Dice of Kalma 1.2. - Pick Your Poison

Hello, wayward souls! The 1.2 "Pick Your Poison" update is finally here!

This massive update adds metaprogression with challenge runs, new skulls, balance adjustments, QoL updates, and much, much more!

Meta progression and challenge runs:

• After winning the game at least once, a new menu opens when the New Game button is pressed in the main menu. This menu houses a progression chart for various challenges that the player can select for their next run.

• Each selected challenge increases the challenge points of the run, and each set of new challenges requires winning the game with a certain amount of challenge points.

• The total score of a run is increased by 15 % for each 5 challenge points.

• Pressing the Play Again button in the stats screen after losing will start a new run with all the same challenges as the lost run.

• The Play Again button of the victory screen now has the text "New Game+" and returns the player to the main menu and immediately opens the challenge selection menu.

New skulls:

• AddedBlank Skullno effects. This skull can be encountered only through some of the new meta progression challenges.

• Ritual Skull: +10 bones / +2 mult / +1 reroll when playing a hand if the sum of the three dice in the middle is divisible by 3.

• Gamer Skull: +15 bones / +3 mult / +2 rerolls. When playing a hand, if the sum of the first and the last dice is equal to hands or rerolls.

• AddedAstronaut Skull+25 bones / +5 mult / +3 rerolls. When starting a new level, if only half or fewer of the granted hands of the previous level were played.

• Mercy Skull: +20 bones / +4 mult / +2 rerolls. After spending the last reroll if there is only one hand left, once per level.

• AdjustedDealer Skull+10 bones / +2 mult / +1 reroll. After a reroll, if the value of the hand was reduced by the reroll, once per hand.

Balance changes:

• Slighly nerfed Bandaged Skull and the yellow version of Archer Skull.

• Slightly buffed Party Skull.

• Increased the base mult and bones of High Die to be on par with Pair.

• Adjusted the difficulty curve to be smoother.

• Reduced all level thresholds by about 10% in order to make the meta progression system more accessible. The previous level thresholds are available as part of one of the new challenges.

• A skull can now be presented only once in an instance of selecting skulls, meaning that the game won’t offer the same skull in multiple colors at once. For example, if a red Executioner Skull is presented, blue and purple Executioner skulls are unobtainable in that skull selection, even when the player uses skull rerolls.

Miscellaneous additions and improvements:

• AddedEight new achievementssix for the new skulls and two that require winning challenge runs.

• The skull listing menu now shows the activation status of skulls with a colored border. Green means that the skull will be activated if the current hand is played. Yellow means a reroll-activated skull has already been activated that turn. Gray means that the skull hasn’t been activated yet or that it won’t activate if the current hand is played.

• The skull listing view in the game end screen has been simplified in order to make “deck sharing” easier. The view now displays all skulls at once, but only their icons without descriptions.

• Changed all singular form instances of the word “dice” to “die” for clarity purposes, even though technically “dice” is also the singular form.

• The part of the death animation where Kalma raises the sword can now be skipped.

• The visualizations for the High Die hand in the hands listing and hand upgrade menus now show dice with both 1 and 6 as both of those numbers are required for the hand.

• All dialogue texts now have a black background in case they are on multiple lines and end up being rendered over Kalma’s skull.

• Reduced the delay before the skull selection window starts accepting input.

• It is now possible to skip score calculation and reroll animations with both Play Hand and Reroll buttons.

• Skull scoring animations can now be skipped.

• The threshold rising animation at the beginning of each level can now be skipped.

• The game now defaults the localization setting to the system language if it is being run for the very first time.

Bugfixes:

• Fixed Party Skull achievement being unachievable on some devices.

• Fixed the blue version of Executioner skull giving 5 too many bones.

• Fixed a bug where the pause menu could be opened while the death animation was starting.

• Fixed a bug where Kalma’s blinking could disrupt eye animations dictated by some dialogues.

• Fixed a bug where the title text of the run end screen could overlap with the "new record" text in some languages.

• Fixed the rendering of centered texts that were fixable. Some centered texts may still appear non-pixel-perfect.

• Fixed the game freezing when loading a run that was saved in the skull selection screen.

• Fixed the game crashing on some devices.