Happy Tuesday, everyone!

I know we dropped the ball on our Friday digests for the last two weeks. We've been a bit busy celebrating birthdays, Easter and working on some game changing new features in Swords 'n Magic.

Class System Progress

The last couple weeks I've been working hard on converting everything over to the new classes system in Swords 'n Magic. I talked a lot about this in the last dev digest if you missed it and want to catch up. The classes are entirely implemented other than saving. After the character skills debacle of 2021, tying everything into the save system has always got me a bit on edge, so I'm putting it off until everything else is in place so it's easier to simply roll back that one change if I mess everything up. Take this as a warning though, changing things this drastic could come at a cost. I'll do everything I can to avoid any lost progress though.

Currently the class system finds your average skills and determines you class levels based on those. So if you have 10 sword skill, 10 shield skill and 0 mace skill your Warrior class level will be 6.6 (rounded up to 7). Any experience toward the next level will be lost. I could build a system for this but I just don't think it's worth the time. To make up for it, I'm rounding up everyone's average to the next level.

Class-Based Passive Skill Trees

The last devlog also touched on the super feature creep idea of class-based skills...

Well I've decided that adding a skill tree for each class is 100% the right way to go. In fact... I've already implemented a pretty robust skill tree that works like you'd expect based on other games in the genre.

I haven't decided how often you'll earn skill points yet, but you'll be awarded the skill points you're owed when you log in for the first time after the next major update. You can spend points in either a major passive node, or a minor passive node. Major nodes grant you a new passive perk that can change your playstyle. This could grant a new effect to your attacks, trigger an event on a crit, or even replace your primary attack with something new. These effects should be a pretty big change to how you play the game. Minor nodes simply grant you a permanent attribute point in a related stat, such as Focus or Resilience.

Here's a mockup of what a tree might look like:


Right now I'm thinking every 5 levels will award you a point starting at level 1, and the new level cap might end up being 60. Right now with a level cap of 30 still in place you should be able to reach the top of a single tree in your primary class.

I also want to make sure players have a variety of playstyles, so I want to add some limitations into the skill trees. You'll earn about 13 skill points in each class, but you'll have a limit to how many total points you can spend, putting you somewhere between 1.5 to 2 primary classes. I'm not entirely sure how this system will work yet, so I'll keep you posted.

Of course you'll be able to reset your points anytime throughout the game. You'll just need a Potion of Amnesia, which is already finished and implemented. Once you drink this potion all your points will be returned to you to redistribute them however you like. This will likely become a high level alchemy craft as well as a rare drop or quest reward item. Perhaps a traveling vendor could sell them for a good price as well.

Here's a sample of a few of the skills I've already got implemented. Please keep in mind these are passive skills and rarely will they give you access to entirely new active abilities. They're also entirely subject to change at any moment, especially before they launch this spring.

Mage skill examples:

• Arcane Mastery - Mage spells now cost 20% less magic to cast
  
  
• Spell Weaving - Mage spells now cast 20% faster
  
  
• Pyromancy - Ember spells now have a 10% crit chance and Ember attuned weapons have a 20% chance to ignite the target.
  
  
• Frostbite - Frost staff attacks slow enemies. Slowed enemies have a 20% chance to become Frostbitten, taking damage over time.

Arcane Skill Changes

You may have noticed that there's now a Frost and Ember skill. Arcane how now been split into 4 different skills, Ember, Frost, Earth and Sky. Due to the way the project was set up, all of your Arcane skill will go straight into Ember, likely giving everyone a high level Mage class right off the bat, but 0 Druid class since both Earth and Sky are brand new skill types. Life has also changed to Order to contrast Chaos better for the Mystic class.

And don't worry, martial classes have passives as well, but I don't want to spoil any of those designs quite yet.

Most of these passives have been relatively easy to implement so far, but I'm sure there will be some hiccups along the way.

I feel like these trees are that dash of permanent progression we've been needing. I can't wait to get everyone's feedback when they go live.

Attribute Name Changes

In the process of the class changes I also decided that our primary attributes needed a bit of a rework. It's minor, but I've changed the name of "Max Magic" to "Aura", representing how strong your magical aura is used to store magic around you. There's a lore book in game that talks about this a bit and it made sense to change the name to better mirror Vitality, which is your maximum health.



The only other new attribute name you'll see is Willpower, which is simply Focus for magic based skills. This will be implemented shortly and will also be seen in the next major update.

Steam Trading Cards

That about wraps up what I've been working on in the game. But I have another neat announcement for you.

Right when this announcement went live, we also launched officially Swords 'n Magic Steam trading cards!



Play the game to unlock 4 cards of the set of 8. Collect all 8 by trading with friends or buying them via the Steam marketplace to unlock the first Swords 'n Magic badge as well as random chances to unlock exclusive Swords 'n Magic emoticons and backgrounds for your Steam profile. Every set of 8 you unlock can be turned into the next badge tier all the way up to a coveted foil badge.

I'm excited to see all the trading card trade chat in the Discord LFG channel!

Thanks again for your patience in this update. I think you'll all be blown away at all the awesome changes in the game. :)

• Fix crash when entering Azathothian portal after Cthulhu attacks in new game.
  
• Maybe prevent High Chambers of Yendor boss from continuing to attack after a fight under certain circumstances.

Save The Date 28/04/2023!!!

After 8 months of development, it's finally time to release Version 1.0 of The Unfound Soul.

Update

• Character Level with Every Run

• Improved Frame Rate
  
• There are too many Bug Fixes to list :>

Greetings commanders,

We're excited to report that Sampstra Games has just released an insightful and detailed Let's Play of Zodiac Legion on their YouTube channel.

What sets this Let's Play apart is Sampstra Games' thorough explanation of the game's rules and mechanics, including flanking, support, pinning, attack rolls, and defense rolls, so it is a great introduction video to the game.

You can watch the Let's Play here:


Note that the video ends on a cliffhanger, though!

Remember to like and subscribe to their channel for more tactical and strategic content.

May the stars align in your favor,
Alexandre

We will be performing server maintenance in the EU, NA and SEA regions on the following schedule:

[Scheduled date and time]

April 12, 2023
9:00 ~ 12:00 (CET)
AM 3:00 ~ AM 6:00 (EST)
PM 4:00 ~ PM 7:00 (GMT+8)

Schedules may change due to unexpected problems.

STALCRAFT servers will be unavailable during maintenance.

The update makes minor changes to the game.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and we thank you in advance for your understanding and patience.

If you have any questions, please visit our support website.

Regards,
EXBO team.

Welcome Wanderers! We want to share our updated roadmap with you all so that you get some insight on what we have planed in our upcoming content updates until the full 1.0 release.

Lets start with a recap of the last 6 months of Striving for Light development.

Game development is a very dynamic process as we are constantly listening to player feedback and also schedule our updates according to how the game evolves over time. Some features might not bring as much value to players like others so we reschedule planed features to a later or earlied date. This not only affects the announced features but also features we only had in mind and not even announced yet.

So looking back at our last posted Roadmap from October last year we implemented most of the announced features along many further features we did not even have on the road map like adding legendary weapons, adding rare/epic weapons with random generated weapon stats or adding 6 new unique playable characters, map tiers, game difficulty settings, twitch& youtube integration, leaderboard build viewer and much more...



We specifically tried to re-schedule features to release as early as possible so that they will get as much testing-time as possible so that we can nail those core features like itemisation, weapon stats, characters and map tiers for endgame balancing for the 1.0 release. That said we did not forget about lore notes and more story content and the steam deck verification.

From the last posted roadmap until early this year we released 5 major content updates and over 30 patches and updates featuring plenty of new content including 5 new skills and 4 new weapons.

We had some great ideas for a fun spin off and released an arena roguelite bullet-heaven game on the end of February 2023. This has proven as a great testing ground for performance optimisation and further QoL improvements like player effect transparency settings, new dynamic enemy health bars, player hit overlay effect, a completely new +20 minute rhythmic and intense alternative soundtrack, new colour coded damage numbers, and so much more. Those features are now all available in Striving for Light. If you haven't checked out the alternate Soundtrack option its available from the options menu.

This not even includes the countless new ideas we had because we were looking at Striving for Light from a complete different angle while designing a new & fun resource system that lets you directly jump into the action. We applied many of the lessons learned and rolled new variations into Striving for Light with a massive 0.8.1 update which was the biggest change we ever did to the codebase of a game ever. As announced this came with some more introduced bugs than on our usual content updates.

After the release of Survival (in the last 50 days) we already released 2 major content updates and over 14 updates and patches which include 7 new added skills and 2 new weapons, playable characters, in game achievements, map tiers, game difficulty tiers, rare/epic weapon system with weapon stats and many more improvements.

Just a few days ago we have released the hideout content update, adding 6 unique playable characters, new main menu, character selection, 3 new secret bosses with a new boss arena, UI overhauls, rare/epic weapons new crafting options and more and are already setting sails for the next content udpates.

That being said we want to ensure that all present content is in good shape and that remaining bugs are hunt down before we go full force onto the next content update. So we will take some time for bugfixes and improvements for especially those areas that could need some long awaited improvements and fixes.

A good example for this is the Shard of Refund algorithm which just now has received a complete rewrite to make refunding possible even on the most complex and difficult tree-shapes. Game development is not always straight forward and some implemented features turned out to simply be more complex than initially expected and just need more time to implement. As we focus on spending our development time on features that serve the majority of the playerbase first, improvements like this are split up along the regular updates to not have weeks without updates and then only an updated respec algorithm that only a few players deeply care about.

So whats on the horizon for next Striving for Light updates until the full 1.0 release:


Next to the pushed back features of the previous roadmaps we will start working on the new parallel secret dungeons that will let you aquire new set items that can be combined to grant you new & never seen before powers in the world of Striving for Light. These powers will be active abilities that are granted by the new set item types that require to actively trigger those abilities. Some of them might as well carry some passive abilities. These new dungeons will impose new challenges with great rewards.
We will further implement new skills & weapons as we have always done. We plan to add at least one new map with new enemies and bosses and a new gatekeeper. Along the new map we are working on additional map and environment decorations to make the environments feel more alive and diverse. There will be more story content and more / new voice acting and we will implement steam achievements for the full 1.0 release.

As always this is just the bare bone planed features until the full 1.0 release of Striving for Light. Most likely there will be more features added as the game evolves and grows of the next updates. If you have suggestions always feel free to drop them on our Discord or the steam forums.

We hope that this gave you some insight into the past and future Striving for Light development.

You are invited to join the community on discord and discuss the future of Striving for Light with other players and participate in the ongoing development of Striving for Light.

Join the official discord community!

In less than 24 hours GHOSTWARE: Arena of the Dead will launch in Early Access. This marks another step on the development road. A road that started with a small project which was meant to be a nostalgic discourse and satire on the state of late '90s shooters. A project that now goes by the name of GHOSTWARE. Many days have passed since its conception and many will pass until the game is ready for full release.

Until then, let's together enjoy the journey ahead of us. Here is what you can expect from Early Access for GHOSTWARE - compiled into an FAQ:


GHOSTWARE is developed by a handful of people in their spare time. Early Access will allow the team to grow and fully focus on development. Not to mention that your feedback will be essential in making the game as good as it can be.


GHOSTWARE will be in development for a period of around 8 months, which would translate to a full release in late Q4 2023 or early Q1 2024.


The full version will have significantly more content for you to enjoy. Besides a greater roster of enemies, you can expect more grandiose boss fights, new maps, story episodes, and various other elements that are not yet present. Furthermore, the Arcade mode will receive a plethora of updates as well.

As to the price difference, on the 12th of April you will be able to get the game for 14.99$ with a 15% launch discount. At the end of the development cycle you can expect the game’s price to rise slightly.


On the 12th of April you will have access to the first episode, which will include:

• 4 chapters, 12+ levels, most of which can be revisited to hunt for extra items.
  
• A full “base” arsenal.
  
• Classic arena game modes such as Deathmatch, King of the Hill, Capture the Flag
  
• 8 enemy types
  
• The Arcade mode which will allow you to set up your own custom matches against bots

As we have mentioned at the beginning, your input will be invaluable. We will be listening to your feedback on various platforms (Discord, Twitter, etc.) in order to deliver a better game. Keep an eye out for closed betas for upcoming episodes as well!

With update 0.8.2.2 we are improving the Shard of Refund - Respec algorithm so that the shard should actually be able to refund every valid skill that does not disconnect other skill nodes from the origin.

Actully we are really excited about this new algorithm as this was not the most straight forward feature to implement. It took several iterations to make it working for all thinkable complex tree shapes and node connections. Previously you would find yourself using a Shard of Refund and the skill node would simply not be refunded if you had bad luck and the validator algorithm which is crawling along all the active branches of the skill tree got stuck on a dead end. The new algorithm should now be able to crawl the complete tree no matter how much dead ends and how complex the shapes and connections are.

This is the new algorithm in action:



The feedback we have received and also the gameplay we watched mostly showed that the Shard of Refund was the least used skill tree shard. Especially in endgame scenarios most players probably have given up hope that the Shard would actually work on important branches as the tree simply just got to complex for the old algorithm.

The new algorithm might now make the Shard of Refund an acutal useful tool to revert some early run decissions and respec depending on your weapon drops and how the skill tree evolves. Even in endgame scenarios you should now be able to rely on the Shard of Refund to fine tune your builds.

To celebrate this we have also implemented a new respec sound and visual effect that should make respecing feel more impactful and fun.



We have also implemented this effect for the Tree of Light.

• Keybindings have been fixed and can now be accessed in game from the pause menu --> options menu.

If you encounter any bugs or issues please report them so that they can be fixes as soon as possible. The best way to engage in the ongoing development of Striving for Light is our discord:

Join our official discord!

Small bugfixes

* Fix 2 reported crashes due to nil references