Hello everyone! It's been a while but we've been hard at work, I swear. Indeed, today we are releasing our biggest update so far. We realized our old health and nectar system wasn’t creating the kind of choices we wanted. You can read the full thinking process abouth this big change in the "Full Health Reword Design process" section of this post but since it's a big piece, here is the TLDR: Players could retry fights almost without consequence, flee for easy nectar, and those who did well early would just snowball through the rest of the run. It didn’t feel strategic or rewarding. So, we decided to completely rework it and introduce the Elixir system. You now start each run with 75 Elixir, which represents your life essence. It’s used to heal and evolve your units, and if it ever reaches zero and you lose a fight, that’s game over. If you win with no Elixir left, you can keep going, but your units will suffer penalties until you recover. The better your team performs in fights, the less Elixir you spend on healing, making careful play and decision-making much more important. Nectar rewards are now fixed at 20 per win, and fleeing no longer grants rewards. That's it for the "piece de resistance" of this update but that not all there is to this update! Indeed, we also implemented a new mechanic: The scrolls.
When starting a new game, you'll be given 3 scrolls. These scrolls can be used to lower the attack speed of the enemies in any fight. Use them wisely as they can come in handy in fight you criticaly need to win but remember that you only have three for the entire run, don't waste them. For those who were lucky enough to have a beta access, we also finished working on the final boss of chapter 3, you'll be able to test it for yourself! Be ready for a test of your skill as you will face your strongest enemy yet, yourself! Indeed, the Crimson Puppeteer uses its blood-like ooze to mimic your team members and boost their stat! Will you be able to take them on? The puppeteer is based on the Devil's Tooth mushroom as you can see:
In addition to all that, we also reworked the blight system (the incremental difficulty so that it becomes challenging faster for player that are used to this type of games. But that's not all, we also added new visuals to the game:
A new ingame screen when obtaining a trinket on the map
A new intro when launching the game. To set the mood...
Currently, were hard at work on our next update! We're bringing a new guy to the team: The Blacksmith!
He will allow you to improve your equipments and even use your leftover nectar to get random equipement!
And, as usual, made a bunch of balance changes and bugfixes. We hope that you enjoy this big changes. You can read the full patchnote after the next section. Enjoy! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
We had been thinking about it for a while, the current health and nectar system we had set up was not quite hitting the mark. As a reminder, in the current system, you had 5 life and would lose 1 each time you would lose a fight and each battle would give you a certain amount of nectar (our game's money) depending on your current team size and how healthy your units where at the end of the fight. You could also retry any fights as long as you had 1 life left or flee the fight and you would gain some nectar in compensation. This system ended up creating two unsatisfying situations.
On one hand, we felt it didn’t really give players meaningful agency. Indeed, as long as you had more than 1 life, it was pretty much always worth it to retry a fight and once you were at 1 life left, it was basically do or die. This was not really interesting as it didn't lead to a conscious choice on the player's hand, he didn't have to balance the pros and cons of retrying an encounter and it didn't have any lasting impact on your current run. You could also somewhat abuse the system to loose the first few fights and gain nectar by fleeing. This felt a bit silly and left you at the mercy of what you would be able to buy in the first shop. Again, not that interesting and even a bit exploitative.
On the other hand, as winning a fight meant earning money depending on your unit's health at the end of the fight, it lead to a weird snowballing effect that we felt was not healthy for the game in the long run. The better you do in a fight the more nectar you get, the more nectar you get the more items and trinkets you can buy, the more items you can buy the better you do in a fight...etc.
To resolve this issue, we therefore needed:
a health pool that decreases over time and slowly reaches 0. The player needs agency on this health pool so he should be able to have some control over how it decreases.
a fixed amount of nectar gain upon winning fight. That way, there is no snowballing effect on income.
We also needed to keep one aspect of our system that we feel is crucial to the game. The player needs to understand how well or how bad he is doing in the fight. This was the one great aspect of the nectar gain depending on unit's health in our previous iteration. Doing better in fight meant more money and it lead to people trying to optimize more. That part was healthy and needed to be kept one way or another. With that clear frame in mind, we decided upon the following changes:
Upon starting a run, you will start with 75 Elixir. If your Elixir amount is 0 or reaches 0 and you lose a fight, it is game over.
If your elixir amount reaches 0 but you win the fight, you can continue. However, your units will suffer a penalty as long as you don't replenish your stock.
Similarly to the nectar in the previous version, at the end of the fight, your units will be automatically heal depending on how much life they have left but instead of costing potential nectar, it costs 1 Elixir per 20% missing health on a unit. This means that your elixir of life amount will deteriorate over time whatever the case.
This way we keep the natural incentive of trying to win fights with units that are as healthy as possible. The more health your units have at the end of a fight, the less elixir is spent, the less elixir is spent, the more risk you can take down the line. Managing your elixir becomes essential in the choice of the path you take on the map. Risky or safe, that's up to the player. That's agency.
You can retry any failed fight but you have to consider whether or not the potential reward of the fight is worth taking the risk of losing even more Elixir. Again reinforcing player agency over the course of the game.
Fleeing a fight no longer rewards nectar. Fleeing therefore means losing on potential income and rewards and that has to be taken into account when deciding whether or not to retry a fight.
Evolving a unit now costs Elixir instead of nectar. This means that improving a unit is a risk down the line if you manage the elixir poorly. Choose wisely.
The nectar gained after a victory is now a flat 20 nectar. No more discrepancies in income and snowball using the economy.
It may sound simple, but it was a big change under the hood. In the end, we think it adds real tension and agency to every decision you make — and that’s exactly what we wanted. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
New Chapter 3 Boss added with final visuals.
Small cinematic introduction added for extra immersion.
New feature: consumable scrolls.
Life system rework.
Blight system rework.
You now start with 75 Elixir of Life.
Evolving units costs 5 Elixir (T2) and 10 Elixir (T3).
Elixir is used to heal units after combat.
If you lose and lack Elixir, you lose the run.
If you win but can’t heal, your units become Broken, taking extra damage.
The last node before each boss is now a Campfire, where you can:
- Rest: regain 40 Elixir and +10 max Elixir.
- Evolve: upgrade one unit.
You start each run with 3 scrolls (1 type for now, more coming).
Current scroll effect: -0.2 Attack Speed to all enemies for one fight.
Now only 4 Blight Levels, each adding multiple modifiers.
Funghi Frenzy replaced by Fungal Proliferation (fights are 10% harder).
Blight 4 is harder than the previous Blight 7, good luck!
Galahad: Now inflicts Shatter in an AoE.
Edith: Charm now affects 4/5/8 closest enemies.
Edith: Attack speed +0.1.
Ulysse: Damage 8/10/12 → 8/12/16.
Vladimir: Attack Power 10/12/15 → 10/15/20.
Lyra: Attack Power 5/8/10 → 5/10/15.
Richard: Attack Power 10/12/14 → 10/13/16.
Ambroise: Heal 3/6/9 → 3/5/7.
Bob: Heal 10/15/20 → 6/11/16 and Attack Speed 0.6/0.8/1 → 0.8 flat.
Achilles: Attack Speed 0.5/0.6/0.8 → 0.6 flat.
Paris: Attack Speed 1.5/1.8/2 → 1.5 flat.
Ulysse: Attack Speed 0.8/1/1.2 → 0.8 flat.
Hercules: Attack Speed 0.6/0.6/0.8 → 0.6 flat, Health 80/130/180 → 70/110/150.
Morgana: Health 30/40/50 → 20/30/40, Attack Speed 0.5/0.6/0.7 → 0.5 flat, no longer gains Attack Speed on level-up.
Vladimir: Attack Speed 0.6/0.8/1 → 0.7 flat.
Lyra: Attack Speed 2/2.4/2.6 → 2 flat.
Nikolai: Attack Speed 1/1.2/1.4 → 1.2 flat.
Bakhan: HP 20/30/40 → 10/15/20.
Yaga: HP 50/60/70 → 30/40/50, Damage 10/18/26 → 12/20/30.
Styx: HP 50/60/70 → 40/50/60.
Nina: Attack Speed is now 1.0 across all tiers.
Moral Booster: Heal 2 → 3, hold limit 3 → 2.
Tip of the Hat: Nectar gain 20 → 30.
Bulk Up: HP gain to Berserk units 25 → 30.
Silent Killer: Attack Power +5 → +4.
Member Card: Now gives a random trinket instead of an equipment.
Overwhelming Takedown: Shatter 3 → 2.
Teeth Breaker: Chitin on heal 3 → 2.
Rallying Call: Charm to units 2 → 1.
Diversion: Removed from the trinket pool (will return as a starting trinket).
Legendary Tank: HP and Chitin 40 → 50.
Birch Buckler: Health gain 2 → 3.
Test Dummy: Now sets HP to 10 (was 1) to prevent instant death.
Nettle Blade: Poison 3 → 2.
Fleeing fights no longer grants rewards.
Elite and Boss fights no longer grant Nectar.
Equipment warning now only checks battlefield units (not bench).
Purge Rituals reward now offers a choice between 3 equipment instead of a random one.
New warning message when you haven’t placed all available units.
Big boss health bar added for boss fights.
Other rewards shrink visually when hovering one.
Tooltip borders now change based on importance.
Altar node now has its own animation when granting a free trinket.
When multiple executions happen at the same time, they now trigger sequentially for readability.
Optimized overall performance, smoother map navigation.
Fixed ranged units briefly switching to idle pose between attacks.
Fixed obstacles being considered for ranged targeting.
Fixed boss fight readability with sequential execution triggers.
Fixed tutorial pop-ups timing issue and wrong unit draft size (5 → 3).