This latest patch is a relatively small one but will have a big impact on the visuals of the game, especially if you started playing it after the scepter patch.

No need for long notes, it's really just three changes:

1.) Fixed a bug that was causing the game to default to "Fastest" quality settings for anyone who hadn't run the game before the scepter patch went live. This will fix a lot of things that made the game look ugly, like trees popping in late and looking low poly until you got extremely close.

2.) Added some additional detail to most of the materials found in the game, which will make them play better with light sources and add a significant amount of detail.

3.) Fixed a bug that would have the game run poorly if not focused on your desktop. This should no longer be an issue.

Hello everyone! So I've realized that a simple, once a week, release schedule is going to work out much better for me. There's a nice structure to my week when I can leave stuff messy and half implemented throughout the week and then clean it up at the end.

So from now on releases should be coming out every Friday (I messed up this week since I got a bit carried away with play testing yesterday). I'll continue to be on Discord each Saturday at 2:00PM PST in order to discuss and get feedback on the changes.

So onto the update, lots of stuff this time.

I'll be trying to give some brief explanations as to what I'm intending with some of these changes and I'd be happy to answer any questions you guys may have. I was planning on spending a lot more time documenting this stuff, but honestly, at this point I think its faster to just 'show' rather than 'tell' i.e. I'll be spending most of my time just getting stuff implemented. My hope is that in about 3-4 weeks we'l have enough of a foundation that we can actually start to take an honest look at how things are working.

All of this is, of course, still very rough and basically guaranteed to change in the future as I slowly hammer this thing into some sort of reasonable shape. I'm also doing a lot of experimentation here so some of these directions may not even prove to be fruitful. IMO paper design can only go so far, eventually the only way to really know how something is going to work is to implement it and give it a try.

TIME, REST, AND THE PRESSURE CLOCK:
A quick note: from now on, when referring to 'time', I am almost always going to be referring to in game time i.e. turn count. Speed running will be a completely separate issue.

One of the major guiding principles of the project is to have a high level meta or strategic element in which the player makes decisions as to what zones to go to, in what order, when to back out etc. In order for this to work, the world needs to be very large i.e. contain much more content than would be required to build an end game character.

Now, if this was an open world RPG, this would be fine as it is, the player could 'choose' to grind away for hours and clear the entire dungeon. But, given that this is a rogue-like with permanent death, there is an enormous pressure on the player to play safely i.e. given no other constraints, the optimal strategy would be to perform this long, tedious, grindy dungeon clear. I think its critical that the design does not encourage this sort of game play but rather rewards time efficiency and risk taking.

This is what is motivating the inclusion of a 'pressure clock' i.e. some method of encouraging the player to play optimally and efficiently. With that in mind, update 1.28 now includes a rough implementation in the form of demon spawning events in Yendor.

Yendor Events

• 5 new demon types
  
• Yendor Events that occur at fixed time periods i.e. after 3,4,5... etc. in game days.
  
• The exact event you get will be randomized each game.
  
• This is basically just a 'stub' for future expansion. My long term vision includes much more sophisticated, i.e. interesting events.
  
• For now, when an event occurs, the Vault of Yendor chunks will all spawn 5 high level demons of the specified type.

So given the time constraints created by the Yendor Events the next question to answer is: how to handle time in the dungeon?. Here's my first stab at tackling this issue:

Very Long Rest
So the idea here is that relative to gameplay (moving, attacking, traveling between zones etc.) resting takes a very long time. I'm hoping this will do the following:

• At the micro-game level: I never want the player to be counting turns while exploring/fighting. The game should encourage the player to use every clever tactic in the book, regardless of how many turns it takes.
  
• At the macro-game level: I want the player to feel free to move back and forth across the world many times, in order to take, what he believes, is the best route through the dungeon. The player should never find himself in a situation where strategically he should retreat, and go somewhere else, but doesn't do this due to 'time constraints'.

By making resting take a very long time relative to normal movement we get the interesting mechanic wherein the player can strategically move about the dungeon freely, use whatever tactics are most efficient in combat and generally focus on playing the game as optimally as possible from the perspective of strategy and tactics, given the constraint that he never rests, or rests very rarely.

In fact, by making resting 'expensive' it should actually massively encourage good, skillful, game play since the player is doing everything possible to not force himself to rest. The idea is that, once properly balanced, this system should allow an experienced player to beat the 'pressure clock' by resting only rarely. With that in mind the following systems have been implemented:

• Rest Menu: now toggled by R
  
• It takes 8 Hours to regenerate from 0->max HP
  
• It takes 4 Hours to regenerate from 0->max MP
  
• ctrl + R is a shortcut for 1 Hour rest
  
• There is now a guaranteed healing and energy fountain in each map chunk.
  
• Healing and energy fountains will now also fill your Clarity and Regeneration pools. These are pools that deplete when you are injured / low on mana in order to quickly replenish them. The idea here is that, besides the various other methods of restoration, a player is trying to survive, chunk by chunk, on fountains and their lingering restorative effects.
  
• The +regen and +mana regen properties on items now increase the max size of your regen/clarity pools.

Once again, it goes without saying, the above is just a first stab at tackling this issue and we may iterate over many different systems before we find something that works well.

DAMAGE BALANCING
Another major goal of the project has always been to avoid stupid or unpredictable deaths for the player. With this in mind a number of changes have been made to try to remove sudden unexpected 'spikes' in damage.

Monster Damage Type Rework:
I noticed that caster type characters had their main, non-avoidable attack (projectile or bolt) on a 5 turn cool down dealing 'high' damage. This was causing sudden, massive, unexpected spikes in damage every 5 turns that was very hard to predict. Furthermore, when compared to the archer type, the casters actually had a significantly lower average turn damage. This gave them the odd duel property of been both a low DPT (average damage per turn) class, while at the same time, having sudden, unavoidable spikes. With that in mind, I've currently rebalanced NPCs to based on the following rules:

• Archers: very low damage
  
• Caster (unavoidable attack), fast melee, swarm melee: low damage
  
• Standard Melee: medium damage
  
• Slow Melee: high damage
  
• Caster (avoidable attack): high damage

Basically, the more predictable and avoidable an attack form is, the higher its damage. Obviously this is more of a guideline than a rule but I think roughly adhering to it should make the game a bit less unpredictably difficult. Just as an fyi, based on my testing last night, the new casters are now very nasty, with a high damage output that makes them a high priority target.

Damage Mitigation Rework:
With the same goal of avoiding unpredictable spikes in damage, both protection and resistance have been changed in the following ways:

• Damage blocked now runs 0.5 -> max instead of 0 -> max. This just generally makes the damage blocked much more consistent.
  
• Damage can now be blocked to 0 i.e. you can actually tank through a swarm of ankle biters while wearing plate and emerge mostly unscathed.

MISC:
Monster Agro and AI
Lots of work still to do in this area. Big changes to stealth coming. Lots of new 'quality of life' features to make movement and exploring quicker without constantly attracting attention.

• Significantly reduced the chance for enemies to start fleeing (its annoying to chase them down).
  
• Fleeing enemies will now stop fleeing and unagro once they have broken LoS for a few turns.
  
• Enemies will not 'chain-agro' quite so much.

Player Character Balance:

• Slightly reduced the damage of many caster spells. Was getting out of hand at higher levels even without putting additional talent points into them (theres a big rework coming soon on this front).
  
• Staves now use the average of their associated spell power + range.
  
• Casters now start with power shot in order to give them a cool down ability. Power shot, may interact with staves differently in the future, giving unique, per element bonus.
  
• Raised casters starting mana to help them out given the new rest/time system.
  
• Generally reduced the number of 'normal' item drops in the dungeon since A) the game is much larger and B) unique drops are getting added all the time.

Interface:
Tons of work to do on this front next week, particularly in regards to quickly traveling across the world, to nearby fountains, etc.

• Centered the small scale mini-map on the current chunk in order to make orientation easier. This is not yet an acceptable solution imo.
  
• I should just mention here (since I didn't last time). The world map is accessed with [m]ap or [g]oto keyboard shortcuts and will eventually contain all sorts of quick travel options. For now, the east, west, north south options don't work particularily well (they get blocked easily) but they are triggered with the WASD keys in the corresponding direction.

NEW CONTENT
Focusing on getting more zones, sub-zones, unique vaults, unique monsters and unique loot implemented. As a side note, in the future, a great deal of the proc-gen will involve the swapping in and out, reordering, and rearranging of content from this high level, top down, perspective.

• Blood Pick Ice Shaman
  
• Blood Pick High Shaman Rotation. One of ice, fire, storm per game. Unique vault, npc and item drop.
  
• Cylomar now has a vault and a unique drop.
  
• Ruins of Tranis sub-zone in the desert full of undead (will eventually contain entrance to a sunken pyramid dungeon beneath the sands).
  
• Orc keep at the back of their fortress w/ the king who now has a unique drop.
  
• Orc Guard captain unique w/ vault and drop.
  
• Spider queen now has vault and drop.

Whew, well that's it for now! Took longer to write then I had intended and now I'm late for the discord meetup. So next update should be the coming Friday. Take care everyone!

-- Greetings, crewmembers,

⚠️We need your opinion about Abyss Crew release. It's very important for us!⚠️

➡️We've prepared a form asking a eight short questions. Would you like to answer it and share the form with your relatives?

Here are the links:
(EN) https://forms.gle/4ee8k5RYk11xdPSj8
(FR) https://forms.gle/SuwcqCv2MQjGURjW7

To thank you, we'll make a draw among the participants to win a key of the game!
We count on you !

Captain Pol, out --

4 new ships: Kage, Scalar, Sol and Wasp




Ship # 25 Kage




Ship # 27 Sol




Ship # 28 Wasp

Fixed some more things along the line,

• The rain shader bug in the second stage of the game is fixed.
  
• I reduced the blocky controls and movement, tried to smooth by various interpolations, should look better now.
  
• No more post process bugs on the second floor. The room should stay lit all the time. Brightness adjusted as well
  
• Ad Memes removed
  
• Pewds voice was unregular, loud and messed up sometimes, I tackled this issue

Hope you enjoy, have fun!

Updated the test build with some more changes to the code for pathfinding that is a bit more efficient and handles making sure NPCs don't walk away when you are speaking to them. This is actually a much bigger change to the NPCs than yesterday's build so I'm going to spend more time testing it.

Any feedback from those of you who have time to check it out would be most appreciated too!

This build also includes some other fixes:

• You can no longer place a building if the road is outside of the town's build area.
  
• Fixed some optimization bugs that caused doors and NPC items (like hammers, pitchforks, etc) to disappear even when they were in view.
  
• Updated the windmill blades to have some canvas rather than just wood. Looks nicer imo. I may have already pushed this live, but I didn't mark it in any patch notes so including it here.

1. In the Steam Client Library where it lists all of your games, right click on HammerHelm
2. Click Preferences
3. In the window that opens, select the "Betas" Tab
4. Enter the password to download this build - PerfTest2019 - and click Check Code
5. You should get a message that the code is correct
6. Click the drop-down box and select BigUpdateTest

Steam should immediately start a new download with the test client. The new game should be called "HammerHelm [bigupdatetest]". Once the download is complete you can launch the game. The build is Alpha 13.4.1.

To get back to the Alpha client:

1. In the Steam Client Library where it lists all of your games, right click on HammerHelm
2. Click Preferences
3. In the window that opens, select the "Betas" Tab
4. Choose “None” from the drop down
5. Steam should then revert back to the Alpha client

Hello! We have made a patch for this game, including the localization for Chinese.
Here are the details.

-Fixed the localization issues, now you can change the language to Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.
-Fixed overridden materials
-Fixed material highlight
-Fixed Notes materials
-Fixed auto-detection settings
-Added Traditional Chinese translation
-Added player hint text
-Changed intro logo animation


Thank you for your support!

In an effort to fix some issues with loading heavier zones we've been making some fairly big changes to how our engine handles loading content. Textures are now loaded gradually in the background after a new zone has loaded. Peak RAM and video RAM usage are greatly reduced, and loading times are improved.

While doing this we took a thorough look at loading performance, and found various ways in which loading times can be further reduced, by a lot. We will likely implement and roll out these changes over the next few updates, and hope to eventually see some very fast load times. This should help make the late game feel more like one big area rather than a set of distant locations.



The way saving works when changing zones has been improved. The game would previously save and load on the transition zone, forcing you to immediately enter the next zone when reloading, and effectively producing a double loading screen.

Now when loading you will appear just before the entrance, and can choose whether to enter the next zone or not. In the case of checkpoints, you'll be able to continue playing on the current zone, then create a new updated checkpoint when entering the next zone again.



The muscle changes in 0.7.2 have affected many motions in unpredictable ways. We're gradually looking what's changed and hearing feedback, reviewing the motions and updating them. Two handed and one handed weapons have been updated to correct unwanted vectors and things have been smoothed out and refined.

This, as with all animation and combat related things, is an ongoing process, so keep giving us feedback.

• Asynchronous texture loads reduce resource usage and loading times
  
  
• Improved zone change saving mechanics
  
  
• Adjusted many combat motions to new muscle systems
  
  
• Improved and optimised numerous assets
  
  
• All things skeletal got some visual upgrades
  
  
• Scales finally have physics!
  
  
• Player placement of articulated bodies now works correctly
  
  
• Improved subsurface scattering shaders
  
  
• Updated some creature materials and textures
  
  
• Fixed many headers preventing texture detail setting from working correctly
  
  
• Fixed some double doors being difficult to open
  
  
• Fixed some shadowing issues with night vision
  
  
• Fixed some weapons sometimes not rendering correctly
  
  
• Fixed tokens sometimes spawning later than when they're useful
  
  
• Fixed becoming stuck when climbing the collapsed entrance on level one
  
  
• Numerous content and small bug fixes

Hello,

ManaRocks' player vTrial created and shared with us a guide to his Black War Clothes deck.

Take a look and tell us your thoughts:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1742421116

See you playing!

ManaRocks' Team