[Beta] 2022.04.21 - Codex Revamp

(No new floors, just some new art.)

Beta

This is a continuation of the long-running beta branch. You can opt into these changes from the Betas section of the game's properties in your Steam library.

I'm sorry. I know, it hasn't been updated in nearly three years--I can't even bring myself to check how long it's been since the last standard release. It's terrifying.

The good news is that this update represents the last chunk of changes I expect to include in this beta phase before standardizing the branch. I will allow some time to gather feedback, make a few more improvements (e.g., a few tooltips still require updating, balance may need tweaking) and fixes. There'll likely be a minor release or two to address any issues, and then I plan to push these changes out to everyone.

Codex

The biggest changes in this release revolve around the in-game codex, which has received a complete face-lift.

This was partly necessitated by a move away from the game's tiniest fonts, which have been completely eliminated. The still-small-but-hopefully-more-legible outlined font has also been adjusted to have generally larger lower-case characters. The various icons used to represent almost everything have also gained an entire pixel in height, and maybe that will help with readability, too.

There's definitely still room for improvement, and on many pages, you can see there's a fair amount of unused real-estate, so I hope to maybe include session stats, fold-out floor trees, or other interesting elements that are a bit more possible now.

Other Changes

The rest of the changelog is all over the place. There were a bunch of random art and flavor updates, and several important fixes (4K and controller issues) that are long overdue. Some floor prerequisites changed, new traits were added, and UI behavior and effects were altered in places. My notes say that at some point in the last three years, I fixed this little corner issue:

And I had completely forgotten about it. Do you see it? Maybe it's unnoticeable, but I think it's awesome, and I'm sorry I made everyone wait so long for it.

Changelog

Additions:

• New Codex

• New traits: Fey (elves, dark elves, sprites, gnomes), Giantblood (ogres, trolls, half-giants, giant rats/spiders), Earthly (humans, dwarves), and Flora (essentially unused so far)--I'm setting up these groups for more future effects

Changes:

• The two tiniest fonts in the game (a plain single-pixel font, and a sort of scrawly handwritten variant) have been completely removed

• The game's standard font and its double-resolution variant have both been modified to have taller lower-case characters and sometimes wider characters where the fonts felt overly compressed

• Nearly all icons have gained a pixel in height, to bring them in line with the font height

• Several pieces of floor art have been altered or improved; the most significant is probably the Undercroft

• When resources were very low with a large cap, the meter could appear empty, but now you will always see at least a sliver when you have some of a given resource

• Removed references to the heroes' motive system, which still technically exists, but is very nebulous and will eventually be phased out

• Improved dump details

• A lot of flavor text updates

• Renamed Coffers to "Treacherous Treasury" and adjusted Belfry to "Bellowing Belfry"

• If polling for new controllers takes too long, controller support will be automatically disabled to prevent the game from hanging every time it looks for controllers

• Simplified floor requirements; a floor can have no more than two prerequisites and can have no alternative prerequisites. The latter change results in some floors no longer being accessible to some paths: Belfry, Undercroft, Guildhall, Rookery, and Attic are most impacted.

• Battle Balm damage buff only applies to allied melee units now

• Giant Rat gained another point of agility

• Some Hoard effects, such as bobbing items or the various sparkles that erupt from collected tiles, are no longer affected by pausing

Fixes:

• Pixel scaling was capped at 4x, which meant the game did not scale well to 4K displays; now theoretically extends to 64x

• Controller disablement via the game's advanced config file wasn't working as expected

• Several character coloration and animation issues: elf bard jank, minotaur's axe, brood sister's legs, etc.

• Film grain effect doesn't pause in menus

• Punji no longer lists a defensive save in its description (this mechanic was removed in a previous beta update)

• "Bad color" exception could occur when player names included bracketed words

• XBox One controllers that didn't contain "One" in their reported name would use the wrong mapping

• Option menu bars weren't all using the same pattern

• Outlines on the hoard were missing a corner pixel on "L"-shaped regions

• Several scrolling/grabbing issues involving the character/floor buttons or trying to scroll on the surface level--just trying to make things feel more intuitive here

• The cycling arrows that appear on the Hoard would become faster or slower based on how many instances of the effect were in play