Have you ever found yourself wishing you could swap your hand for another build in the middle of a fight? Ever wished to be able to have two builds and quickly swap between them? If you answered yes to any of those questions, this update is for you. Introducing: Card Sets!




From now on you can have two hands of cards. Only one is equipped at a time but you can switch between them quickly without opening inventory.

This means you can now have two specialized builds and adapt faster. Passive vs aggressive build. Fire vs ice. Ranged vs. Close And Personal™! It all depends on your play style and creativity, so don't be afraid to experiment!




You can use them from the very beginning of the game. The feature is accessible starting from level one on all game modes. In order to swap your cards use the button to the left from mana orb, press G (default) on your keyboard or hold D-pad up on your controller. The number on the button shows which set is active. There is no cooldown.




Come join our Discord channel and let's chat!
https://discord.gg/bookofdemons

• Card sets
  
• Fixed disenchantment granting unidentified card that cannot be identified
  
• Fixed showing incorrect progress of "Bronze division" achievement in Awards window
  
• Added supporters to to credits
  
• Updated translations

Stay safe in paper dungeons! ːarchduckː
Agnes ːpaperheartː

Game developers don't share their early working concepts of games - the prototypes - often. When they do it's usually super interesting to see how the game changed and get a glimpse into the creation process. That's why we would like to share the earliest prototype with collectors.

In game development, prototypes serve many purposes but most importantly they are used to test if the core gameplay is fun. Usually, the first prototypes are not even computer games but rather tabletop games quickly put together with pieces of paper and a set of dice. Prototypes don't have to look good either - it's even better if they are not great looking as you can focus on how fun they are that way.




Our prototype took a month to put together. When compared to years it took to make the finished and polished game it gives a good idea of how much work separates an idea from the finished game.

We wanted to be very thorough when making a prototype so we made sure it's as complete experience as possible. That's why you will find that the prototype plays almost until the Archdemon. As a neat bonus, you can get a glimpse into how we initially imagined the cards. You will find some of them echo similarly to what ended in the finished game, while others will be... different.

Important note: only Warrior has cards in the prototype. Both other classes are present and playable but without cards. Warrior's set was all we needed to prove the concept.

The Flexiscope is present in its basic form. Balance is *very* rudimentary so don't expect the prototype to hold your hand. While the rng gods might time at you there is a considerable chance you will get killed. A lot.

Unless you like to experiment that is. There are developer shortcuts in the prototype that grant superpowers.



There are possibly also bugs, some of them exploitable, waiting to be discovered. The boss fight at the end of the game is metaphorical: the game crashes. We like to think it conveys the futility of eternal fight of light versus darkness. Also, we had no use for the boss fight in the demo :archduck:

Ah, and one more thing. There is no duck in the prototype. Really, can you believe it wasn't a core character in the beginning? A poignant realization, it would be a sad world without it :archduck:



All of you who own Collector's Content or Supporters' Bundle will gain access to the prototype immediately. For those of you who would like to check it out but don't own the Collector's Content pack, we are putting it on a 50% sale now so you can grab it on the cheap.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/991890

To run the prototype just go to the Book of Demons' files where you can now find a new folder called Prototype. Just enter it and double click the executable file.

Here is a short step by step guide how to get to the Book of Demons' files:

• Go to your Steam Library (list of your games)
  
• Select Book of Demos and make sure Steam uploaded the Collector's Content DLC (see the image)
  
  
• RMB-click on the Book of Demons
  
• Select Properties
  
• In the window that pops-up select Local Files tab
  
• Press Browse Local Files button
  
• Go to Prototype folder and double click Prototype.exe

Some time ago Matthew wrote a couple of blog posts and did interviews about Book of Demons' creation process. If you are interested in how the game was made, get a cup of tea and make yourself comfortable:

• Making of the Paperverse, the art-style of Book of Demons
  
  
• A closer look at the deck-building hack-and-slash success
  
  
• Deep Dive: Flexiscope, the play-time aware dungeon generator
  
  
• 99$ - Live orchestra on an indie budget
  
  
• Designing for deck-building in video games

And if you would like to know more we are on Discord and we are running Ask Us Anything channel for the curious :archduck:

Here is the invite link: https://discord.gg/qD4uWKu

Stay safe in the almost-paper-like-prototype dungeons! :archduck:

Margaret :paperheart:

Those of you who have been waiting for more opportunities to compete with other players will be happy to read that today's update introduces Speedrun to the Cook!



Everyone is invited. All of you who will start a new game in the Normal mode are now eligible to enter speedrun leaderboards. The clock starts right after you enter the Town for the first time and stops when you defeat the Cook. But be warned - the timer does not stop during the visits in the Town so cut your shopping sprees short!

All you have to do is find the optimal card build per class, decide the best length of the quests and fight your way down as fast as you can!



If you remember the Book of Demons' roadmap update, we mentioned that we would like to show you the Book of Demons original prototype. It was left for quite long and grow some mold on it so first we will have to dust it off a bit. However once ready, it will be added to Collectors' Content pack.



We are also thrilled to announce that Book of Demons got nominated for a prestigious Digital Dragons 2018 award not in one but in three categories! Including "The best Polish game of 2018" alongside Frostpunk and Thronebreaker! Whaaaat!

ːrarestoneː Best Polish Game
ːrarestoneː Best Polish Game Design
ːrarestoneː Best Polish Game Art

We will know the winner at the end of May, but even being nominated is an awesome honor! Fingers crossed!



As we mentioned in previous posts we are preparing to move to larger offices since our old building is being demolished sometime soon. Our search was fruitful. As you can see in the picture above, the new space is aaaalmost ready ːarchduckː

As usual, the update brings a bunch of fixes and changes, and here is the full list:

Changelog for Version 1.01.18203 (15th April 2019)

• Speedrun to Cook
  
• Fixed portal still being active after closing a game
  
• Made the achievement "Tis' but a scratch" unlock automatically for players who have had already met requirements before they changed in the previous update
  
• Added more supporters to credits
  
• Updated translations
  
• Fixed a few typos

If you don't feel like posting on the steam community but would still get in touch with us or other players we have an official Disord channel for you. We are trying to hang out in there as often as possible ːarchduckː

Anyway, without a further ado, here is the invite link: https://discord.gg/qD4uWKu

Speedrun safe through the paper dungeons! ːarchduckː
Margaret ːpaperheartː

Today is the day we go public with a piece of super exciting news! We are thrilled to announce that Book of Demons is getting Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing expansion! Tell your friends and join the adventure in an ever-changing World of Dungeoncraft.

We know you always wanted to continue your adventure in the Paperverse in a more crowded manner. One recurring request during Early Access was to add multiplayer to the game. After some research, it became obvious that it would require rewriting all the 353,241 lines of code from scratch.



Luckily, our crack team of engineers figured out that we can save a lot of time by using CTRL+H and changing all instances of "singleplayer" to "multiplayer". And while we were at it we added "massively" and here we are!


One of the issues raised by the community in the context of multiplayer was how to fit all the heroes on a single path? Our crack team of designers yet again came up with a brilliant solution! MMO games are all about players' agency and emergent gameplay and other buzzwords so we will let players figure out how to move (also because the crack team of designers is still stuck on the first level trying to open the first chest).

https://youtu.be/2yiVEp8kJ1Y

• Discover countless paths to greatness
  
• Share your path with your friends
  
• Form powerful guilds and build guild highways
  
• Become a businessman and gather toll from other players
  
• Embark on epic quests to slay world bosses - confront the Cook, Antipope, and Archdemon with others
  
• Inventory shared with all other players in what we call Inventory Royale mode
  
• Stay in exciting lines in order to attack a world boss
  
• Join impressive queues in an attempt to farm & craft
  
• Vigorously block your enemies' path in Battle Royale areas
  
• Enjoy our novel PvB (player vs bug) mode in selected areas
  
• No subscription plan required
  
• In planned expansion choose the opposing faction; become the Archdemon and build the dungeons for other players (only one copy of the expansion available since there can be only one Archdemon, first come first served).

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback!

Stay safe in paper dungeons this April Fools' Day :archduck:
Margaret

They say that "Archdemon never sleeps"... and neither do we! It appears that recent storms over the Paperverse electrified some things. Today's update introduces new enemies you haven't the opportunity to meet before:

They might seem quite harmless at distance, but don't give them a chance to come close. Every time an electric boss is hit the damage you deal them converts to ball lightning that flies your way.




Better have your Boots card polished and shiny as it might be a good idea to be well grounded in the near future!




As usual, the update also introduces a bunch of fixes. You will find the full changelog below. Those of you who enjoy hunting for achievements will be happy to hear that "I'm Invincible" achievement requirements were lowered from 10 deaths to 8 in Roguelike mode.

Another noteworthy change: Legendary Chaotic Ring effect got significantly buffed.



Besides that, we are busy planning future updates for Book of Demons and production of the next games. We are also expanding the team and switching offices (our lovely current spot is scheduled for demolition so it makes sense to plan ahead and not to be blindsided by a wrecking ball :paperdeath:). All this in hands of just seven people so it's busy as usual :archduck:

• Added bosses with a new tag Electric
  
• Fixed a crash occurring when Twitch viewers type a dungeon command during a legendary card voting
  
• Changed incorrect text on a death screen after death during quest mastering
  
• Reduced number of resurrections needed to unlock the 3rd level of achievement "Tis' but a scratch"
  
• Fixed Evil warrior, Evil rogue and Evil mage taunting with an empty text
  
• Adjusted a change of light intensity during a Meteor fall in a dungeon
  
• Changed Instigator's (legendary Chaotic Ring) effect's trigger chance from incorrect 0.1-2% to 3/5/7%
  
• Removed the "Online Battle" button from Selection Screen - the feature may come back sometime in the future
  
• Fixed game freezing when trying to load corrupted save file
  
• Minor UI corrections
  
• Added new supporters to credits

As always,
Stay safe in the dungeons :archduck:
Margaret

Online Battles timed event has ended on schedule and we would like to take a moment to sum it up.

First of all: it worked! This was not granted as it was a very experimental networking code, something we never did before. Besides some matchmaking issues, the mode ran smoothly, which we count as a success. We also gathered a lot of useful data on network loads and general multiplayer design. Both will come in handy when working on future games in the Return 2 Games series.

While the scoring, like the whole event, was experimental and should be taken with a pinch of salt the results are in!

Over 1000 players competed with three players getting ahead of the pack:

• kenzos75 with 15 won matches and only one match lost,
  
• Lokken with 10 matches won and
  
• our teammate Wiedźma Danaien who, to our surprise, played the mode a lot and won 7 battles.

Congratulations everyone, it was fun! And in case you were wondering why so many hearts for the header animation for this news: Happy Valentine's Day everyone! :paperheart: :paperheart: :paperheart:

Stay safe in paper dungeons :archduck:
Konstanty

One recurring request during Early Access was to add multiplayer to the game. We researched that and experimented but in the end, it became obvious we can't do it without rewriting the game from scratch. However, while experimenting we came up with a multiplayer competitive mode that works and we had a surprising amount of fun playing it.

We decided to share this experiment with you. So, without further ado, we present...



What are Online Battles? It's a timed event that will run for a week starting now. Two players are matched together. Both competing heroes share the same class, same random cards, and the same dungeon.

After initial 20 seconds for picking a hand out of random cards, the battle begins. Each time a player slays a monster, a shadow of this monster will spawn in opponent's dungeon. Shadows are tinted red and while they can deal damage and be killed they don't count against total monsters count. Whoever kills all the enemies (excluding shadows spawned by the opponent) wins! There is no way to interact with the other player besides throwing your defeated enemies at him. Watch your opponents moves, time your kills well to throw a wrench in his plans. Two men enter, one man leaves :paperdeath:



It's very important to stress that this is not a completely finished product. It's more of an experiment we put together and are sharing after hewing the roughest of edges. This is our first attempt at multiplayer so we hope it will work reasonably well and you will have fun with it.

We would love to include multiplayer in all future games and we are looking forward to learning a lot from this experiment.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback.

• Experimental Online Battles mode
  
• Fixed walking in the dungeon using WASD keys not working when mouse cursor was over the lower bar
  
• Fixed issue when the player could walk in the dungeon with stats window open
  
• Fixed card Relic of Rage showing incorrect initial trigger value
  
• Disenchanting currently not equipped card variant won't switch the current variant to common while resetting charges to zero anymore
  
• Fixed issue when crosscut was scrolling simultaneously with opened frame scrollbar
  
• Fixed typos in multiple translations

As always,
Stay safe in the paper dungeons (and slay faster than the other guy) :paperheart:
Konstanty

Don't think the work on the game slowed down. A new pack of bugfixes and translation updates is here.

Among the changes we made in this version more notable are:

• Roguelike enthusiasts don't have to die in order to see their results in Roguelike Deepest Death leaderboard (effective from next month's season)
  
• The first usage of Golem card after leaving and reentering the dungeon with the other staircase will work correctly instead of just wasting your mana and putting the card on cooldown
  
• Ghosts will no longer get stuck in walls when low on health and the player levels up. Ghosts currently stuck in walls will come out
  
• Gargoyles in stone form are no longer selectable when you play with a controller

Version 1.00.18019 24th January 2019

• Fixed an issue where upgrade card window showing the wrong cost just after downgrading card in slot
  
• Fixed an issue where card lost on higher difficulty would become unavailable and variant change was not possible
  
• Fixed typos in multiple translations
  
• Fixed golem card not going on cooldown after leaving the dungeon with golem and reentering it
  
• Fixed Quest Mastering tutorial displaying the wrong amount of keys
  
• Fixed fear aura not resuming after the card is disabled
  
• Fixed achievement "The first Riddle" not being granted after identifying all unidentified cards at once
  
• Fixed heal spell timing issues
  
• Fixed ghost sometimes getting stuck in walls if the hero leveled up on that level
  
• Fountains no longer change the cursor to "use" when the hold key is held down
  
• Fixed miscounting cards for Full Deck achievements (Full Armory, Full Stash, Full Library)
  
• Deprecated card Helmet can no longer be found in the dungeon
  
• Fixed particle effect on the lost card
  
• Fixed an issue where disenchanting a card could prevent it from dropping ever again
  
• Fixed a crash occurring during card disenchantment sequence
  
• Allow alive character in roguelike final death leaderboard
  
• Fixed Cold Nova not spawning icicle on the position of a killed monster
  
• Gargoyles in stone form are no longer selectable when using the controller
  
• Updated translations
  
• Supporters added to credits

As always,
Stay safe in paper dungeon :paperheart:
Margaret

It’s been a whole month since Book of Demons went out of Early Access and the launch dust has settled a bit, so we feel it’s the right moment to talk about the future. Also, it’s the beginning of a new year, so what better time to make new and bold plans? But before we jump to the point, let’s take a step back and look at what we’ve accomplished so far (and why getting here took us so long).



When we launched Book of Demons into Early Access in July 2016, we’ve been already developing the game for more than 3 years in a team oscillating between 3 and 6 members. Back then we felt the game was already pretty solid, and we were planning to stay in Early Access for about six months. After all, it shouldn’t take long to balance 2 more classes, add some cards and some sounds, right?

The ever-abundant feedback from the Early Access community steered our development into territories that we never anticipated. Book of Demons was supposed to be a midcore take on a hardcore genre, but soon it became apparent that catering to a diverse and enthusiastic Steam audience would mean much more than doing a few bug and balance fixes. It was something we weren’t really prepared for, but we were keen on fixing the biggest limitations coming from our original design.

This is the main culprit of why it took two and a half years. The game was already a huge undertaking for a small team, but rebuilding and adding major systems on a living game proved to be much more time consuming than we anticipated. Having known it back then, we’d probably try to be better prepared and we’d have scheduled things more cautiously.



Despite it took so long, our hard work seems to have paid off, as the launch of the full game was a success! We launched on December 13th and before 2018 was over, we sold two times more copies than we did during the entire two and a half years of Early Access. Even though most of the copies sold were discounted due to various promotions, it’s still a huge thing for our small team. As of today, Book of Demons development costs have paid off and we can start planning for the new shiny things to come.



Our internal goal is to grow our team and invest so that we can build things faster and do more things simultaneously. This is easier said than done, but we see no other choice – we see the successful launch as an obligation, especially to our R2G supporters. This is a scenario in which so many gamedev companies fail, so we need to be extra careful about the decisions we now make.

The next few months will be the most critical and probably chaotic, as every transition period is. Therefore, the plans outlined below must be treated as a rough sketch and they are subject to change. We’re also not giving any exact timeframes, as there are simply too many unknowns at this point and as usual, we don’t want to overpromise. We’d love to tick off all those things in 2019, but history teaches us this might be... well, challenging.



This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. We already announced Book of Demons would be coming to Xbox One, but it would be silly of us not to port it to other platforms as well. Thanks to awesome guys at 505 Games Book of Demons will be coming to Xbox One, Playstation 4 and last but very far from least, Switch! This should be happening around April 2020 so stay tuned.

Book of Demons is getting new features

As promised, going out of Early Access does not mean the end of development for Book of Demons. We’ll keep serving the usual bugfix and balance updates, but we also envision a few bigger features that we’d like to squeeze in during 2019. Here they are, not necessarily in the order of development:

• Online battles – a prototype timed event (more on that below)
  
• Speedrun to cook – a new leaderboard measuring who can slay the Cook fastest
  
• Challenge mode – a new mode where you can compete via leaderboards with other gamers and your friends in special short challenge scenarios. There will be both daily challenges and custom scenarios.
  
• Music update – the game could use a bit more variation when it comes to ambient music in the dungeons, and this is exactly what we intend to fix.

We have a lot more ideas (quick-swap cards? roguelike quick restart?), but let’s start with the ones described above and see how it goes. We can’t promise everything listed above will be launched in 2019, but we’ll definitely try our best.

What about DLC’s?

We do have plans for a small DLC that will add a new mode centered around a more strategic way to play Book of Demons and we already have a prototype for that. Unfortunately, we still need to figure out a good way to mix that into the main game, without fragmenting the leaderboards and the overall experience too much. We’d love to launch it this year, but that’s a big maybe.

We know many of you have been asking for a content packed DLC, featuring new monsters, levels, quest, and even towns, but realistically speaking this is not possible for us at this point. What we might do instead in the future is add a DLC with a whole new playable character class with new cards, but this won’t happen in 2019.

Book of Demons experiments in multiplayer

If there is one thing we regret not being able to do, is adding multiplayer support to Book of Demons. This is something we didn’t plan for from the very beginning, and the number of things we would need to rebuild from scratch to support it was simply too big. But we did try. During early access we made a few attempts at adding multiplayer features. Sadly, it only proved that it wasn’t feasible for us.

But one of those attempts, while not a true multiplayer mode, showed some promise, and we’d like to show you how it worked. Treat this like an experimental indirect PvP mode, a prototype of sorts that we plan to enable as a timed event. We’re not sure if it’ll work as expected and things might yet go south. But if it works, and if there is enough interest among Book of Demons players, we might consider developing it further or making it a periodic event.

This feature is codenamed Book of Demons: Online Battles, and we plan to enable it as a timed event in February.

The first Book of Demons prototype

On a similar note, we’d like to give you more insight into our process of game development by showing the original Book of Demons prototype. This is one of the four Return 2 Games prototypes that we did back in 2013, and one that we picked as the best blueprint for the first game in the series.

We haven’t decided yet on the form of this demonstration – we can add it to the Collector’s Content DLC, launch as a free app on Steam, or any other setup. The priority of this depends on your interest, so if this something you would like to see please let us know in the comments below.

The next book in the series

As much as we’d like to, Book of Aliens (since some of you already found the name in Book of Demons data let’s make it official, the next game is in fact called Book of Aliens) will NOT be released in 2019. For the past three years, we’ve been totally invested in Book of Demons, so the second game in the series has been somewhat left out. But now, with the release of Book of Demons, this will need to change, and Book of Demons production has to ramp up.

First, we’ll need to revisit the designs and the prototypes we did in 2013. Five years is a lot in game development, and the bar keeps getting higher and higher. This is a good thing, but we’ll need to step up our game. Things that we thought were cool or good enough in 2013 now might not be anymore. Also, this time, we’ll want multiplayer to be part of the game right from the start (and we’re certainly not abandoning single player either).
If this sounds like going back to drawing board, that’s because it mostly is. If everything goes well, by the end of 2019 we’ll have closed the pre-production phase of the game. This means having a working proof of concept, finalized designs and full production plan that we’ll be able to announce.

Book of Demons might get a new flavor

There is one more crazy idea that we are actively debating inside the team, and we haven’t decided yet if we actually want to pursue it. You see, during the development of the Book of Demons, we made a lot of designs and prototypes that were scrapped. Some of them were really good on their own, but they just didn’t within the game. We’re thinking about taking one of the best of those designs and developing it into a separate game.
This might sound crazy at first, but when you think about it, there are some big pros to such an approach. Book of Aliens is still a few years away and we really don’t want to rush the pre-production phase risking sacrificing game quality. Being able to develop and publish another game in the meantime with existing assets and tested mechanics should go much more smoothly. Hopefully, it would allow us to grow our team even further and build a stable foundation for quicker production of Book of Aliens. We also hope it would make the wait for Book of Aliens a little less painful.

Although technically this wouldn’t be the second book in the series, this would still be part of Return 2 Games so it would come free for R2G supporters, and we’d have some major discounts for all other Book of Demons owners. You could think of it as a new game mode DLC that is so big, that has to be a separate game. And btw, we think it’s one hell of an idea that would be really fun to play.

In other pros, this might be a good test-bed before Book of Aliens, as we’d like to try out some things that we didn’t do before, and that we’re very excited about. And, if everything goes well, we actually might have a chance to have a new game out this year.

Anyway, we haven’t decided yet if we want to pursue this project or not, but we’ll have to decide soon. This will be influenced by our luck with expanding the team so it wouldn’t impact Book of Aliens development too much and if we can actually push off all our console ports onto an external publisher. There’s no way of telling how the indie game landscape will look in a year, let alone two, so in the end, we’ll have to go with our gut feeling and do our best.

Making all this happen

Looking at all those things described above, this will be a very, very busy year. Making of all of this happen will certainly be challenging as we’ll be breaking new grounds on multiple fields. We want to transition from a company working on a single project to one working on several, and at the same time, we need to keep supporting Book of Demons with updates and with marketing to keep those sales going. We’ll also want to bring Book of Demons to more online shops, and even publish in physical retail, and that all requires a lot of effort.

Work will have to go on all fronts - and frankly speaking - we’re a bit scared. But with your support, which we are so grateful for, we know we can push forward. Thanks, and stay tuned for more details about or our plans and progress!

As always,
Stay safe in paperverse ːpaperheartː
Thing Trunk team

To set a good example for the upcoming 2019 we are rolling out an update with some quality of life improvements and various bug fixes that the community reported over the holidays.

Besides the minor stuff like missing strings and credits not being displayed most notable fixes are:

• The Arachgod spiders that wouldn't come out of an ambush will now behave as expected. The ones already on maps won't be fixed but ones in newly generated dungeons will be bolder.
  
  
• Added option to collect cauldron's prizes with a stick on a controller, now each prize will be highlightable.
  
  
• We also changed the useless extra magical parameter on legendary Fan card to something much more useful (it will be swapped in already found cards).
  
  
• Last but not least, we have disabled Razer Chroma support to do some testing. We are in touch with guys at Razer and it will be back as soon as we are sure it's stable.

Version 1.00.17927+ 31st December 2018

• Fix problem with Arachgod not always getting out of hiding
  
• Fixed incorrect number of stars in the equipped projectile tooltip
  
• Legendary Fan Card now have more useful magical companion variant
  
• Add prize collection under pad stick
  
• Crows in Town are once again usable with a controller (Left Trigger + Thumbstick)
  
• Fixed a possible crash in upgrade window when displaying a tooltip
  
• Fixed card upgrade window not refreshing after a card was downgraded
  
• Fix to language change restart doesn't save the game
  
• Fix algorithm fixing scroll allocations in the roguelike mode
  
• Fixed confusing avatar research related tooltip
  
• Fixed missing string on Avatar research screen when using the controller
  
• Fixed incorrect upgrade cost in the variant window (was calculated based on equipped variant)
  
• Fixed Fortune Teller's gossip sometimes not unlocking properly
  
• Fixed missing credits
  
• Fixed Healer's missing VO
  
• Supporters added to credits

Have an awesome 2019 everyone, we wish you many ducks and a calm and satisfying year. And, most importantly, stay safe in paper dungeons :archduck:
Konstanty