July Progress Update

Welcome to the July Progress Update! First of all: thank you to everyone who visited our store page, downloaded the demo, Wishlisted the full release, and hung out on our Next Fest stream! We've seen a lot of activity, and we would cordially invite you to hang out as we barrel through the summer here and keep working on Slayers!

On that note, this month has been a huge one for the full release. Not necessarily because of any additions, but due to us going back and polishing up the overall experience. We've taken note of both people's feedback - "enemies too grindy", "too easy to get overwhelmed", "scaling too sharp", etc. - and our own experience and we said "yeah, probably". So this month, we focused a lot on balance and gameplay flow, especially since we can test the difficulty curve across the entire game, as opposed to when the game "ends" at Abzul-Thurak. Now, enemies won't spawn in all at once, the Overlord won't be a jerk and spawn 20 enemies at once, and there's more leeway for taking your time to figure things out, as opposed to being forced into a speedrun to keep up. Loops will also act differently - while the Overlord will still follow similar spawning behaviors, the beginning of each Loop will be less of a smack in the face than before. Finally, we've put the numbers (HP, damage, cost, stonks, etc.) for enemies through our state-of-the-art Babbage Difference Engine and tried to smooth out their base statistics to offer a more natural progression of base difficulty.

We also focused on Steam Achievements, so regardless of difficulty concerns, you can still get at least a small sense of pride and accomplishment.

In-Progress

• Art for boss in Area 3A

• Art for boss in Area 4B

• Art for the final characters

• New backgrounds for Areas

• Additions to the Archives

Major Additions

• Unlock system (!)

• Steam achievements (!!)

• Title screen changes with unlocks

• Area and enemy art is complete for Area 4B

Minor Additions and Improvements

• Enemy costs for spawning have been tightened

• The Overlord has a bit more nuanced approach to spawning enemies during Loops

• Enemy HP and HP scaling have been reduced

• Marcus now gains a small amount of Armor when landing his close-range hit

• Damage numbers now have a bit more flair

• Massive optimization improvements thanks to scrubbing the floors, among other things

• Enemies no longer make it look like debris are laying flat on the ground

• Abzul-Thurak's pylons now take less time to charge

• Divine Arrow now summons a rain of arrows on hit, as opposed to shooting a projectile

• Mortar shots now need to be closer to the ground to hit the player

• Added advanced fish AI

• Control displays now show the last control method you used (keyboard or gamepad)

• Rumble support for gamepads

• More item lore

• Piercing shots have been overhauled to avoid "skipped" shots

• Minor healing tweaks

If you're still alive after scaling that wall of text, be sure keep an eye on our Twitter and Discord server for teasers, announcements, and more as development continues.

Happy Slaying!