Attention, fellow cultists. The Devourer has heard your devotions, and your fingers will be spared.
After a fun first week and a half since releasing the game, we've had the chance to gather feedback and take in both positive and negative reviews. The fun part about game dev is that you never stop learning, especially when players get a chance to play your game for the first time. We've been patching a few things here and there, but this update marks a bigger change to how the main attacks work in the game.
In the previous version, you had to click and hold on a building to get the full attack damage and proc some of the relics and effects in the game. You could also at any time do a partial click to receive a small but upgradeable portion of the click damage amount. The partial click was always meant to be an alternative to the main click-and-hold functionality.
We saw that some players were stressing because they thought the partial click mode was the primary mode and the game required a breakneck pace. We also realized that the click-and-hold mode, while more powerful, especially when you max out the speed halfway through, wasn't providing a fun alternative. In fact, it could be more stressful having to click correctly on the building and hold it there. So we've made a big adjustment to that control scheme.
By default, you can now just hover over a building to charge up an attack — no click and hold required. If you hover off the building midway, it takes the damage at the level it charged to. You can still click on the building at any time to perform a "Quick Strike," our new name for the partial click. These Quick Strike clicks have their own percentage of total damage and can be upgraded just like before. We did not remove the old click-and-hold mechanic entirely. If you preferred it the old way, you can still enable it in the start screen settings menu.
After playtesting this hover-to-attack mode for a few days, we feel the game experience has improved dramatically, especially as the levels and cities get bigger. This is closer to the fun and satisfying power destruction fantasy we intended without all the stress and frustration. We may still need to adjust levels and goals because of this, but we thought we'd introduce the mechanic first because we had a blast with it this week in our playtests.
Thank you again to everybody that has played Hail the Devourer so far and taken the time to give feedback, both positive and negative. It is enormously helpful as we tweak this experience and work on our future games in the pipeline. Shoutout to the r/incremental_games subreddit for all the attention and feedback for the past week as well. We hope you enjoy the new changes and we'll be back for more updates soon. Cheers!
Version 1.3.0
New Features
- Hover over buildings to attack automatically — no clicking required. Your attack charges and cycles on its own while your cursor is on a building
- Click to interrupt with a Quick Strike for partial damage with full relic effects
- Classic Mode toggle in Settings to switch back to click-and-hold style
Bug Fixes
- Fixed rare game lock on the level-up celebration screen when clicking during fade-in
- Fixed Overachiever achievement not triggering when earning 2x the required XP
Quality of Life
- Renamed stats for clarity: Attack Damage, Attack Speed, Quick Strike
- All relic descriptions updated with new terminology
- Stats panel now shows 0% progress at game start, climbing as you upgrade
- Reordered stats panel: Attack Damage, Attack Speed, Quick Strike at the top
- Removed Inventory Slots from stats display