I am excited to announce that the first playable version of Loya is finally here! It contains the first biome and the first part of the main quest. This version will be sent to private testers to improve the game's onboarding and fix as many bugs as possible.
Version 0.104a
- The first Biome is now completed. - Finished the main quest series for the first biome. - Added the Ancient Golem boss. - Villagers now give randomized missions to the player - Added sleep and hunger, they reduce maxhp, sp and sp regen - Added a new class selector linked to the quest system. - Items are now automatically looted if you get near them - Chests are now shared with all group members. - Added extra tooltips to guide the player on early objectives. - Added specific minimap icons for towns caves and puzzles. - Improved water shader - You can now hold left click to attack instead of clicking every time. - Some npc dialogs now only spawn under certain conditions (quests, items etc...)
Spin the Wheel of Destiny and win fantastic prizes: Cute mounts and many more precious rewards await you!
Period: 6th March 2023 – 24th March 2023
Amazing Prizes
With a bit of good fortune, pick up these great pets for your adventures: the Festive Peach Blossom Alpaca Mount (Permanent) or the Flying Rune Disk (Permanent)!
Increase Your Odds
You can increase your chances of landing a Jackpot by collecting keys to reach the next level on the wheel: here there’s not just one but two Jackpot segments waiting for you.
Some new screenshots from Chornobyl expansion that will be released this Spring, along with new scenarios! Meanwhile, we’re testing TrackIR support that will be released really soon!
Fix crash on Windows caused by C++ exceptions not being handled properly.
Adjust ranges in combat pathing to ensure general melee range is approximately 1 tile away for humans.
Fix issue where very short paths (1 tile) would never pop off command queue, resulting in erratic behavior (e.g., the if you talked to an NPC while standing on the NPC, nothing would happen).
The Ducklands region has been greatly expanded, with a bevy of content, features, and gameplay optimizations to boot!
Journey further into the woods, plains, marshes, and gardens of the Ducklands, finding new weaponry and allies to help you venture across the Scrabdackle landscape.
New content this update:
The Ducklands region has been heavily expanded
A new spell to learn
Many new lore entries and collectibles to uncover
Several new enemies, NPCs, and soundtracks
A scrying-based sidequest rewarding players familiar with their lore!
A huge amount of new dialogue
A golf minigame!
The Ducklands are accessible from every other demo region, in the northwest of the current map. The region is by far the largest planned - while many new screens have been added, only about half of the region is accessible within the demo.
There are also a few new major features to talk about on their own:
The Challenge Menu:
This menu serves as a customizable difficulty manager that serves any player’s preference. Choose between 4 presets to determine how intense you want your experience to be, or open the advanced settings to customize every slider and toggle yourself!
Challenge Mode presets do not restrict any content, and can be changed any time without judgement. No achievements will ever be restricted to certain challenge settings. Play the way that feels best for you!
Your existing save file will be set to the way of the Poet, and new game files will prompt you to select a preset on first play.
Somehow, you begin to suspect even this menu has its secrets…
The Sticker Binder:
This menu, accessible once you’ve found at least one sticker, can be opened up to browse your stickers and pop them on to your academy notebook for fun, bonus decoration.
You can also see which stickers you’re missing here, as their silhouette will be visible. All visible stickers are collectible in the current demo.
Share your best covers using F12 to take an in-game screenshot!
Other notable changes:
Significant optimization improvements
Hundreds (not exaggerating) of bugs patches and and quality-of-life improvements have been implemented
The magic casting system has been adjusted to be clearer and more satisfying
Falling into water or a pit now deals light damage, and correspondingly, a ledge detection feature has been added to prevent accidental pitfalls. (Hazard damage can be disabled in the Challenge Menu).
This work was largely completed by early November last year, but I ended up needing to focus on something new for a while and get away from the mentality of always updating the demo. It’s lighter on content than the Blustergust Ridge update, but that’s partially because the content I’ve been working on mostly will not appear in demo updates, and partially because some of the focus of this update was on depth of systems and polishing the experience, not breadth of new things to do.
From here, I am not going to be focusing on further demo work - I’d like to eventually add a new spell in once I’ve completed it for an upcoming region, but it won’t be a major update, just a patch. The demo may receive some tuning and optimizations here and there as I implement them out for the full game, but at the moment the demo is functionally both content-complete and systems-complete.
If you’re excited about the game, please pop by our Discord server to hang out! There’s a large, active community to talk lore with, talk speedrun strategies, and generally hang around and play games with!
