It’s been a minute but we’ve been busy and have a lot to highlight for this update. New mechanics, polish, fixes, and balance changes, along with a new unlockable music track.
In order to continue making the cave system how we envisioned it we had to go back and polish up a few things we added a while back.
The boulders/mounds and their lighting/reveal systems needed a little work, and along with that came some polish to how we hide and reveal the known map as you unlock new areas.
It’s been a long time coming, but we finally got around to organizing the next few “Mystery Box” style skills and the mechanics of how the player receives their respective “keys”.
We needed an upgrade to the forge and some new craftables for use in and out of the cave as well.
Once you find your way in you’ll be met with many challenges in the ever shifting darkness that will test your skills, your ingenuity, and at times your pockets. To explore the cave you will need to come prepared, but with greater challenge comes greater rewards. As you make your way through the cave you will certainly find some foes to block your path, but you will also have the opportunity to make some lifelong friends that might be able to assist you in your explorations, even through ascensions. A great treasure awaits those who can survive the journey through the cave.
We added some more states to the skill tree visual styling to help see and read things a little easier as you make your way through ascensions. Already purchased skills now have their own overlay so you’re not endlessly searching for the one skill you missed on your way to ascending. The dark upgradable skills also have a new background once you have the ability to purchase them.
Along with the new music track from our friend Stephen Garza we added a little detail we 100% lifted from the makers of a little game called Slay the Spire 2. If you haven’t heard of it (how?) you should do yourself a favor and familiarize yourself with it. Little details can highlight how much a team cares about a game, and often I think it’s hard to even notice some of the polish teams like the one at Slay the Spire add to their games. We noticed in our time slaying said spire (no, that’s totally not why it took us two months to get this update out) that when you tab out of the game the audio fades out instead of cutting away like basically every other software we’ve ever used, and we had no choice but to completely rip off these master game creators and add audio fading when tabbing out to our game as well. Two thumbs up to whoever thought of this sickeningly slick detail, truly, chef’s kiss.
Some particles now have their own behaviors in the way they move through the world. Once we have everything in place we want to do much more juice like this.
In an attempt to speed up the early game and get our players to the new stuff asap, we once again have lowered costs of normal skills, greatly lowered costs of dark skills, sped up the growth speed of Tree of Life and slowed its withering phase. Whisps now grow faster and the particle types it absorbs gives different amounts of growth. Dark encroachment now encroaches faster and gains rewards quicker. The player takes less time to recover from injuries and we lowered the chance of rolling an “obstacle” like spiders or falling rocks from chaos events. Also if you do roll an obstacle, we raised rewards like getting gold from killing the spider and iron from breaking rocks. More balance changes are surely coming as we shore up the cave and move on to our other plans (see the last “Roadmap-ish” post for more details).
Skill button icon art fixes
Opening backpack and/or compendium now clears all related notifications
New Notifications and compendium entries with mechanic explanations and other info
Added ability to disable notifications
Game now focuses on skills that were previously hidden and newly unlocked (Mystery Box, Map, Nest)
Fixed some icon spacing issues in purchase buttons
Implemented new multiple and random currency costs for skills and cave challenges
Now possible to catch sticks while fishing
Chance for multiple sticks when pruning limb from tree of life
Change focus when mystery box skills and important upgrades are revealed
More compendium entries with mechanic explanations
Backpack icon shows up in player HUD if a new item is acquired and goes away on opening backpack
Mouse movement while digging with pick or shovel now limited to avoid boulder or mound not finishing digging animation
Fixed mouse sometimes being hidden behind certain windows
Fixed Forge lighting and progress bar getting stuck across ascensions
Implemented a “Disable Notifications” options in compendium
Digging and mining SFX (SFX will most likely be more of a focus during polishing of he finished game)
Fixed bug with fruit stand costing 0 and now just shows how many fruit you need to be able to sell. Now also shows how much gold and dark players will receive when selling.
Fixed background music bug that made it so only one unlocked song would play during an ascension
Fixed a bug where whisps become unclickable
Dark will now drop during encroaching darkness buildup if you have idle tree dark upgrade
Fixed bug where opening sigil editor breaks mouse collector
Fixed possibly long standing tree of life bug that caused withering to possibly crash the game. Also fixed bug where pruning the tree sometimes having a cost.
Fixed bugs with tree of life showing wrong withering/growth times.
Fixed bug related to withering tree of life where empty nodes would spawn on restart