatedly
Bug Fixes
- Fixed an issue with the "Confine Mouse Cursor" option
- Fixed an issue with the "Auto" aspect ratio button
- Fixed an issue with Sundrop and Lumberjack Doll that would allow them to affect cells without monsters if all monsters were already revealed
- Fixed a minor visual issue with the HUD's XP bar
- Fixed several avatars that were incorrectly sized
- Fixed Lead Balloon duplicate toast alert
- Fixed a couple visual issues with particles being removed prematurely
- Fixed a crash related to the Item Tree