greetings and well met, friends

today is a fine day, for it is patch day! and what a fine patch it is. i had plenty of feedback to review thanks to many players deciding to stream or record their gameplay and voice their thoughts, and i must once again express my gratitude to those who have done so and especially those who reached out with bugs to fix and errors to correct.

i will also once again outline the current standing of the game and what remains to be done before the 1.0 release is ready, you can find this brief recap after the patch notes.

alright, here comes the update!

Update v0.29:

General:

-Cape items now no longer have an 11 Intelligence requirement. Your character is smart enough to put on a cape by default.

-Spells behave as Combat Arts in regards to being remembered when switching loadouts. Meaning if you equip a spell, switch to your backslot, equip a Combat Arts, then return to your original loadout, you will auto-equip the first spell. Combat Arts no longer overwrite any spells held in a loadout.

-Added the Holy Rend spell

-Increased starting Mana from 20 to 30.

-Increased Manacost of the Shield Bash Combat Art, but also expanded the reach of the shield.

-Changed how spell animations and spellcasting cooldowns are controlled. Previously, you could not move at any point during the casting animation. This would be a pain if you wanted to cast and quickly move while holding a bulky two hander weapon, as they have long cast times. You will now be able to cast, and begin movement as soon as the spell is cast, ignoring the end of the animation as it resets to an Idle state. However, the spell cooldown will remain the same, meaning you can't move to reset your spellcasting cooldown. Simply put, you shouldn't notice a difference if you stand still and cast several spells back to back but kiting an enemy will feel better.

-Changed how enemy chance to hit is calculated. Having higher dodge values will have less effect.Y ou most likely won't notice much difference in the demo version of the game, as this was more of a fix for the later stages of the game.

-Added more trap rooms. Every randomly generated floor in the game now has at least one trap room.

-Added more item modifiers, such as Reduce Ranged Damage %, Double Potion Effect, +Armor/Dodge on Rings, and some more rare ones for you to find. Some modifiers, like Manasteal, Mana on Kill, Wand Projectile Multishots, and others have been rebalanced to no longer drop on the first floor under normal circumstances. However, rarer modifiers will drop more often.

-Changed item drop rate mechanics. An item can no longer be spawned consecutively, meaning you cannot open a chest to find 2 swords. 

-Reduced chance for an dropped item to be two tiers lower than the current level.

-Added a new enemy in a section of the Halls of Pain. They have temporary VFX, but they pack a punch!

-Balanced the Shop system further. The amount of items that are two tiers above the current item tier has been reduced, and the item level of items is reduced from +2 to +1, with a 25% chance to roll +2. 

-Greatly increased the chance for unique items to spawn in general with a further increase when looting Rare Chests.

-Buffed old Unique items such as the Wand of Infection and Sir Sterling Swift's Splitter to be more in line with the latest ones.

-Buffed Fetish Idols and Two-Handed Staves slightly.

-Bloodsoaked Guard will heal less often for more HP.

Misc. :

-Improved Fire Arrow visuals

-Mimics will only trigger mimics in the same room. Mimics in other rooms that hear a mimic wake up will no longer awake.

-Thunderdisk bounce off more world objects, like the Alchemy Tables

-Improved blood spray visuals for mimics

-Improved the behavior of ranged named enemies further. 

-Most enemies will randomly walk around more often if they don't notice the player.

-Nerfed the Armor/Dodge amount of most armors and shields, namely Robes, Caps, Long Wooden Shields, Leather Armors, Reinforced Shields, etc.

-Slightly increased the hit-chance for the enemies in Lower Dungeon 2

-Slightly reduced the attack cooldown of Skeletons

-Being frozen will now also reduce the cast time for combat arts such as Reflect Projectile or Shield Bash

-Experimenting with improved collision detection on certain enemies, namely all Cultists. Will be iterated further.

-No longer can roll +2 All Stats by default, the maximum is +1 unless the item is specially crafted through clever means, at which point the maximum allowed value is 2.

Bugfixes:

-Finally fixed the dreaded Attack-move bug, where if you issued an attack, then issue a move command within 5 frames, you would play out the attack while also moving.

-Fixed incorrect enemy aura sizes for certain enemies.

-Fixed crash when saving and loading a game that has an aggroed chest mimic

-Fixed crash when refreshing shop if the player has Rhiri's Cover equipped.

-Fixed issue where incorrect combat arts will be displayed if you have a Wand and Fetish Idol in the back loadout.

-Fixed minor movement issues when holding both LMB and RMB

-Fixed minor UI issue with the Help menu appearing when not requested

-Fixed some issues with the Cult Sacrifice animations

-Fixed some minor pathing issues in Halls of Pain

-Fixed issues where a specific key (Spell 4) wouldn't properly rebind itself

-Fixed Artam's NPC textbox glitching out if you interact with him again while the textbox is active.

-Fixed issues with inconsistent volume for certain elemental attack modifiers

-Fixed some Combat Arts icons not updating when mana-drained

-Fixed some minor dungeon generation issues

-Fixed rare chance of enemy dying with their navigation agent still turned on, meaning they could be pushed around.

-Fixed Staff icon not being set properly after weapon is thrown.

With that out of the way, currently the game is nearing completion. Some levels require improvements and polish, certain spells still need work, but the bestiary is finished and almost all items are done. The current plan is to participate in the upcoming Next Fest, which will contain some nice new key-art, and to slowly wrap things up and get the full game in your hands. Of course, along the way there's balance, balance and more balance to do, but things are moving as expected and the full public build is in sight.

As always, I encourage you to write to me with your thoughts, questions, suggestions or any feedback. I am always interested in hearing what you have to say. 

I hope you will enjoy this update and thank you for reading and for your continued support.

best

-osur