The Lore Update is LIVE!

Hey folks! BIG update time! New spell, new system, tens of pages of content to discover and read - it's all here!

This entire system is actually a suggestion from the initial demo release back in September. I loved the idea, and realized that if players were interested in the world there was no way to learn more or pursue that - and since the world WAS something that people really liked in feedback, it seemed worth pursuing! Smash cut to... nearly 5 months later...! 😅 We actually started doing some beta testing from the Discord server (thanks guys!) to be able to support the breadth of testing for this beast.

I didn't think it'd be quite this involved, but now that it's done, I'm extremely proud of this system. Here's the high-level:

• New Scry spell for finding lore entries
• New notebook to read from (and write to!)
• 38 entries hidden all across the game world, with a massive amount of unique art and writing to discover.

Let's go through em.

The Scrying Glass

Players now start with a scrying glass on a new game, and have access to the Scry spell from the get-go. A variety of creatures and objects of note have entries associated with them, and if you've found a yet-undiscovered entry, a creature with that entry will emit green triangles as a 'tell' that there's something here to study.

If you start scrying and can sustain the spell without being hit, you'll unlock a new entry in your notebook with more information about both what you scryed, and your character's thoughts about it. You'll also get a notification prompt when it unlocks.

The Notebook

The official academy notebook can now be opened, letting you flip around through a number of entries, and can be navigated quickly from the table of contents.

If that sounds simple... well, good! It's far and away the most complicated system in the game, and with a goal of being simple to use and understand. Ignoring the content of each entry and their unique art, the book has a lot of unique art all to itself, while also managing all of the data, formatting it into pages, word wrap around images, handling the flipping, blah blah blah - I'm going to see about writing up a behind the scenes tutorial soon, so if you're interested, stay tuned.

What's next?

This update actually started back in early December, before the GUI update, and paused for a few weeks when I realized the GUI work was necessary to let the lore work continue. This and the GUI work have pretty thoroughly occupied me for the past two months, as you can plainly see, and we're gettig closer to Kickstarter season.

So, I'm actually hoping to tie off most remaining polish tasks and start ramping up towards the Kickstarter, and having a version of the demo that is the best it can be for any streamers and content creators that we might be able to convince to give the game a try. If things go well, I might be able to drop additional content updates during the Kickstarter campaign itself to keep things spicy -- but a campaign-ready demo is the priority. So, stuff like more 'oomph' to the player's attacks and tweaks to enemy AI in the ruins. Maybe the opening cutscene if I can swing it.

If you're interested, please sign up for our mailing list here! I'm only going to email you once the Kickstarter's ready - no spam, promise.

Hey, also - I ended up finishing the major boss theme for the full game. It's, uh... it's really something else. Have a listen if you like!

Patch notes for 07a:

• The main update content:
  • Added Scry spell
  • Added notebook
  • Added many, many entries of writing and art content
• Still new, but less frontline:

  
  

  • The wizard holds the scrying glass (instead of the wand) when castig Scry
  • Refactored all of the wizard's skill code to be more dynamic and accessible. Meaning, when I needed to do a major design change for the Scry spell after some early feedback, it was pretty quick and painless - vs a big mess that I'd have needed to deal with without this clean system. This isn't visible to the player, but it's huge for future development.
  • Linked the presskit from the title screen
• Some misc polish:
  • Shifted the souther Junk Heap save point north one room, to make it more likely players will come across it prior to finding the wand.
  • Added a save point to the Ruins (off PEanut Village, not in the main section) to allow for its lore entry to be get-able.
  • Increased pickup range for magic bits by 50%
  • Variety of polish and minor fixes and tweaks to the tooltips in the sidebar GUI, and the notification system
  • I dunno, it's been two months - there's a ton of minor tune-ups that I put in place as I happened across them.
• Fixed some misc bugs:
  • Fixed the wand event still being repeatable in some situations
  • Fixed a softlock with the dust mote challenge arena
  • Fixed a softlock with the trash bandit challenge arena
  • ...Fixed a softlock relevant to all four challenge arenas... (yes, all of these softlocks come from different root causes)
  • Fixed some tiny spots where some system buttons wouldn't react to the mouse

See you next time! Or, if you want to see what's coming up before it comes out - see you on Discord!