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Steam News29 July 20241y ago

Demo Update 0.2.1 - The Challenge Update and What's Next

Patch Notes: Challenges: Challenges are a new way to increase the difficulty of the game. They mixed and matched or played one at a time.

Full notes

Full Snowbound: Dead of Winter update

Read the full published notes in a cleaner layout. The original post stays linked below.

What changed

4 fixes2 additions5 changes2 removals
  • Events
  • Balance
  • Gameplay
  • Fixes
  • UI and audio
changedChallenges: Challenges are a new way to increase the difficulty of the game. They mixed and matched or played one at a time. Each available level has its own set of challenges, and completing all of them (on their own or together) will award you with a gold star for that level. Additionally, challenges will increase your sap reward, and your highest challenge difficulty (the cumulative difficulty value of all active challenges) will now be saved as a high score.
changedBalance Changes:
removedPlant food has been removed- Now you will earn experience for the witheroot tree by killing enemies. Each night you'll see how much experience you earned. While I liked the old system in concept, I felt as though it wasn't very clear mechanically and was a bit tedious to work with. If you want to earn more experience faster, you can try increasing the pollution so more enemies spawn,
changedLevel difficulty adjustments - While testing I realized that the original level requirements caused the game to drag on for too long while not really increasing difficulty, so I decreased the costs to leave for each level. The addition of challenges should make up for it.
addedModifiers - Currently modifiers have been temporarily removed from the game. Originally I was also going to include a new feature giving small rewards each day, which would include modifiers, but I decided to remove this last minute because it got in the way of the gameplay experience. Modifiers will likely return but I need to figure out how to integrate them better into gameplay first.
fixedFixed bug where tutorial would break if plots were watered too quickly

Snowbound: Dead of Winter changes

changedChallenges: Challenges are a new way to increase the difficulty of the game. They mixed and matched or played one at a time. Each available level has its own set of challenges, and completing all of them (on their own or together) will award you with a gold star for that level. Additionally, challenges will increase your sap reward, and your highest challenge difficulty (the cumulative difficulty value of all active challenges) will now be saved as a high score.
changedBalance Changes:
removedPlant food has been removed- Now you will earn experience for the witheroot tree by killing enemies. Each night you'll see how much experience you earned. While I liked the old system in concept, I felt as though it wasn't very clear mechanically and was a bit tedious to work with. If you want to earn more experience faster, you can try increasing the pollution so more enemies spawn,
changedLevel difficulty adjustments - While testing I realized that the original level requirements caused the game to drag on for too long while not really increasing difficulty, so I decreased the costs to leave for each level. The addition of challenges should make up for it.
addedModifiers - Currently modifiers have been temporarily removed from the game. Originally I was also going to include a new feature giving small rewards each day, which would include modifiers, but I decided to remove this last minute because it got in the way of the gameplay experience. Modifiers will likely return but I need to figure out how to integrate them better into gameplay first.

Patch Notes:

Challenges: Challenges are a new way to increase the difficulty of the game. They mixed and matched or played one at a time. Each available level has its own set of challenges, and completing all of them (on their own or together) will award you with a gold star for that level. Additionally, challenges will increase your sap reward, and your highest challenge difficulty (the cumulative difficulty value of all active challenges) will now be saved as a high score.

Balance Changes:

  • Plant food has been removed- Now you will earn experience for the witheroot tree by killing enemies. Each night you'll see how much experience you earned. While I liked the old system in concept, I felt as though it wasn't very clear mechanically and was a bit tedious to work with. If you want to earn more experience faster, you can try increasing the pollution so more enemies spawn,

  • Level difficulty adjustments - While testing I realized that the original level requirements caused the game to drag on for too long while not really increasing difficulty, so I decreased the costs to leave for each level. The addition of challenges should make up for it.

  • Modifiers - Currently modifiers have been temporarily removed from the game. Originally I was also going to include a new feature giving small rewards each day, which would include modifiers, but I decided to remove this last minute because it got in the way of the gameplay experience. Modifiers will likely return but I need to figure out how to integrate them better into gameplay first.

Fixes:

  • Fixed bug where tutorial would break if plots were watered too quickly

  • Fixed bug where mouse would disappear while tutorial popups are open

  • Fixed bug where night tutorial wouldn't go away after being completed

  • Fixed some minor UI bugs for the level selector

What's Next: Currently I have a good amount of updates planned before launch, some of which will also affect the demo. I can't be sure about which order they'll come out in but here's some confirmed future updates:

  • Ui update for upgrades screen (likely next)

  • Fishing

  • Defense QoL (move and destroy traps/turrets)

  • Building QoL (move and remove buildings)

  • More enemies/enemy variation

Some of these updates will effect the demo, but from here there's going to be a lot of content work for the main game which won't reach the demo. I'll likely still post updates about it regardless so you all know what's going on. Enjoy the new update!

Source

Steam News / 29 July 2024

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