Myriad Mayhem · build 21906554 · published
This patch is a smaller one, as development time was limited over the holidays and due to illness — thanks for your patience!
The main focus has been expanding AI behavior for units and buildings. This required improving the underlying ability and unit logic to support it properly. Thankfully, the systems are modular, so they can grow without adding unnecessary complexity — but it was still a fairly extensive addition, as you might have noticed :P. Alongside that, there are various balance tweaks, updates to the new fire spells, a few additional equipment pieces, and general fixes and adjustments.
After this patch, development will slow down a bit as I need to shift more focus toward work outside the game. That said, I still strongly believe in this project. Every hour invested moves it closer to 1.0, and I’ll continue developing it in my spare time. The goal remains the same: bring the game to a polished, balanced 1.0 release and out of Early Access.
Boss is back in business again - Now with two abilities and not just a dull auto-attacking heap of flesh.
Reworked Firebolt:
Added New talent: Firebolt - Infuse
I thought it would be nice to be able to keep the “core-style” of the ability (e.g. classic firebolt or fireball), e.g. if you felt duped when getting the timebomb when you liked Fireball.
And Timebomb is now on the right side instead after Fireball - if I wanted it balanced, it would have to be very low damage(every affected target will deal damage to everyone next to them).
Everkindle is no longer piercing - got too strong.
Reworked Meteor MagmaCore - it will also now use up all your mana to boost its damage & Area size - I thought it matches its theme much better - The wizard consumes all of his mana to summon the largest possible meteor - It gets pretty insane though if you try to get the highest possible max mana - but what the heck, it is fun! (Maybe need a little balancing as well :P)
Added two new equipment - these ones are a bit special compared to most other bland +basic stats - So they probably need some heavy lifting with balancing, but I think it is worth it - the game is made to be fun & experiment with weird builds, not have a perfect 1:1 balanced game.
I know one of them is harsh - but it is added to make more unique playstyles - if so by little this time.
I didn’t notice that the “bug-handling” - gui window was not popping up when encountering an error, so I saw I had accidentally disabled it, so now it is on again, now with the option to let the player risk keep on playing, or try save and then quit.
Casttime abilities like meteor will now cancel if you let go of its ability (e.g. hold to cast) - The idea is that your are the “character”, which is focusing on casting it
Also added a game-setting to toggle this off (to get click once for cast-time abilities, like most MMO games have) - I thought it felt more “immersive”, but I also think it can become irritating / boring, thus the setting was added.
Quickbar overlay (the teal/cyan filter) opacity is reduced 80% -> 50% - I wanted to be able to be even more able to see which ability is behind it.
If you reach / are Max-level, it will say so in Score-screen now.
Volume sliders now move in 5% steps instead of 1% to make adjustments faster and cleaner.
I know the current map is unbalanced with different starting-locations, it was made from start with the idea of only one start location and wanted later regions to be larger - build-slots which are used by allies as well.
I'm thinking of either just setting a hard limit of slots so every region has the same amount of slots, but it becomes even more generic then, which I don’t like. So I have put it aside until I complete a couple more maps (which are on high priority to add) - As I thought that I may learn some better solutions to it rather than have to make a temporary solution. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Poison-dealing dmg buildings & units now deal less direct dmg, and more poison dmg (delayed dmg)
After playing around a little on hardest difficulty, it was too punishing, so two camps out won’t no longer be awakened anymore (still testing it out, what do you think, too much?)
Enemies status effects like poison and chilled now last longer
Swamp barbarians didn’t embrace the power of poison, so more of their damage will come from poison.
Poison & chilled felt kinda bland, it should be more impactful.
The Axethrower tribe got enough of swamps, and joined forces with the frozen barbarians
The main reason was that I think it matches their army composition better (their front-lines are tankier & can have more use of close-quarters range units, compared to the swamp-barbarians that should focus on “hit-n-run”, poison and subterfuge tactics (sneaky n stuff)
They also only had 4 faction specific units compared to 6 units for the swamp-barbarians.
Roughly 33% less enemies as it easily got out of hand, especially if you only met one new camp at a time, then suddenly awakened two or three camps, all of higher tiers!
Not 100% with this one, Maybe the issue is your allies have too few units? - Might go back and forth depending on adding new content to the game.
What do you prefer? I was thinking of maybe keeping the amount, but the “step” when you face a new tier, will not have all of them at a higher tier - that gap is too large. But this was a 5 min fix for now.
Status-effects are more dangerous now though, so less enemies but nastier.
Giants rework: roughly -50% health, new deathsound, and 60% faster Movementspeed
MagicMissile Homing - Now weaker homing-strength & detection-radius, as only getting lvl 1 made it super-easy to hit most missiles, and its huge detection-radius made it feel weird to home in on stuff far away.
Equipment reduced mana-regen on Arolin's Tunic & Crystal staff - too strong. - The tunic also got +1 armour
Firebolt Timebomb duration 2 -> 3 sec - was too instant - Maybe 5 was good? The idea behind it, is to avoid having super-low damage to remain balanced, so its drawback is the delayed damage (which also had friendly fire) - but it felt that delay was negligible - To “any means necessary to win the war”, and it felt fun to make your allies walking timebombs approaching the enemies :P.
There are a handful of smaller ones as well, but I think they won’t be noticeable and only bloat the patch-log.
The wizard is now able to adjust the meteor's trajectory while he is casting it.
Units should now more precisely look in the direction they are interested in, e.g. less moonwalk, and gaze towards the eastern sunrise when on guard duty, and without a target.
Units won’t push other units as much (or at all - is a bit cumbersome to work with the AI-pathfinding tool)
Added a performance-issue-detector - so was able to catch an issue and gain a slight performance boost, and it will also catch introducing performance issues of the same type.
Added support for fade-out sound effects (for those without a good fade-out by default)
So the casting meteor sound is not stopping so abruptly anymore.
Reduced scale on mageTower to make it match the pixelated-style more. - It is a placeholder until a replacement comes.
Reduced Bandits towers size (looked a bit out of place)
I’ve pixelated more elements like the build site (still placeholders), as well as buildings and the Magic Circle. The high-resolution assets didn’t really match the pixel-art style I’m aiming for. It’s far from perfect, but it feels like a step in the right direction.
What do you think—do you prefer this, or the previous high-resolution assets on top of the pixelated terrain? Personally, I’ve never been a big fan of classic JRPGs' art style, which mixes beautiful pixel art with high-res effects or spells. I think it breaks immersion, even though I know a lot of people love that approach (as they keep doing it, or maybe it is a cost-issue?).
Also changed a bunch of other minor things, but they are so small fixes/tweaks like talent-tree’s lines are a bit brighter, so won’t go over them.
I really appreciate any help in tracking them down! If you experience one of these issues, please share the details of when it occurs, especially the steps you took and any patterns you noticed (for example, it happens when doing A after B). Your feedback helps me work toward a bug-free game. - Or best of all, when it happens and you get the error-window, please send the log-file (more info at Discord) - It will usually point right away where the issue is.
I have found and fixed at least one place where one of these bugs enters. But in the worst case, there were even more places the bug sneaks in that I have missed, so maybe a bit misleading with "Bug fixes".
Status-effects (poison, burning, etc.) visual effect was removed before the target started rotting or dissolving.
One instance (not sure if last) fixed with status effects not always removed (Damn i hate float precision error, e.g. 1.0 - 1.0 could become 0.0000016, which I fixed all existing ones (I keep on forgetting that nasty one, thinking of making my own “float” made of two integers to get correct values - but feels like overkill)
Music not queueing next soundtrack if you have the game out of focus (it stopped the timer)
This was an old Unity version issue, so I had that simple solution to fix a larger music-player issue, at the cost of this delayed queue if the game was out of focus.
Firebolt Timebomb:
I missed updating the visual effect with new time - I thought the visual effect was coupled to the status effects duration, my bad.
There was a race-condition (code), which caused the trigger to not happen (no explosion, no damage dealt, etc).
Abilities with status effects with friendly fire, like Meteor with Emberstrike ignored friendly fire-value.
ChainLightning SplitOnHit didn’t show correct value in its talent description.
Beam Chargeup didn’t reset its current beam-rank correctly when stopped using it
Also made it show roman numbers instead of Hindu-Arabic numerals - looks nicer with lower values.
It also shows first rank when using it now as well (from only showing rank > 1 before).
Berserker going berserk (red hue-filter) and dying - when new berserk respawn, I use pooling == same “object”, and missed to restore colour-filter.
When Chain Lightning jumped off-screen, it would animate its bounce when you get it on screen again (off-screen animation was turned off - the default value).
Some generated map-layouts crashed the game - I found one place causing the issue, hopefully it was the only place.
MagicCircle Aegis - the new AI sometimes sneaks inside, even if they shouldn’t be able to.
When you restart multiple matches after each other the game crashes, the culprit is the Pathfinding AI tool the game uses - Thanks to the community for finding and reporting it. Will try get hold of the author to see if he knows a fix
These are known issues that I haven’t been able to reproduce. I’m sorry if you’re still encountering them. Since I believe these bugs aren’t critical or really hard to reproduce, I have set them aside for now but I am keeping an eye open for them to identify the conditions under which they occur.
Chain Lightning: Doesn't always jump to the next target in the vicinity.
If you're slowed by a chill effect, the blue visual effect sometimes doesn't disappear.
Upgrades in progress don't always cancel when the building is destroyed.
The new AI version has a large impact on performance - will look into it if it gets out of hand (most noticeable with a lot of units, e.g. with the pack of the black wargs).