Posted June 27, 2022 by osur
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!