Tower of Kalemonvo
Unique Patch of Revisiting
Hello gamers,
As promised, here is the second half of the spring cleaning patch, as well as a major content patch!
In early May, I submitted ToK to a demo day event, where I got a lot of feedback and playtesting. The testers uncovered a lot of bugs - my favorite being the "Max HP/Mana capped at weird numbers and unable to change". It took me an uncomfortably long period of time to discover that this only occurred if you've died and restarted from the Menu. Oops.
Those players also had a lot of suggestions, such as some ability to see enemy hitpoints (I didn't want any healthbars), and some more combat options for melee builds. Both of those things got addressed, as well as many other ideas. Here's the full changelog:
-Added blood to all non-skeleton enemies, which will change their visuals to display their current health. The bloodier the character, the less health they've got!
-Added the Combat Arts page - a sort of spellcasting option for melee fighters. Open it up using the "A" key, which will then display your options based on your equipment and stats. There are now only 6 skills: 3 for the bow, 2 for shields and one for two-handed weapons (0 for one-handed!) Ideally, all of those weapon types will have at least 6 skills each. I am slowly working with new skills - but this is just an draft to see how the idea works. The main inspiration is a MOBA/DotA design, where you can invoke a skill at any time with the WERTYU keys. No need to have them equipped like spells do - your only requirements are your equipment and if you have the stats to use them.
-Reintroduced unique items! There are 5 of them in the game and spawn like magic items do, although rarely. They are: a sword, a heavy mace, a crossbow, a shield, and gloves. Most have a unique modifier not seen anywhere else- but you'll have to find them yourself to see. Writing this, I realized I didn't try putting them in the Golden Goblin. I'm pretty sure it wont take any of those new modifiers into consideration, but that will be something for the next patch. I can already imagine the wonky item combinations you could craft...
cool crossbow!
-Fixed Transparency shaders being too bright for certain walls, making them fading in/out very obvious and ugly
-Added a fade animation to walls when they fade in and out, where they will do so gradually instead of it being an instant effect.
-Changes to the Summon Snake spell - you can have multiple and they last forever. Improved their AI a bit, but still needs work. Also has a death animation now instead of just disappearing.
-Fixed all Bloodguard animations. He should be buttery smooth now.
-Reduced room count in early levels, but increased them in later levels.
-Added several new rooms, mostly in Lower Dungeons 2 and Breeding Grounds
-Breeding grounds will be quite large on average now
-Improved several Player animations
-Added Options to main menu, including resolution/sound settings. Options are saved after exiting the game
-Added an Introduction button in the main menu, which will display some story text. More story coming now that the foundations are settled.
-Added a 'Main Menu' button to return you there during gameplay. Terminates your current run
-Fixed the ability to push around all the Bug enemies. They now stand their ground.
-Minor saving menu corrections to prevent player griefing themselves
-Enemies react to receiving damage from outside their line of sight, and will search for the source.
-Fixed various enemy animation loop issues
-Fixed main menu resolution on lower resolution systems
-Performance update for lower end systems. Won't be buttery smooth, but it's about a 30FPS increase on average
-Fixed teleportation issues on The Burrows
-More things now blow up barrels
-UI changes to prevent minor issues, like the Mana orb being above the Inventory screen
-Fixed issues with the UI buttons sometimes messing up
-Fixed some movement issues for the Player when attacking with bows under certain conditions
-New art for several items
-Fixed hundreds of minor bugs
As always, this is the first iteration of this build. I'll probably release 3 or 4 hotfix patches that will resolve whatever issues crop up.
While this one has a lot of new features, I always advocate for returning players to wait until there are new areas/biomes before playing again. So, if you've played the last version, feel free to wait for the next patch. Even if the Breeding Grounds were expanded, it did not introduce any new enemies or items.
Should you have any questions, ideas, bug reports or hatemail, you can always reach me in the comments here, or on twitter @kalemonvo
Thanks for reading!
Comments
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Played through the game again and I'm glad to see it improving.
Blob shadows really made the game look better and I'm glad you implemented them.
Wounds on enemies is a good health bar substitute. As for skeletal enemies, you could give them more armor pieces and make them fall off as they take damage. Skeletal mages could get their robes more torn and flying skulls could get more cracked.
Didn't finish the entire playthrough this time, since I got rekt in the skeleton pit, where some of the balance problems became apparent.
Early in the run, I got really lucky and found life leech bow and a ring. First problem is how overpowered ranged weapons are. Most enemies are slower, or have same speed as the player so taking care of them is really easy. Dodging projectiles is also not that difficult, except for the arrows since the game is pretty dark and they are hard to see. Plus some enemies and even bosses got stunlocked by my arrows and couldn't really do anything to me. Combine that with health leaching and I was pretty much unstopable. Then came the skeleton pit and I found a unique sword in the chest that had also life leech. I picked up some magic shield and tried killing something as a warrior again and I got killed really quickly.
My stats might have been a problem, but a bow has very obvious advantage over melee right now. Most straight forward fix would be introducing limited arrows, but that would be quite hard to balance drop wise. Or you can try giving player a "magic" quiver that has about 10 arrows and they regenerate slowly.
The best option though is going to be sticking with combat arts. I'm sure as you develop them and add more of them, melee will become stronger and more comparable to ranged weapons.
As for combat arts, here is a little tip. If you want to stick with the WERTYU keys, please make sure the game recognizes the active keyboard layout (Or allow us to rebind those keys). Most keyboards outside of english speaking countries have Y bellow the A key instead of Z, which can mess things up.
One thing that slightly bothers me (many games actualy do this for some reason) is the "press ENTER to start". Nothing againts the screen itself. It is much better than just spawning and getting attacked while I'm doing something else. It's the "enter" key that bothers me. The game is played with mouse and left side of the keyboard. Enter is quite far from there. Spacebar or simply mouse click would be much better keys for that since I don't really have to move my hand from the optimal keyboard position or from the mouse. Just a minor gripe.
Lastly, sound. I think I talked about this the last time, but adding sound effects for opening and closing inventory screen, spell book or minimap might improve the general feeling the game has. Same goes for sound effects of droping items. I missed several item drops since I had the outlines disabled and adding some kind of sound effect that plays when item drops would be of great help.
As for bugs, I found only one. On second level, the automap didn't draw some parts correctly.
I think that's all. I enjoyed plaing this game again and I think it is going the right way. Keep it up!
Whoa, you work fast!
Thanks for another detailed review. I am very glad that you were willing to play through it again, and took the time to write a review. That alone tells me that the game is interesting enough to warrant playing it more than once.
To address your feedback, firstly I agree with everything you've mentioned.
The balance is all over the place, mostly since the math I use to determine the damage values the player will take from an attack is still being worked on. The goal is to have one calculation that works for all enemies, and incorporates things like their damage, the player's armor, and the enemies' armor piercing values. Right now I think the formula makes the early game easy, but the late game too difficult to enjoy. It's also hard to figure out since I don't have all the pieces of the puzzle, like the rest of Combat Arts, ready. I'm hoping the problem will resolve itself without me having to change any values by just adding more skills.
Pressing Enter is annoying - it really should be asking for ANY key instead of enter and it's something I didn't really think about after the first implementation. It will be going on my to-do list and implemented by the next patch. I also need to get to work on rebindable keys to avoid issues with the WERTYU setup.
Sounds for UI and enemies is something I didn't get to work on, but I remember all your insight from the last update. It will surely be addressed for the next update. I never even thought about having sounds on opening UI panels. It's so obvious in hindsight that it's been missing, but it's just one of those things that require a different perspective to notice.
Thanks again for the detailed feedback and playthrough. I am very grateful for your help and support. It has been a long and fun journey for both of our games, and I'm glad we're both improving our games and our skills.