Ahoy, mateys!
First of all, let me wish everyone very happy new year! I wanted to finish 2023 with a bang, and the new level, Misson's lagoon does just that. Avoid the cannon volleys of a huge battleship, while fighting the French colonial forces. I wanted to release the next map too, but I got sick :C . For spoliers you can visit the Borington Discord dev diary.
Another short map has been added right after the Wicked Mermaid in act 2. This serves as the new ship tutorial level.
Ship combat has been changed in multiple ways:
- Ships are now healed by collecting Flotsam. Use your fiddle to attract some. Music still heals the ship at the moment, but significantly less (might be zero in the future, not sure yet)
- Ships with sails can use a speed boost. Can be even more useful for fast steering.
- Enemy ships try to keep a minimum distance from your ship
- Ships now play a water sound effect while moving
Other changes:
- Important Notice: All old save games will be set back to the start of the map to avoid errors caused by map changes. Almost every map was changed in some way by this patch.
- Detailed stats screen accessible from the inventory
- New spell: Flicker. Melee attack that teleports you behind the enemy.
- New spell: Bubble. Slow-moving homing projectile that can be charged up for more damage and scale.
- also, updated model for bubbles
- New spell: Magic bullet. Homing bullet with a flat damage bonus and reflection resistance
- New mini-boss on the Haunted Landing: the Shorelord
- Added ship battle to Hooghly Crossing
- Compatible spells are displayed on equipped items when hovering over a rune
- New enemy type: Assassin
- Cursed Sailors can use Flicker ability
- Improved tutorials for reloading and sprint/sprint charge
- New animation for running with 2-handed guns
- New animation for walking/running with a shield
- Added custom grenade weapon model (not a retextured bomb).
- Updated models for shields and rum pickups
- Improved shell texture for Hermit Crabs
- Adjusted rifle/blunderbuss hero animation (gun is not tilted)
- Added Elemental / Bloated Corpse birth sound
- Added step sounds for giants
- Improved look for Stand Your Ground area
- Updated cursor texture
- Structures are dynamically updated on the minimap. Allied structures are shown in color.
- Structures have 2x smaller life bars
- Bleed damage and time scaling is now using a square root formula, and it scales with max hp. This means that on later levels it's not certain death.
- Some spells now inherit windup from charged weapons (rifle, javelin)
- Anchor now has sprint damage bonus
- Javelin uncharged projectile speed increased
- Anchor attack cooldown after switching has been reduced
- Immolation now supports burst attacks
- Increased bleed time on Hooks
- Soulfire no longer gives bomb regen, instead bomb per kill (when held, also applies to secondary weapon)
- Faultline and Bullet Slowing spells buffed
- Increased mutlishot powder cost of Hurl Lava from 1 to 2
- Explosive Parasite now has 30% spellpower damage bonus
- Added birth animation for Bloated Corpse
- Ocean Guardian is now a giant mudskipper, renamed to Marsh Guardian
- Reworked Jungle Protector into a larger enemy with very delayed attacks
- You get a guaranteed Torch at the start of Uncharted Tunnels
- Added camera shake to snake boss birth
- Changed color of saturation bar
- Improved look for GUI bar floaters effect
- Xp display arm now rotates gradually
- Retouched rock doodad and rock terrain textures
- Improved Destructible Rocks UV mapping
- Kraken's tentacle animations are no longer in sync at birth
- Buff display for "Near, Far" perk effect
- Off-screen hero projectiles now disappear, to not aggro enemies that are far away
- Fractional reloads are now accumlating instead of chance-based
- Homing projectiles no longer count for hit streak
- Gun loot types can now drop even if their pickup was missed (from next mission onward)
- Bone Snake boss can now be killed at 3 segments, not 2
- Reduced Crazed Torso life from 40 to 30
- Reduced Husk life from 50 to 45
- Reduced Skeleton life from 80 to 70
- Updated some editor GUI buttons
- Additive shader no longer writes in alpha channel - more correct shoreline shading
- Added custom maggot shadow model. Eliminates bias artifact
- Added new trigger actions to control rain, music track, enemy ship speed
- Added new trigger conditions: perfect reload, ship cannon use
Bugfixes:
- Fixed (from last patch): unit armor was ignored. MAJOR BUG!
- Fixed: Item tooltips could not go below inventory panel, even with reduced GUI scale
- Fixed: birth sounds are no longer played on map start
- Fixed: various Fort Bourbon bugs and issues. (e.g. soft-locking).
- Fixed: captured ship was still in focus
- Fixed: Trident sprint charge can no longer be spammed with 'Run and Gun' perk
- Fixed: possible error if projectile had water death SFX but no land death SFX
- Fixed: setting unit tags under 0 caused editor freeze
- Fixed: editor minimap reticle scaling
- Fixed: missing female version speech line in Sober Shore map
- Fixed: Scorpant Martyr ragdoll anim is missing. Disabled it.
- Fixed: jungle texture mistake
That's all for today! The next content update is being made at full speed right now, but my vacation ends this Tuesday. I hope to release at least another large patch in January, finishing the Madagascar arc and starting the final couple of maps.
Until then, smooth sailing! Have a wonderful 2024!
Borington