Devblog: The Remix Update

We've been meaning to write this devblog for a while. The honest reason it took so long is that every time someone sat down to summarise where the game was, somebody else would push a new feature into the build and the summary would be out of date. So we eventually gave up waiting for a quiet moment and decided to just write the dang thing.

Working hard, or hardly working? There's a subtle difference!

In the weeks after Next Fest, Patrik had been tweaking his own private set of game settings, originally just to make the game more optimal for him to test against. Slightly lower enemy speed, a different XP curve, a few other tweaks. We started calling it Patrik's Remix, mostly as a joke. Then everyone playing the game started reaching for it instead of the default settings. After a couple of weeks of this we realised what was happening: Patrik had basically been balancing the actual game while pretending to balance his own little spin off. So we baked the Remix into the main build. It’s now the official “mix”.

Look at all those amphibians, perhaps enjoying roasted marshmallows and a cup of hot cocoa?

One of our testers mentioned how much they loved that the roads gave a speed bonus. Which they didn't. But we figured maybe they should? It was a small tweak that we ended up adding to the game. As Niklas put it during a playtest, you get a "subconscious desire to follow the path." Which works rather neatly, given that's exactly the phrase he used months ago when explaining why he was adding roads in the first place.

Patrik har reworked the visuals for the treasure chests. Sweet.

A bigger piece of feedback from the demo was that players often felt unfairly swarmed by enemies, so we rewrote the wave system. Waves now ramp up rather than slamming in at full force, and the kill threshold to clear a wave is 95% instead of 100% so you don't have to chase down stragglers. Niklas also wrote what we're calling the anti swarm helper. If the crowd system detects you're properly surrounded, the spawner will sometimes carve a small gap on one edge of the screen, just enough to make you notice the opening and dash for it.

[dynamiclink href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/3546610/Wielders_of_the_Essence/"]The Egg is now part of the meta progression. In the demo, meta progression was tied entirely to buildings. Now you also feed the Egg with experience from your runs, and every time it levels up it gives you something back. We're keeping the specifics under wraps for the moment, partly because we want you to find out in the next update of the demo, and partly because we are still figuring out all the details.

Programmer pre-visualization of the egg level up effects. Spectacular stuff.

Lot’s of more stuff happened as well: Like more Wielders and spells, new maps, Synergy effects between troops. But we'll save those for the next post. We are currently hard at work with a new trailer and huge demo update, which both are coming soon. Until then, please wishlist if you haven't already, and drop us a comment with any feedback. We do read them.

/Magnus & Team Lavapotion