Dec 17, 2020

New Legendary Dungeon "Lord of the Things" and Gold Event

Shakes and Fidget - Leander Playa Games

Get ready for the Mines of Gloria! On Friday, December 18 at 00:01 the brand-new LEGENDARY DUNGEON "Lord of the Things" will open its dark gates and you'll have 10 days to face infamous monsters of Mid Earth and fight for mighty rings and undiscovered treasures. New legendary items that are even better than epics and are guaranteed not to be found anywhere else. Real adventurers should not miss this opportunity!

Moreover, we will have our GOLD EVENT from Friday to Sunday!

Full list of new features, changes and fixed bugs:

New features:

Legendary Dungeon: new Lord of the Things dungeon
Legendary Dungeon: new Lord of the Things legendaries
Legendary Dungeon: many new rooms, sounds and voice samples
Legendary Dungeon: new dungeon statistics (fastest victory, best run…)
Tutorials: added Holy Grail and stable entries

Changes:

Legendary Dungeon: reworked graphics of several rooms
Legendary Dungeon: tweaked drop chance of items
Legendary Dungeon: tweaked drop chance of legendaries you already found (fewer duplicates)
Legendary Dungeon: tweaked gold reward (the more playthroughs, the less gold)
Legendary Dungeon: if the dungeon is locked (after 10 days), you can no longer log in again and enter
Legendary Dungeon: certain animations are faster now
Scrapbook: added info text to "Legendaries" tab
Scrapbook: reduced font size of descriptions of legendaries
Guild: reworked colors of members’ activity
Magic shop: potions capped at 5 million gold now

Fixed bugs:

Legendary Dungeon: legendaries are no longer invisible in inventory
Legendary Dungeon: fixed a cursor bug when leaving the dungeon
Legendary Dungeon: fixed "Not in dungeon " bug
Legendary Dungeon: fixed some text errors
Legendary Dungeon: fixed a display bug of room 200
Legendary Dungeon: death screen no longer displayed too early after trap or monster attack
Legendary Dungeon: disabling ambient sounds also disables the correct dungeon sounds now
Legendary Dungeon: legendary shields (warriors) give the correct (lower) amount of resources now
Mannequin: added missing "Set gem?" security question
Mannequin: sales price (witch) and resources of an item displayed now
Magic shop: fixed price of potions for players level 600+

Enjoy the new Legendary Dungeon!

Dec 17, 2020

Feature Preview : Character Creation & Skills

StarCrawlers Chimera - Thunderflux

Hey all! Periodically before launch into Early Access I'll be sharing some screenshots of different features and giving an overview of how their systems work. Please note, these are early development previews, so expect things to change. Let's start off with Character Creation and Skills!

This is the Character Creation menu and first thing you'll see when starting a new game of Chimera.
A character is built by choosing 7 different Skill Trees to define what your abilities will be. Skill Trees belong to different Archetypes :

Muscle Archetype uses brute force and raw power to achieve victory.
Guile Archetype is favoured by roguish, roguelike, and rogue-lite types.
Intellect Archetype is for people who are better than everyone else.

Archetypes are a guide for how your character will play and what stats you will favour, but there are no restrictions on what combination of Skill Trees you can select. You could build a stealthy melee hacker or go full war machine and make a heavy weapons pyromaniac soldier. Or combine them. I don't judge.

Skill Trees are also informally categorised into Class / Weaponry / Utility trees :

Class Trees contain signature abilities (you might notice some familiar faces from StarCrawlers on the top row)
Weaponry Trees improve your use of different weapon types (melee, ranged, heavy melee, heavy ranged, dual wielding, etc)
Utility Trees let you interact with the world differently (lockpicking, bashing doors, sneaking)

Once your skills are selected, pick a difficulty and optional permadeath with Ironmode, slap a name on yourself and you're ready to play.

In game, you'll be able to bring up the Skills Menu to add unlocked abilities to your action bar, assign Skill and Perk Points, and plot your character growth. This randomly genned character has the Soldier, Smuggler and Force Psyker class trees, Pistolier, Gunslinger (dual ranged weapons) and Smashmaster weaponry trees, and Loot Hunter utility tree. Not bad for a random character.

Most Skill Trees have a combination of active and passive abilities and all begin with the 1st ability unlocked for free. To unlock the next ability in the tree, simply assign a Skill Point which you earned by gaining a character level. Skill Trees will start Early Access with 3 - 5 abilities, with more added as we refine what each tree brings to the game.

Perk Points are earned by accomplishing something on each floor (no spoilers on what yet) and can be assigned to certain abilities to unlock a bonus effect. In the example here, the Fan the Hammers ability (which can trigger chained bonus attacks on a target) can use a Perk Point to gain Spitfire, greatly increasing the chance of a bonus attack when the hit is critical. Perk Points are limited, but can be added or removed to abilities at will, so you can experiment with which perks you like.

All the Skill Trees shown are currently implemented and will be ready to play as soon as Early Access starts. I look forward to hearing what everyone thinks about their favourite or least favourite trees and what to add and improve!

Dec 17, 2020

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Oortmas!

Boundless - SamF

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. There’ll be Cuttletrunks honking and meteorites glowing when group hunts are near!

Boundless will be getting into the festive mood from 1200 UTC on the 17th December for two weeks, ending on the 31st December. The Known Worlds of Boundless will be experiencing seasonally-appropriate snowy conditions, and the local wildlife will be wrapping up warm in their traditional Oortmas hats.

For those of you who have yet to be visited by the Ghost of Oortmas past, let’s recap just how the Boundless universe changes over the holiday season. Those Oortmas creatures will drop extra-special Green Candy Canes. These are then used to craft decorative Gift Boxes, and festive Oortmas trees with which to decorate your builds.

What’s new for 2020?

As always, we have some new props to share this year. We have two brand new festive centrepieces with which you can decorate your beacons - Roasted Spitter for the meat eaters, and an Earthyam platter for vegetarian citizens.

We’ve got some very cool new goodies coming to the Exchange for a limited time only. These are the Snowflakes Body Paint, and two wearables - the Snowglobe and the Guiding Star.

Another major change over this time of year is the introduction of the famous Snowball Meteorites. Let’s go over how those work again…

Snowball Meteorites 101

For the duration of the Winter Event, special Snowball Fight Meteorite events will occur on Starter Worlds. Rather than a regular strike, a giant Snowball will crash to the surface of the World, bringing with it a swarm of special Snow Spitters, which will launch their chilly projectiles at Citizens, and are impervious to regular Weapons.

You’ll have to fight snow with snow! Gather enough Ice from the Meteorite to Handcraft a Bag of Snowballs, and give the icy critters everything you’ve got! These will do direct damage to one target, and are only effective against Snow Spitters. There will also be no Defeat Penalty on these events, with Players instead building up ‘embarrassment’ from being hit, before heading to the sanctum having lost their ‘Meteorite Life’. As well as Red Candy Canes the rewards for these Snowball Fights include Food, Brews and Gifts. Poorly behaved Citizens may end up with Coal…

What else is coming?

Red Candy Canes are used to craft Snow Citizens and Twinkles, giving your beacon some festive cheer for the winter. Elsewhere, our previous Oortmas wearables are back in the exchange for two weeks only, with the Father Oortmas beards, with the Oortmas Hat and three designs of Winter Scarf all returning from last year, and 2018’s Rudolph the Red Nosed Wildstock antlers and Snow Citizen mask joining them on sale once again.

You’ll also want to keep an eye out for special Candy Seeds, which are planted to grow the Candy Totem tool as a crop. Not to forget Oorty!

There’s a lot to see and do at Oortmas, and we’ve had great fun getting stuck into the snowball fights with you all down the years, so we’ll see you there for another round!

Dec 17, 2020

Devlog - Fresh Alpha

Devader - marcgfx

I'm not sure if this is the right thing to do or not. But I've got a devlog over on tigsource and decided to maybe start posting here too.

Variation or Chaos

The original release of Devader has 14 different types of minor enemies that are just spiders. There are others too, but the spiders are pretty much the filler unit to add that extra bit of chaos and support the bigger enemies. In an earlier post I mentioned adding a ton of new alternatives to the spiders with different behaviors. So instead of 14 small enemies (peons) I had over 60...

A level in Devader is split into 6 waves + boss wave. Each wave has a simple definition specifying which of the 14 spiders will appear. This can look like this [2] or [1,8] or [-5]. [2] means only spider 2 can appear. [1,8] activates spider 1 and 8. [-5] allows all spiders from 0 to 5 to appear.

To prevent having to redo everything I made 4 groups out 56 peons, so 4 groups of 14. Spawning peon [1] now meant randomly selecting from the 4 groups. So peon A1, B1, C1 or D1. This turned out to be very chaotic. I then switched to seeded-random to chose which enemies would appear in which wave. So wave X would always only spawn A1 or B1, but no longer both.

The random seed is determined by the players upgrade choices. This makes sense for the game as the upgrade choices determine the outcome of the game with different final bosses and various other things.

Play-testing showed me the experience was still highly chaotic as every wave would throw something entirely new at you. The player never had time to get to know an enemy as it would mostly only appear once and then never again. So instead of per wave I now make the choice of peon on a level basis. There are 7 levels. Each level specifies 2 new peon types that can appear. So in a full run you will only encounter 14 different peons (not entirely true). This seems to be a fairly good solution, but it will need some balancing and testing for sure.

https://i.imgur.com/7A4Hew4.jpg
img desc: The gray creatures spawn the blue pulsating stationary explosive creatures. It can get out of hand when your main damage dealer is blocked by the outer ring, as is the case here. (fixed)

Besides the peons I had also created a huge amount of creatures I call grunts. These beasts are much larger and more menacing. To include them into the game I again used the seeded random information I had defined for each wave. Only waves without mini-bosses or bosses can spawn grunts and when one appears it reduces the amount of peons that can be spawned. It's pretty straight forward and should work nicely, but certainly needs some balancing and testing.

Power-Ups

Power-ups in Devader have been very straight forward. There is hardly a reason not to pick them up, there is not much of a choice going on. Weapon power-ups stack and you get the rewards from both while they last. Power-Ups have limited ammo, it was my way of trying to make it a good idea to preserve them by not shooting. I don't think it really does, or at least it does not work on me. As picking up power-ups is a no brainer, it's not really interesting. To make things worse not having power-ups kind of sucks, as you feel a lot less powerful. If you get destroyed you lose them all so it's quite troubling. To mitigate this, I added a new feature. When you lose your bot the power-ups you are carrying are blown out and you get the chance to pick them back up. I started off by allowing weapon power-ups to be retrieved and eventually added HP + SP to the list. HP and SP add +1 capacity to health and shields.

It makes dying less punishing, but also gives you the choice of taking additional risk to retrieve what you have lost or to accept the loss. In a multi player game your allies will have to go in and collect your stuff as respawning takes a bit of time. I have not tested it yet though.

HP is special in Devader. There is a container you can pick up and it restores all your health. If you are at full health you get +1 HP-capacity. It's pretty valuable to get the latter, but if you just lose a bit of HP you miss out. You can restore HP by grazing bullets and picking it up later, but sometimes there are no bullets. My above changes lead to destroyed HP containers leaving the same remnants as if you had just lost your robot. So a destroyed container no longer restores your full HP but gives you +1 HP capacity. I noticed while playing that I sometimes rather waited for the containers to get destroyed as it was more beneficial. But waiting is not really fun. Soooo... I decided to make containers destructible for the player. This was actually something that was in the game right at the start, but at the time it didnt really work. Now it makes it a lot more interesting.

Linux issues

On a different note I received some linux-customer feedback and one player (maybe 2) have an issue with gamepad on Linux. It seems like this is not something that I am directly causing and assume it's a problem with webkit. Main issue is that I've made a huge amount of changes to the game and I am not in the most balanced of versions right now. Nonetheless after plugging through all of the above I decided to make a new version. Windows went fine, but the Linux version did not work off the bat. Turns out my older laptop no longer can run the game, due to the fact that I now have a 8192x8192 texture atlas and no longer 4096x4096. Turns out 4096 was the upper limit... So now what do I do? I currently only see one option, if it's supposed to work on older hard-ware and that is recalculating the texture atlas for every level. AAAAARGH. Not something I want to do as it will cause delays. I have no idea what can be expected from most peoples hard-ware.

Debug Build

If you want to see what I am working on, switch to the Alpha branch! There a hundreds of changes that no one besides myself has tested. There is a new robot, that might not ever be included but it's in there now and can be tested. No explanations/tutorials I am afraid. Expect some things to break or not be good. Feedback appreciated.

Discord: https://discord.gg/AWhsvN3