ZAR NEW UPDATE LIVE!

Hello everyone! ZAR Alpha v0.4.85.18 is now available!

This update mainly focuses on readability, visual consistency, balance improvements, enemy clarity, and bug fixes.

Readability & UI Improvements

• Updated the game's font system.
• Previously, a single font was used throughout the entire game, which caused readability issues and problems with some characters, including Turkish characters.
• ZAR now uses two different fonts, allowing us to choose the more suitable font depending on the UI element while supporting a wider range of characters.
• Updated Enemy and Player speech bubbles to make dialogue cleaner and easier to read.
• Updated several box names and descriptions for better clarity.
• Improved several UI texts and descriptions throughout the game.

Keyword Highlight System

• Refined the recently added Keyword Highlight System.
• Previously, some highlighted sections could cover large parts of a sentence, making descriptions visually noisy and harder to scan.
• Keyword highlighting is now more minimal and focuses only on the most important values and mechanics.
• This should make Relic, Augment, Enemy Skill, and Player Skill descriptions easier to read without overwhelming the player with too many colors.

Visual Improvements

• Updated the game's color palettes.
• Relic illustrations, Augment illustrations, UI elements, and several other visual elements have been adjusted to better match the updated color direction.
• Enemy sprites are still placeholder assets during the Alpha, but different enemies now use different color variations.
• This makes it easier to immediately recognize when you are fighting a different enemy and helps communicate that enemies may have different attacks and abilities.

Balance

• Updated several Dice Augments to improve balance and fix unintended interactions.
• Adjusted several Enemy Attacks and their values.
• Updated the Slot Machine Relic probability system.
• Slot Machine symbols no longer have equal chances of appearing.
• More powerful symbols such as M and J are now rarer.
• This makes powerful combinations such as MMM and JJJ significantly harder to obtain and keeps the Relic's high-roll potential more balanced.

Dice Collision Improvements

• Improved Die-to-Die collision interactions.
• Collision-triggered effects now use a trigger buffer to prevent unintended repeated activations.
• Previously, combining Sticky with collision-based Augments could cause two dice that remained in contact to continuously trigger collision effects.
• These interactions are now handled more consistently and should no longer generate unintended repeated effects.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed issues with Sir Rollington's Passive Skill.
• Fixed issues with Sir Rollington's Active Skill.
• Fixed and adjusted several Dice Augment interactions.
• Improved several collision-related edge cases.
• Fixed various minor UI, text, and gameplay issues.

Enemy Updates

• Adjusted several existing Enemy Attacks.
• Improved the visual distinction between different enemies during the Alpha.
• Different placeholder enemy sprites now use different colors, making it easier to recognize enemy changes and understand that they may use different attacks or mechanics.

Thank you for playing ZAR and continuing to share your feedback with us! 🎲

We're continuing to improve the Alpha step by step, especially around readability, balance, visual clarity, and progression as we work toward the Steam Demo.