May 2, 2023

Devlog: Armored Combat and the Equipment III Update Announcement

Stoneshard - Wayfinder

Hello everyone!

In today’s devlog we’ll take a look at the new ability tree - the long awaited Armored Combat. We also have a surprise announcement to make.

Initially, we planned to add Armored Combat with the next major update, “Rags to Riches”. But since there’s still a lot of work to be done, and it’ll be a while before “Rags to Riches” is released, we decided to make this one ability tree a part of the previously unannounced Equipment Update III, which will introduce many new pieces of armor for mages and hybrid builds.

On top of all that, Equipment III will feature various tweaks to half the existing abilities. There was a lot of negative feedback regarding Ranged Weapons, Warfare (former Combat Mastery), and Shields, so these ability trees in particular were changed the most. There’ll also be certain QoL improvements, such as reworked skill hovers and a better system for skills classification. The exact details will be revealed in the patch notes.

We aim to release the Equipment Update III on May 16th. Please take note that this interim update won’t feature new bags, reworked Dungeons, the Caravan, and everything else that was explicitly presented as a part of “Rags to Riches”. The exact date for the latter will be announced a short time before its release. Another thing worth mentioning: the Equipment Update III will be compatible with your current save files.

Now let’s move onto the new ability tree. Armored Combat consists of 8 skills, spread evenly between actives and passives.

While conceptualizing Armored Combat, one of our goals was to make it useful to all armor types, both heavy and light.

As a result, its skills are designed to dynamically change depending on the equipped armor. This mechanic bears some resemblance to the one used by Shields, although the differences between armor types’ effects are significantly more noticeable.

Light armor adds bonus Dodge Chance to the skills’ effects or otherwise improves the effectiveness of evasion. It also allows using Armored Combat skills more frequently.
The main drawback of heavy armor is its hefty penalties to Max Energy, so its changes to the ability tree’s skills are focused on counteracting them in one manner or another.
Medium armor offers a compromise between Energy efficiency and Protection. For the most part, it doesn’t require any bonuses to be effective, and wearing it usually won’t modify Armored Combat skills in any way.

ACTIVE ABILITIES

“Brace for Impact!”

Grants bonus Dodge Chance and Block Chance until the next turn. While the effect is active, all received strikes receive major penalties to Accuracy, Fumble Chance, Armor Penetration and can’t crit.

Light body armor halves the skill’s Cooldown Duration and Energy Cost, and heavy armor doubles its Cooldown Duration.

This skill is useful for situations when your enemy is preparing to deliver a highly damaging or debilitating strike - “Brace for Impact!” will allow you to either negate it entirely or at least greatly reduce its effectiveness.

“Flexible Defense”

Delivers a strike to three adjacent tiles with a penalty to Weapon Damage but a large bonus to Stagger Chance. Additionally, all enemies within the skill’s area of effect receive a debuff to Weapon Damage, Fumble Chance, and Accuracy for three turns.

Light body armor prolongs the debuff’s duration to six turns, and heavy body armor replenishes 5% Max Energy for each enemy within the skill’s AoE.

Although this skill works well with all armor types, its synergy with high Dodge Chance makes it exceptionally useful to lightly armored builds.

“Unyielding Defense”

Allows to reposition to an adjacent tile, then activates an effect that grants a bonus to Control Resistance, Block Power Recovery, all body parts’ Protection, as well as Block Chance or Dodge Chance (depending on which one is higher). Receiving enemy strikes grants an extra stack of the effect.

This skill isn’t considered a stance, so it can be used together with Weaponry stances. Other than that, it provides an option to safely reposition when surrounded by enemies, as moving with abilities doesn’t trigger Attacks of Opportunity.

“Battering Ram”

“Battering Ram” performs a charge towards a target, dealing Crushing Damage to it with a chance to apply Stagger.

Light body armor halves the skill’s Cooldown, increases its Range, and allows it to grant bonus Weapon Damage for a few turns that scales with Dodge Chance. Heavy armor reduces the skill’s Range and switches the Stagger Chance to Stun Chance for a greater impact.

This skill is meant to be an alternative to “Dash” from Athletics, offering extra means of closing distance with enemies, especially if your weapon of choice doesn’t have access to charges.

PASSIVE ABILITIES

“Self-Repairs”

Reduces the rate of Durability loss (for weapons too) by 15%, increases the effectiveness of Repair Kits, and allows to dismantle armor into fragments that can be used for patching up your other armor.

Additionally, this passive grants a bonus to Bleed Resistance and Fortitude for each equipped piece of armor with more than 80% Durability.

Different fragment types replenish different amounts of Durability depending on an item’s level. For instance, a piece of cloth scrounged from a peasant shirt won’t be very effective when used for repairing an expensive mantle.

“Hard Target”

Reduces Armor Penetration of all attacks against the character.

Ranged attacks against the character also grant a bonus to Dodge Chance for a few turns while simultaneously reducing the attacker’s Accuracy. The effect triggers twice if the enemy manages to land a shot.

“Battle-Hardiness”

Using stance skills and maneuvers reduces Damage Taken until the next turn.

Light body armor also grants bonus Dodge Chance and Counter Chance for a few turns for each traveled tile (this includes tiles traversed with charges and maneuvers), and heavy body armor reduces Skills Energy Cost for each turn spent on the same tile.

“Custom Adjustments”

Each piece of equipped armor grants a special bonus depending on its type.

Light armor grants additional Protection to the respective body parts. Medium armor grants Bleed Resistance to the respective body parts. Heavy armor increases Max Energy and Energy Restoration.

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And finally, here are some of the new items that will be added with the Equipment Update III:

That’s all for now. Until next time!

May 2, 2023

Devlog 06

Covenant: Project Zero - crookedlungs

For the sixth edition of the devlog, first – it’s been a LONG time. There’s a lot of news, but – let’s start with an official update of the game description:

Covenant: Project Zero is a space saga with intergalactic trading, mystery, and action elements, weaved into an immersive storyline. We follow the adventures of John Covenant, captain of the cargo corvette “Tango”, as he and his ragtag crew of misfits try to make a buck traversing the frontier of the inhabited universe – and getting into all kinds of trouble along the way.

A lot has happened since the last devlog. Duh.

Just when we thought this game was going smoothly – our game designer Aleksandar “Sasha” Djordjevic’s VFX career provided a distraction as he got picked up to supervise visual effects for a major Amazon Prime TV show – Outer Range, Season 1.

This course of events led him to spend over a year in USA & New Mexico and quite stuck for eight long months in an extraordinarily tight COVID-19 bubble with a bunch of A-list actors. The great cast and crew made the work and being away from his family so much easier, but it’s good that the pandemic feels almost like it’s behind us now.

But the days were really long, and there was simply no time for dev work so 11000AD was put on hiatus, being an indie studio. So, after that amazing experience finally came to an end in August 2021 – the busy-bee Sasha is – the day he came back to Amsterdam, The Netherlands – he started a brand new creative studio in town.

Doing good work means people want you to do more good work. Ok. Note taken. So, to add to it, 11000AD slowly started moving back into work mode.

With the company on a good run, we decided to bring on board more folks to work on it, and we have a more solid idea of where to go next with both the VFX and gaming departments within the studio to make sure everything moves forward.

11000AD was always supposed to be the experimental lab to test things out – but now it’s also an integrated gaming division of the company, with a sign on the door, and all.

A few major technical decisions had to be made, too. Although super appealing – Godot will remain in our hearts and on our drives but until it has airtight support for targeting mobile devices – we’ll have to stick with Unity 3D to make it happen. TBH – we always planned to develop in Unity.

And – also – Covenant’s finally gone 3D! Well, actually, 2.5D. Which is still 3D, but our main characters and NPCs are sprites in 3D space. And it looks freaking awesome and cute 🙂

We can still keep the pixel art look and feel, but the coding is so much more streamlined as there are a whole bunch of amazing 3D tools we can use.

So – here are some visuals of the shape of things to come. These, by no means, are final visuals, there’s definitely much more going into shader research and different models of creating the pixel art look and feel straight out of the shader.

The biggest challenge now shifts to creating prefabs to work with this new approach and still keep the desired look. But it’s lots of fun!

More to come.

May 2, 2023

Devlog 05

Covenant: Project Zero - crookedlungs

My second update to the preview prototype is up. I’ve been thinking more and more to move to a 3D realm, so these may be the last days of a 2D approach game.

I’ve done more pixel art for the bottom floor, and it’s really starting to take shape, so even if it goes 3D, it’s going to be interesting trying to retain or reinvent the look for a pixel-art world feel. We’ve been looking over toon shaders for that, and we think it’s gonna be alright.

Although the lower deck takes a back seat to the main deck, it’s actually mighty important for the narrative. This being your proverbial interstellar cargo transporter, it’s all gonna be about the goods.

We worked on the initial planning and setup for lights and shadows, too, and worked out the basics. The screen glows are working great, and both they and the stairwells light the captain nicely.

We spent almost an hour (!) just walking around the spaceship and looking at screens. This is the kind of stuff indie development is all about. You give yourself some time to enjoy the little things.

There are a lot of functionalities ahead, but what we’re looking into now is finishing the basic look and feel, some essential designs, and animation cycles for the rest of the crew before we go full 3D.

Beyond that, we’ll be biding our figuring out interactions and items – and it’s already looking like once we start working on dialogues it’s gonna be a lot, a LOT of time to spend there.

We’ll just see where the solar winds take us!

May 2, 2023

Nexus News - 1 Year Anniversary!

Ember Knights - iKermit

Greetings, Knights!

We've just passed 1 year in Early Access and we wanted to take a moment to recap what we've accomplished as well as share a little bit about what we're working on to get ready for 1.0!

Taking all the feedback we received from our Combat Demo, we launched with the following stats and over the course of the year, added the following:

Lord Bruma got a bit of a glow-up!

We even found some early art concepts...

Skrixxa Za's cave

Rakkling Nest

Chillvalier progress

Evee's Skill Convergence

Skrixxa Za, in color

Our amazing community!

We had very modest expectations when we launched but were quickly overwhelmed with the amount of support we received. Thanks to all of you, we hit the incredible milestone of reaching an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam and grew our Discord community to over 4000 amazing members! From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for your support and trust in us to work hard to bring you the best version of Ember Knights we can!

So, now what?

We have one more update before the full version launches.
0.12 is dropping at the end of May and we're planning to include the following:

Reconnect support for disconnected players. This has been a massive undertaking but we feel pretty good about this being ready for 0.12
The ability to swap items via an overhauled Offering Pit
Improvements to the Ember Tree, Compendium and other systems
Additional boss rewards
And more!

As usual, player feedback has been an integral part of the development process and we're happy to implement a lot of player-requested features, especially the mechanic to swap items! Bob will be your new best friend!

After that, we're in the final stretch to 1.0, coming this summer. It's been extremely busy with making sure everything is ready and without spoiling too much, you can expect the following:

The fifth and final area of the story
The Praxis fight
A new weapon
A completely overhauled difficulty modifier system
Boss variants
And a few more surprises that we still have up our sleeves!

Thank you for an incredible year and we'll see you soon!

Doom Turtle