Woah, a dev blog! I should write here more often!
Before we get to the changelog, I just want to say once more: thank you. I've never had a community of players engage with my games like this before, and it feels amazing. I love the livestreams, the GIFs, the discussions, the competitions, all of it! The fact that you're reading this right now honestly means so much to me. :)
[EDIT: The kind testers on Discord found a few critical bugs, so I pushed a hotfix to fix some of those! The latest version should now be 0.33 on PC and 0.34 on Quest.)
Without further ado, I present Ironlights v0.32!
FEATURES:
- Replays have been made more accurate. (Sadly, this required us to wipe previous replay files. Very sorry about that!)
- Damage numbers can now be toggled on/off in the Options menu. As an experiment, they are turned off by default in this version.
- Both players must now select Rematch before a multiplayer rematch can occur.
- When searching for a Quickmatch, the total number of people currently playing online quickmatches is shown.
BUG FIXES:
- Attempted a fix for the failure-to-sync bug, which caused extremely laggy gameplay in some multiplayer matches.
- Menus should no longer remain open after joining a multiplayer match from single-player.
- Fixed an issue that caused one or both players to remain stuck in the multiplayer menu instead of loading into the match.
- You no longer lose coins after losing a multiplayer match.
- You can no longer become invulnerable or get infinite energy by joining a multiplayer match from the tutorial.
GAMEPLAY:
- Ranged attacks are now totally disabled during melee attacks.
- Passive energy regeneration is slightly faster.
- Charging up energy now incurs a slightly larger vulnerability cost.
- The movement radius for each player has been reduced to an oval (1m x 0.75m), further limiting forward and backward movement.
- When leaving the allowed movement radius, damage now scales up with distance.
- Players will now also take damage for moving very high or very low.
- Monk AIs will are now able to block ranged attacks.
- Damage particles have been made more chonky.
BALANCE:
Knight:
- Spammy stabby attacks have been made less viable. (They're slower, and there is now a minimum distance that you must pull back the sword to reload it.)
- Increased the grab radius for a two-handed grip on the greatsword.
- Slightly increased greatsword swing speed (and slightly decreased damage multiplier to compensate).
- Made it harder to fire short spammy ranged attacks with the greatsword.
Duelist:
- Spammy stabby attacks have been made less viable. (Same as above.)
- Slightly increased rapier swing speed.
- Slightly decreased rapier ranged attack damage.
- Reduced shield health and made shield regenerate linearly (instead of following an asymptotic curve).
Monk:
- Slightly decreased staff melee damage.
- Slightly decreased staff ranged projectile speed / damage.
- Passing the staff through your body will now cause the staff to slow down dramatically.
Ninja:
- Slightly increased katar melee damage.
- Increased katar ranged projectile speed, especially after charging it up.
Crusader:
- Reworked flail physics to feel tighter.
- Flail ranged attacks now break if they hit the floor.
- Flail ranged attacks now seek toward a wider target area.
- Reduced shield health and made shield regenerate linearly.
FUTURE PLANS:
Unfortunately, our schedule is tight in the next few weeks, so don't get used to seeing a new build every few days! Some of our time will need to be spent on Oculus QA requirements, but even more daunting is our upcoming showing at PAX East! There's a lot to prepare, and there's not much time to do it.
With that said, we already have a pretty long list of things that we want to tweak or add in future beta updates. Just to mention a few:
- A handicapping system (so that new players to enjoy a fair fight against the experts in multiplayer)
- Multiplayer skill-tracking
- A "tips" section in the menu to help explain non-obvious game mechanics that aren't explained in the tutorial
- A recenter button for non-Quest users
- Revamping the AI blocking algorithm
- Lots of other AI tweaks
- Adding new AI characters and rearranging the single-player campaign
- Making a proper list of known issues
- Making a proper list of post-launch update plans
- Proofreading this blog post
There's a lot more I could write, but it's 3am and I still have work to do. I hope you like these changes, and please join us on Discord or Reddit to share your thoughts on the new build!