Ascension System + July 2025 Progress Report

Sometimes there are ideas in a game that must subsequently change all other games of the genre in the same direction. Like cross-hairs in shooters (didn't exist in Wolfenstein 3D or the original Doom) or (for better or worse) fast-travel in open-world games.

I thought for sure that after Hades every roguelike game to come after it would adopt its brilliant ascension system. And maybe some of them have, but I have not yet encountered one.

If you haven't played Hades or are unfamiliar with the ascension mechanic in general, let me explain: When you win a run and kill the final boss (or achieve the final objective) in a roguelike game, often you are tasked with doing it again, only now the difficulty has been raised. It's a mechanic I really like as it prolongs the fun you can have with a game, if it is done well. In most games, this difficulty progression is pre-ordained by the developer. Ascension level 1 might make enemies stronger, level 2 adds a health regeneration restriction, level 3 increases the amount of enemies, and so on.

In Hades, you can choose in which ways to make the game more difficult. Each successful run gives you another point to put into one of several options of the "pact of punishment". You can choose to make bosses tougher, enemies more frequent, upgrades more expensive and more. This has a lot of obvious advantages, most of all giving players a choice which challenges they are interested in making more difficult.

So yeah, I intend to blatantly copy this system from Hades and I hope other games will do so as well. While I have already figured out how to incorporate it into the story of Life Altered, I unfortunately cannot show you a screenshot of it, because I haven't coded a single line of it yet. Still hacking away at the first run of the game.

July 2025 Progress Report

I have made a few (but in my opinion significant) visual touches to the UI of the game (oh UI, my nemesis, when will you be satisfied?), most importantly to text readability in the game. Check it out:

I know. This should be obvious, right? It's surprising however how many of these quality of life factors I have taken for granted without really noticing them.

The largest chunk of the month however belonged to systematically testing every element of the game (every skill, every ability, every evolution, every enemy, ...) for bugs, functionality and balance. I feel like many of the game's core mechanics are at least close to finalized, so now is a good time for this kind of testing (if I'd done it earlier I would have fixed stuff that would have become obsolete a month later anyway). This is all in preparation to a demo release. I know, I have talked about it before and have been way off with release date estimates. I have a personal deadline to release the demo in October at the latest, but I need to make sure it's fun to play, it looks presentable and doesn't have any game crashing bugs in it. Ok, back to work.