Bascially 1.0: Weekly Update #10

Weekly Update

Hello! Welcome to our Tenth Weekly Update!

We are just seven days out from the August 13th 1.0 date! Woohoo!

There's four big changes pushing this game to its final polished form: Resistances, New Time System to replace Ticks, Enhancement System for Crafting, and a How to Play tab in the Start Menu.

Woohoo!

NEW FEATURES

The focus this update is time, type matchups, and finishing the polish passes I flagged last week. There are three headline changes.

The world now runs on a real calendar. Every step you take advances an in game clock, and the game tells you the time and date.

Combat gained RESISTANCE, sitting between "weak to" and "immune to." Previously an enemy either took extra damage from a type or took none at all. Now we have a more realistic middle ground.

The How to Play guide I promised last update is in, browsable from the main menu.

The rest is quality of life, crafting fixes, and a fairly long list of defensive abilities that have been reworked for better visibility.

The In Game Calendar

• The map now shows the time and date next to your coordinates. It starts at 12:00 on the 13th of August, Year 1.

• Every step is five minutes. Twelve steps make an hour, and 288 make a day. Months are thirty days and years are twelve months, running August, Avior, Velin, Kranak, Sauronelle, Atritudo, Albitudo, Licin, Vespar, Tuvon, Scaena, Fluxia.

• Waiting with Z advances it too. I hope this all makes time feel more real.

• Everything the world used to measure in turns is now told to you in hours and days. A mercenary contract is "7 days," a caravan arrives "within the next 4 hours," a destroyed dungeon repopulates in "7 days."

• The intervals themselves were retuned to land on clean values while I was in there. Mercenary contracts went from roughly a day and a half to a full 7 days for the same gold, and they now warn you a day before expiry instead of about an hour. Autosave moved to once a week, and a purged dungeon takes considerably longer to come back at a week as well.

Resistance

• A new middle ground between weakness and immunity. Each stack of resistance cuts that damage type by 20%, up to four stacks for a maximum of 80%. Resistance can never fully block a hit. Only immunity does that.

• 140 of the game's 212 enemies now resist something, mostly drawn from what they are. Undead resist necrotic and edged weapons, constructs ignore rot and mind magic, elementals-cut, giants resist blunt and cold, etc.

• An enemy themed around an element now resists that element, so a frost wolf is harder to kill with cold than with anything else.

• The 15 zone bosses, the 4 corner bosses, Malachar and Dolus Malus previously had no type matchups at all and quietly took normal damage from everything. They all have proper weaknesses, resistances and immunities now.

• The Monster Grimoire lists all three, and it is now accurate. It used to only report what an enemy declared about itself, so a Skeleton never showed the solar weakness it gets from being undead. That is fixed for every entry, including old saves.

Warding Etchings

• Ten new armour crafting recipes, one for every elemental type, plus a capstone. Emberward, Frostward, Stormward, Venomward, Blightward, Sunshade, Mirefoil, Hushward, Mindward, Runeward, and Dragonhide for double fire resistance.

• These are the first way for YOU to gain resistance. Etch a piece and it turns aside 20% of that damage type. Wear two pieces warded to the same element and it stacks.

• Companions get it too, from the same etched gear.

• They drop like any other recipe, tiers 3 through 7, from kills and dungeon caches. None are boss locked.

• An etched piece is renamed so you can actually find it. "Iron Helmet (Venomward)" sits in your pack as its own entry, so six differently warded helmets are six separate lines instead of one indistinguishable stack.

• A ward gives resistance and nothing else. A piece is either warded or upgraded(tempered), never both. And only one ward can be on an item at once, putting a ward on a piece with an existing ward will replace it.

How to Play

• Browsable from the main menu, as promised last update. Its not very wordy and should be a pretty clean way for new players to learn the game.

• The map page is color coded to match the actual map, so the words yellow, orange and cyan appear in those colors and the example cells are tinted the way you will really see them.

• It also now explains things the game never told you: that mountains and water block you unless you find a boat or something that flies, how merges are actually discovered, that you learn one of three abilities every two class levels, that you can only have nine abilities prepared at once, etc.

Balance Changes

• Companions can now read ability tomes.

• Boss and patrol special moves now carry a damage type and go through the full defense path. A dragon's fire breath used to ignore fire resistance entirely. It no longer does.

• Thorns abilities (Plague Aura, Entropy Field, Eternal Void) were reworked from a vague "reflect" into a proper retaliation. They now bite back for a share of the blow aimed at you, including the attacker's ability multiplier, and the bite is reduced by the attacker's own defense. They fire even when your wards absorbed the hit completely, because the blow still landed on you. Only a clean dodge skips them.

• Three new abilities tied to skill evolutions: Savage Chop for axes, Corpse Light for necrotic magic, and Gravity Well for force magic.

Bug Fixes

• Inferno is back to its proper tier. The master fire magic skill was rewarding you with a much weaker version.

• Mana Burn works again. It was being silently overwritten by an unrelated fire spell that happened to share its name, which meant the mana drain mechanic had no usable ability at all. The fire spell is now Searing Bolt.

• Crafting upgrades applied to every copy of an item. Tempering one of your 24 Iron Daggers upgraded all 24. Upgrades now rename the piece they are worked into, so "Iron Dagger (+4 Atk)" is its own item and the other 23 are untouched. Upgrades also stack additively on the same piece, and the listed stat shows the true total including the upgrade.

• Iron Shell and every other blocking ability only worked against basic attacks. The moment a boss used an actual ability, Iron Shell, magic barriers and damage reduction were all bypassed. This is why a boss could say it did 14 damage through a 20 point block and you would still lose HP. All of it now applies to every source of damage.

• Iron Shell also now lasts the two turns it always claimed to, rather than being spent after two hits.

• Counter Stance and thorns had the same problem and only fired against basic attacks. Both work against everything now.

• Eleven abilities were defined twice in the game data, meaning one version of each was silently discarded. All resolved.

• An enemy killed by thorns or by its own confusion paid out nothing, no XP, no gold, no loot, and its body stayed standing on the world map afterwards. Thats fixed now.

• Void Ward claimed to absorb "200 magic damage each turn." It actually absorbs 200 of any damage type, per hit, permanently. Description corrected.

• Fixed several status effects being indistinguishable in the combat display, since burning and bleeding shared a color, as did frostbite and frozen, and shocked and stunned.

• Equipment menus no longer pile up on top of each other when you redraw them, and equipped gear is hidden from sell menus properly.

• Cleaned up book and item descriptions, removed the rarity stars from books, and one off notes and letters now read their own text instead of saying the pages are blank.

Future Plans

No major plans are expected between now and 1.0 just one last final layer of polish and updating the steam page.

Linux and Mac builds are being set up. They will likely be out in a bit. I've been having issues getting them onto steam as I don't have an actual Mac or Linux OS just VMs, but I believe I'm working towards a solution!

Please let me know if you have an idea for the game or if you run into any bugs. The Iron Shell report from last week turned into about six connected fixes and the suggestion to add time was a really easy addition that I think makes the game feel a lot more real. Please keep coming with the feedback =)

Thanks for playing!

-Lansdolli