Tower of Kalemonvo
The Pain Update
Greetings and well met friends,
It is another fine day, made all the finer for it is also Patch Day.
As promised, I bring you a fat patch loaded with content. In fact, I think it has too much content, and I will perhaps toy around with smarter ways of releasing content. As always, I will list off the biggest and most notable changes, but many will go unmentioned here, and will be up to you to discover.
There has also been a lot of balance changes, where some aspects were buffed and many others nerfed. Due some changes you will read about soon, many balance changes will not be discussed since I believe the game will require a pure balancing patch later on, after which things will normalize.
Before we continue, two announcements:
First: The development team of myself has now expanded- I am joined by two friends who will, when able, assist me with matters of 2D art and Sound Effects
Secondly: I have a discord for the game now! Feel free to join and tell us how the game is too easy for you: https://discord.gg/RFAveQVkRz
Now, onto the balance changes:
General:
-Added a new main level, filled with 3 brand-new enemy types. They might be too hard.
-Added a small level for world-building purposes. You will encounter a friendly face there
-Added new Potion types. They are randomly assembled at the start of the game, and will always have different names and effects.
-Added new Potion tiers. There are now Small, Medium and Large potion types
-Redesigned the way Potions drop. Only Small Potions drop early game, and more tiers start to spawn as you progress
-Redid art for all Potions
-Redid art for all early-game Spells, up until Tier 3. Tier 3 and 4 Spells will be done soon enough.
-Redid the way Damage is calculated. The difference is slight, but it's there. It allows for some enemies to be immune to certain damage, but weak to other types.
-Added visuals to show which Damage Type will apply a Damage Effect. Your sword will burn if you deal Fire Damage, give off sparks for Lightning, and so on.
-Hallowed Damage now deals double damage to all Undead enemies. Only the Hallowed Damage values will be multiplied and not your whole Damage amount
-Redid Wands. Wands now launch projectiles of their Damage Type. All wands now have a Damage Type. Some Types are rarer than others.
-Wands have low damage and do not benefit from Strength. Wand Damage increases by 1-1 for every 5 Intelligence.
-Redesigned how Combat Arts work. The type of C.A. available is now tied to an Item stat. Some Items do not grant Combat Arts
-Added a bunch of Unique items
-Added a super-unique item that only spawns in a specific circumstance
-Added an END OF DEMO screen for people not testing the game as part of Demo Day or are a known tester. The game will now end at the end of the Upper Halls level. Of course, if you are playing this during Demo Day or if you have played before, the game will allow you to proceed as normal. This is only intended to prevent the normal playerbase from reaching areas that lack polish
UI:
-Hotbar completely redone as to match the new Orb visuals
-Spellbook completely redone as to match the new aesthetic style of the UI
-Updated Spell Description and Combat Arts description for every Spell and CA
-Added an option to rebind keys both ingame and in the Main Menu. Keys are persistent between game sessions
-Added minor description to some inventory items
-Changed +Armor % and +Defense % modifier descriptions to better reflect the changes
-You can now deselect Spells, and have no Spell equipped by clicking an empty Spell slot in the UI page
-Fixed various button highlighting issues
Bugfixes:
-Fixed Upperhalls issues with inaccessible rooms, and also fixed some pathfinding issues with certain room combinations. Again.
-Fixed rare bug caused by reading books in specific inventory slots
-Fixed rare bug which prevented items from autoequipping if you fiddled around with potions a lot
-Named enemies will properly react if one of their mob units spots you
-Vastly improved minimap on loading a saved game. Not perfect, but miles better
-Fixed being able to move Fountains if you did some very specific shenanigans
-Invalid saves will now try to autodelete
-Items left on the ground on a reload no longer leave holes in the pathfinding mesh
Various:
-Changes to the lighting system. The game should look better now
-If you have a weapon and offhand equipped and are swapping it for a two-handed weapon, the game will attempt to put both equipped items in the backpack instead of having to manually send both
-The game will now automatically display stats for a weapon you inserted into a slot or picked up, instead of having to stop and start mousing over it again.
-Unseen enemy types are now much harder to see at a distance
-Added various visuals and sounds to minor effects such as Reflect Damage, Lifesteal and so on
-Various performance boosts. The average FPS should be high on most machines now. Still more to fix here
And much more!
As always, I will monitor the bugs and issues this update will inevitably bring, and I will try to correct them as soon as possible.
Should you manage to play through to the end, let me know your thoughts!
Comments
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Love the two mirrored spell icons! I was actually planning on doing a similar design as your lovely spell book, i guess the similarities won't end with the green hood.
Kudos to your friends for doing the art, i've got a sounds and music guy myself and it really is a big help not having the need to learn and do it on your own. I'm very curious as to where your art direction is gonna develop, since it has been clearly a lot of placeholder art until now. Very exciting stuff!
Sorry for being late to this, real life was calling since last DD.
Thanks for the kind words! Can't wait to see more Plundergrounds next DD
Congratulations on expanding your team
thanks!
eagerly awaiting next DD for another voice acted reading of your intro scene
I wait for you to post in next DD. It looks like your game had a lot of content added to it.
Played 0.16 hotfix.
Didn't finish the game yet, but I got to the golden goblin floor. Here are some thing I found.
Tried playing as a melee character again and I got rekt on the first floor. Ran out of poitions. Next character I decided to play as a mage and this is how my inventory looked like near the end of my playthrough.
This might be me just being bad, but I really think melee should be buffed. Ranged weapons allow you to get out of the way and you can clear entire levels without taking any damage. Can't really do that with melee. Giving to all melee weapons life leech or giving them regeneration weapon art might be a solution.
That said, playing as a mage was really fun. Your attacks never miss, and lightning disc is really fun. Sadly other spells are not that useful. Fire trap takes too long to triger, fireball is too weak / very little area of effect, ice spikes are not that strong and they don't pass through enemies.
I had mana leach on most of my items so I could spam the disc pretty much all the time, since it was much better than any other spells.
Next something minor. Visibility behind walls is slightly iffy. You can see boss / elite enemy effects in rooms you didn't even visit yet and the rooms them selves are visible without visiting them too. Seeing an empty room fill with enemies when you open the door doesn't look very good. Exanima does that nicely. your character can also get obscured by walls sometimes.
This is also a minor thing, but skill requirements for books after reaching certain level shows 9999. I'm sure this means I reached max spell level, but displaying "Max level reached" would be better.
Now for the more serious stuff.
You can't put potions into potion slot by holding and draging the potion from your inventory into a full slot. Potions don't swap, while they do when you click, move and click the full slot.
You can duplicate items if you place two handed weapon into your main slot while having both of them full. Here I have ground full of duplicated wands I made with the two handed staff.
Lastly, saving is broken.
First, I tried to save, selected a slot and pressed esc instead of entering a save name. This put me back into game. When I pressed esc again, I got instantly thrown into the save screen and the prompt "do you want to overwrite the file?" was showing. Pressing the esc again put me back into the save screen, but all buttons (delete save and back) were missing. Esc put me back into game, pressing it again put me into the save screen with no buttons again. Saving the game made all the buttons come back.
After that, I actualy tried loading a game. That's when the weird stuff happened.
I quit to main menu and loaded the latest save (Golden goblin level). I loaded into what looked like the skeleton level, but I was stucked in some corner, unable to move.
Then I quit the game completely and loaded that save again. Waited for about five minutes and nothing was happening. The game didn't froze, because loading animations were playing, but nothing else was happening.
Alt+f4 fixed that. I tried loading slightly older save and I got loaded into the bone zone level. I had all my items, but the level was wrong.
Tried to load the same save again and the game loaded for minutes without anyhting happening.
Other than that I didn't really find anything else broken. New UI is nice and the graphics are getting better. NPCs are a good addition, although I would slow down the text scroll speed a bit and allowed players to scroll the box up / down when they click on it.
And one last suggestion. At the start of the game, you start with 3 potions, sword and a bow. Please add some kind of starter wand also. The game is getting better. Keep it up.
Thanks for another review! I think you're probably the most detailed feedback I get on releases, I really appreciate it.
Saving is completely busted after the early game, no clue why. Similar issues happened to many others. I'll look into it and see what's up.
The item cloning is funny! Most Diablolikes have an exploit like that. I'll look into it and try and get that and saving fixed by tomorrow.
The starter wand is a good idea as well! That should be an easy addition.
As for the balance - all my testers so far have the same feedback: melee sucks and ranged is too good. I'll look into this and try and give it some parity. For the spell balance, every person who told me their experience had a "this spell is really good, but all the other ones are lame" attitude, where they all had a completely different spell that they liked. If anything, this tells me that the spells are different enough in design, which I am happy with. I'll need to balance them more as well, since I do feel like some are too strong and others too weak.
The rest of your concerns seem like easy fixes that I'll include when pushing out a save/load hotfix.
Thanks again for your feedback!
About melee. It sadly sucks to some degree in all other ARPGs.
I played quite a lot of games like tok. Diablo 1-3, sacred 1-2, torchlight 1-2 or path of exile. I even played lesser known games like R.A.W. or space hack. I was thinking about improving melee while I was working and here is what I came up with.
Melee in Tok has two problems. Hard to avoid damage and low damage output compared to spells / ranged weapon arts.
I came up with multiple ways that might fix these problems.
Adding more movement options, like shield dash weapon art or haste ability would be a good idea. Dash would simply launch your character quickly forward and stun the enemy you hit with it. Haste would increase your movement speed. Both could be used for attacking and escaping. I believe these two abilities should be enough to make avoiding damage easier, but reworking shields might be a good idea too. I will talk about that later.
Low damage is a problem because you can only hit one enemy while attacking, other weapon types have AoE weapon arts or spells. This makes melee weapons too weak once more enemies start appearing. Adding weapon arts like cleave or ground slam might fix that but then again, this won't make melee weapons on par with other ranged options, since they have better range while also having AoE abilities.
Best option I think would be giving all melee weapons some form of default splash damage. When you hit an enemy, other enemies around you get also damaged. Number of enemies and damage percentage could be influenced by weapon type or strength level. Blunt weapons could hit one enemy for 80% damage, two handed axes 4 enemies for 40% damage and so on. Would also make picking a melee weapon slightly more involved than just looking at higher damage number, since weapons hitting more enemies would be better in levels with a lot of weaker enemies while weapons hitting less enemies would be better againts smaller, stronger groups.
This alone would make melee have its niche. You risk taking damage, but you will be able to kill groups faster without using any mana.
Also, reworking shields might help make melee better too.
Shields could work as a secondary health bar. Once it runs out, you start getting health damage. Shield could get restored by attacking / killing enemies in melee. Seems better than just letting it regenerate over time. Points restored could be affected by the amount of enemies you are hitting at once, so hitting four enemies with splash damage restores 1 point per hit while hitting only one enemy restores 0.2. This would make it less overpowered againts single enemies like bosses while making you thougher when overwhelmed with large groups. Two handed melee weapons could have some shield points too.
Right now, using a weapon / gear without life leech is a suicide whne using melee. This seems like a good alternative.
It's possible none of these are going to work once put to a test, but they seem like good solutions on paper. Up to you to decide, but I hope I helped a little.
Thanks for the writeup! I just finished fixing some of what you mentioned in your previous post (no more duplicating items!)
I think the major issue at hand now is a numbers issue: melee is tough because you WILL get surrounded and you WILL take damage, no matter what. Meanwhile, a bow can deal only one damage per shot but a skilled player will shoot-move-shoot and kill everything before taking any damage, since most enemies are slow and cannot deal in any way with a ranged player. A crap bow will be better than the best melee weapon. I think the first step should be creating a scenario where using a bow is NOT the optimal solution. I think I already have something like that with the Unseen enemies, who have a Evasion, which gives arrows a high chance to simply phase through them. Problem is, they're also tough for melee users due to their high dodge values.
Meanwhile, most of the other enemies are slow and heavy-damage-dealers, which is a counter to melee users. I think tweaking some values to make some enemies be countered by melee and others by bow would be a good step forward before adding any other tools.
Using the newest level (Halls Of Pain) as an example:
Goat: best dealt with by ranged, good against melee
Hammer man: best dealt with by ranged, very strong against melee
Red man: usually has fireshield which damages you if you hit them in melee, not particularly strong against anything
I think the first step here is to mix and match: I'll try and make the Skinless Red boys be much faster at chasing the player and giving them faster attack speed at the expense of damage.
So ideally you'll at least have a situation where a melee weapon or spell dispatches them quickly and having a shield would prevent their damage, but a bow is weak since you can't easily shoot-run-shoot. This should change the dynamic where some enemies are best dealt with different equipment
Your Combat Art and skills suggestions are all very good but I will need to first try and somewhat balance the situation as mentioned above. After that, I already have your cleave idea in mind - since two handed weapons are on average slower, they should have some AOE ability. Same with shields - using an item meant to mitigate damage and increase survivability does the opposite since it puts you in harm's way, and there isn't a good CA to assist in this (block doesn't really count, it's meant for 1 on 1 encounters). If number changes alone don't solve any issue, it'll be time to change the design of things. I personally wouldn't like having automatic/natural regeneration, since I believe then the optimal move would be "kill something -> wait to heal automatically -> kill something -> ..."
Either way, I have a lot of work ahead of me balance-wise.
Thanks for your detailed ideas!
Also, I forgot to mention this previously: be on the lookout for a Unique Spear in your future playthroughs. A small token of my appreciation for you and your valuable feedback through the developments of our games
Making enemies with different strengths / weaknesses againts different weapon types is a good call. You will definitely want to add quick loadout switching with a key though, since trying to quickly change weapons with full inventory is not great.
Other than that, I think you have everything else covered. All atributes have both melee / ranged options so that shouldn't be a problem. Only switching between them quickly.
Also, I like that spear. Thanks for adding it.