Visual Polish, Threat Tooltips, and a Complete Difficulty Overhaul v.0.12.0

It's been a busy few weeks. Most of the work this sprint was polish and systems I'd been putting off, VFX that were half-finished, animations that existed but weren't wired up, and the difficulty system which had been sitting at 5 levels for way too long. Here's everything that changed:

Changes

• Re-added blood spatter VFX, and added new armour sparks on hurt and block animations for both players and enemies. These were stripped out at some point during refactoring and I finally got around to putting them back properly.

• Enemies now have Threat threshold up and down animations, these were actually built weeks ago but weren't linked in the enemy scene. They have SFX now too. Steam post image

• The card tooltip formatter now shows Threat actives with a glowing effect (so you'll see "At 10+ Threat:" highlighted properly), and I've added the "Threat" keyword itself to the formatter so it's colour-coded in tooltips and the rules explanation shows on hover.

• Card visuals and tooltips now update keyword and status colours dynamically, with bold formatting for better readability at a glance.

• Added a custom mouse cursor with state-based animations, hovering over UI, waiting, dragging all have their own anims now.

• The AnimationComponent now has ripple shader effects: a light ripple on hover and a larger one on click. Small thing but it makes the UI feel a lot more alive.

• Made some significant improvements to the Ancient map chase, new VFX and SFX, more aggressive animations, and rising blob particles to sell the Ancient's corruption.

• Fixed the event room pool logic so events are removed from the array after each pick and only re-added once the pool is empty. This was causing the same event to show up back-to-back which felt boring.

• Overhauled the difficulty system from 5 levels to 15. This is the big one. The old system didn't have enough granularity, the jump between levels was too sharp and new players were getting hit hard while experienced players didn't feel enough pressure at the top end. The new 15-level range gives much more room to tune. The early levels are much more forgiving now, and the upper end escalates properly. Here's roughly how the layers stack as difficulty climbs: enemy cards per turn scales (1/2/3 across the range), hand size changes at Upside 9 (+1 draw) and Downside 6 (-1 draw), gold drops get a 1.25x multiplier at Upside 8, shop prices go up 1.25x at Downside 3, card choice rewards are reduced at Downside 4, card removal is locked out at Downside 8. From D6 the Black Colour deck cards get amplified negative effects. D7+ introduces enemy first strike (50% chance, guaranteed from D8). D8+ adds extra starter attacks to your opening deck. D9+ injects a Weakness card into your draw pile each battle. D12+ introduces downside pickers and starts trimming enemy base decks. D14+ applies a permanent -25% damage dealt modifier to the player. Character select now has a dropdown instead of the old buttons, and there's a difficulty label with a tooltip that explains every stacked effect at a glance. Steam post image

• Enemy first strike now only activates on the first turn of combat. Players get a status notification so it's visible when it's in play.

• Player cards now play their block effects as part of their instant effect function, which makes blocking feel more immediate. (this is a big change for the basic gameplay, but was necessary with the recent first strike addition).

• Updated the card update logic in hand, played cards, and enemy played cards, tooltips now update values without showing the tooltip unnecessarily, which was causing the odd mid-battle popup and blocking things visually.

• Set up signals in hand, played cards, and enemy played cards to fire when child order changes, so UI elements update without blocking the battle loop. Also added a [c]status_applied[/c] signal in events for the same reason.

• Overhauled the hitstop and slow-motion system. It now uses a new ScreenEffects canvas layer that fires alongside the slow-mo keyframes: white screen flash, chromatic aberration, and a camera shake all trigger together during hit stops. Previously the screen shaker wasn't processing during hitstop at all, I fixed that too, Combat feels a lot more impactful now imo. Steam post image

• Updated all player and enemy animations to use the new slow-mo and hitstop setup. Player instant animations are also quicker now so they don't hold up the turn order as much.

• Created a Combat Animation Preview test scene from the old RD rest scene, for easier animation tweaking going forward. Started adding enemies to it too.

Bugfixes

• Fixed the TimeSpeedManager resetting speed incorrectly when cards were played. This was causing the game to feel inconsistently paced mid-combat.

• Fixed the end turn button being clickable at the start of battle before the hand was drawn — this was messing up turn order.

• Fixed a visual bug where the map would show a blank paper background when loading an existing run.

• Fixed the custom cursor dragging state, it now applies rotation correctly before being removed from the scene tree.

• Fixed slow motion not working correctly during hitstop, hit stops were resetting the speed to the global speed and overriding the slow-mo effect.

• Fixed screen shaker not processing during hitstop.

• Fixed enemy actions being set incorrectly on D1.

• Fixed Umbral Fog and Rampage Sigil Black cards, shielding effect was redundant, changed to reduce/strip block gained through instant effects.

Balancing

• The difficulty overhaul is still a work in progress, the foundation and hooks are in place but I'm still testing to make sure all 15 levels behave as intended. D12+ downside pickers are working, card choice penalties scale with difficulty, and the overall curve feels much better than before. Will keep tuning.

• Adjusted enemy first strike so it's only a factor on the opening turn, which gives players clearer information to make decisions with.

As always, the demo is live on Steam if you want to see where things are at:

Hunters Hand

What do you think of the difficulty overhaul direction? I'm still not sure the top-end penalties are too aggressive, or impossible even. I'd love to hear from anyone who's played into the higher difficulties.

Dan