Dec 23, 2023

Play Wraithbinder’s open beta now to Jan 2

Wraithbinder - Wizardfu

Fair tidings, legendary person!

Wraithbinder's open beta has begun and runs until Jan 2. Crack out your favorite weapon and prepare to slay some goat-headed demons, space pirate style.

If you haven't already, click Request Access on the Steam page and Wraithbinder will be playable in your Steam library.

Sharing your feedback on Wraithbinder's Discord server helps to make this game more awesome. Your feedback will also help improve the game for Steam Next Fest this Feburary 2024 and Early Access launch sometime after that.

Exclusive Hair Style

As a thank you for playing Wraithbinder's beta, please enjoy claiming this exclusive hairstyle. Only players of the beta will ever be able to own this item. Grab it now or forever hold your peace. Just visit the Forge on the ship in-game and purchase 'Beta Haircut.' It only costs 1 gold:

Here's part two of all the new stuff in Wraithbinder. There's also part 1 in case you missed it.

New Objects

You'll find many fun new objects to interact with. Exploding barrels damage both you and enemies, so it's best to trigger them from afar:

Watch out for raised floor plates which can trigger arrow traps:

Sometimes you will encounter chests that run away, not wanting to be opened:

Some rooms will lock themselves until you defeat all nearby enemies:

Player Experience Improvements

All enemies you encounter are now outlined in red while friendlies are outlined in green. This helps to immediately clarify who is trying to hurt you versus help you:

Whenever your character or an enemy is low on health, they will glow red. This is a visual indicator to help you notice when you are critically low on health or an enemy is nearly vanquished:

A small health bar appears beneath your feet temporarily when you are hurt. This helps you to catch a glimpse of your health reserves without having to take your eyes off the center of the screen:

Your character now glows white when you have leveled up. This, along with a persistent announcement, ought to help you to notice whenever you have an ability point to spend:

Other Improvements

Several improvements have been made to the game's art style. The shadows are now more smooth & solid. The edges of circular objects are now perfectly circular:

You can now have both hair and a helmet, allowing you to combine the two in your own way:

The Revealer relic has been improved, showing secret blocks as obviously red-colored with an X on top:

Thickets now expand to nearby blocks when re-growing:

Walls can be hit once, releasing a poof of smoke and changing to look cracked:

The boss platform falls away beneath your feet:

What's Next?

Wraithbinder will be participating in Steam Next Fest, Feb 05 - 12, 2024. There's some significant new content you will be able to experience in February's demo that won't be a part of December's beta.

Join me as I play Wraithbinder live on the opening day of Next Fest at 1pm PST. In this stream, I will be creating a new character from scratch and starting a run or two. Root for me (or not) as I attempt to beat the final boss on the first run. I will be pausing the game to answer any of your questions as they come up. Set a reminder for the event here.

An Early Access launch will follow sometime after Steam Next Fest in 2024. I will be making announcements as soon as the date is locked in.

Release Notes

Here's the full release notes for Wraithbinder's version 0.8.9 beta, in case you want all the details:

v0.8.9 : Dec 22, 2023

Gameplay:

New bosses: Rizoel (dwarf), Gzrel (archer) and Puriel (slider)
New floor types: dark floor with light switches, chase floor with new Rizoel boss
New enemies: Mages, Jumping Blobs, Chasers, Elusive Creatures, Floating Mines, Baller
New relics: Wraithbinder (increase bindable wraiths), Attack Buffer (buff wraith attack), Defense Buffer (buff wraith defense)
Bosses now have elemental effects & random sidekicks
Created fog of war
Enemies are now semi-transparent or invisible if they are covered by fog
Secret areas are entirely covered by fog
Created exploding barrels, arrow traps & chests that can run away
Created locked rooms
Created secret items hidden in a single random wall block
Surrounded goal elevator with gate blocks where you have to use the ability you've gained on that floor
Added a new type of world layout where floors lie adjacent to each other & you walk upstairs instead of use an elevator

Input:

Separated bindings into in-game versus menu bindings
Made the sword button X and dash button A to match many other top-down action RPGs
Made the A/B buttons power up attributes on the Light menu instead of having to press left/right
Got rumble working on Steam Deck and Mac

Balance:

Made it possible for rare & epic items to be found on any floor
Be able to jump over pillars
Changed wraithbind attribute to boost wraith health instead of increasing amount of bindable wraiths
Increased experience required per level a bit
Increased the curve of how much light it takes to power up attributes the more pips you've powered up
Made Boomerang cost some mana
Made the Shield last longer
Made player arrow a little less heat seaking
Reduced mana per rock a little
Be able to bind spiders as wraiths
Disabled bonus runs after victory
Reduced amount of experience Radruiel grants on death
Make equipment at the Armory cost more at higher tiers
Escalated the cost of checkpoints based on character grade

UI/UX:

Show a small health bar beneath your feet temporarily when you are hurt
Made all enemies outlined in red & friendlies outlined in green
Made your character glow white when you have leveled up & have an ability point to spend
Made enemies & your character glow red when low on health
Increased the quality of all fonts & all UI elements
Improved the UI for the Leaderboard
Made the inventory detail popup not cover the character
Made character selector a list instead of a dropdown-like thing
Announce to powerup using the forge on the ship whenever you have light
Announce on death what the player keeps
Announce that checkpoint has been depleted

Art Improvements:

Be able to have both hair & helmet
Made shadows more smooth & solid
Made circular voxel edges perfectly circular
Improved the swoosh attack animations
Solved high-res models having some garbled voxels
Solved white pixels left behind when enemies fall off an edge
Solved some lights becoming really intense
Made Guardian more noticeable
Increased the amount of sloshing in the health & mana baubles
Made item & equipment icons able to be runtime 3d renderings of models
Made many small visual improvements to animations, models & artwork

Audio:

Create a sound for when enemies wake up & are alerted
Solved music stuttering when transitioning between floors

Other:

Improved the Revealer relic to show secret blocks as obviously red-colored with an X on top
Created the Vim Nudger (+5 max mana) & Vigor Nudger (+5 max health) mini-relics
Made thickets expand to nearby blocks when re-growing
Randomized the order of bosses & floor paradigms
Placed some secret items on the boss floor
Created unique art & mechanics for the Wraithbind & Shield gates
Made revealing a boss announce it's name
Made walls able to be hit once & change to look cracked
Made the Blink ability's animation trail red to indicate that it does damage
Added more variation to the room patterns
Made the boss platform fall away beneath your feet
Made the camera rotate during a boss reveal
Added an menu choice to Exit Game within a run
Prefer the word "run" to "game" on the main menu
Made changing the window size on Mac and Linux work properly
Laid some important foundational work to the game's systems in preparation for online multiplayer

Bug Fixes:

Made items warp to a good location if they accidentally land inside a wall
Solved not being able to hold Y to activate a Guardian
Remove old hair when buying new hair
Solved buying a scroll sometimes didn't unlock the attribute for powering up
Solved if you pick up a relic before the others spawn you can get multiple
Solved being able to pick up covered chest relics again if you leave & return to the dungeon
Solved closing the equipment menu but character is not wearing new armor
Solved nearby creeps taking team damage whenever player chains lightning
Solved sometimes there is a oneway door with the switch on the wrong side
Solved sometimes there is no button shown when you need to hold Y to interact with something
Solved shield duration says 120s instead of 1.2s
Solved a random crash

Performance:

Increased the speed of rendering shadows

That's all for now. Cheers and happy holidays,

Nat
Code, Art & Music

Dec 23, 2023

Thanks for an amazing year!

Trailmakers - alexirons92

A year has passed and what a year it has been.

The Updates

1.6 Wings and Weapons

In Spring we introduced 1.6 Wings and Weapons as well as Airborne - our biggest campaign to date - which was played by more than 50,000 of you which is just overwhelming. 1.6 gave the players the long requested Center of Forces feature in the builder along with miniguns, ailerons, balloons and most importantly: Chirpos!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2285970/Trailmakers_Airborne_Expansion/

1.7 Spacebound

Our most ambitious update to date: Spacebound! With our first teaser reaching almost 400,000 views on YouTube we had a hunch that we were making the right choice. With the new vast Space Sector map you all found your place among the stars and destroyed the pirate base on Nassau and all their pew pew turret towers to claim the loot for yourself.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2579530/Trailmakers_Space_Voyager_Pack/

Christmas!

The Christmas Island is not a new concept to Trailmakers but we definitely expanded on the idea (and the island!). As you may have seen we are also giving the VIP seat away for free from December 24 - 31 to both PC and console users!

Everything in between

22 Build Challenges with more than 1000 submissions across all platforms. We truly celebrated the community’s creativity and for the first time in Trailmakers history it culminated in one final Builder of the Year challenge that will be an annual thing going forward. Because we never get tired of showing off the skill of our players.

Thank you for playing, Trailmakers

Let’s round off the year with some stats. We are blown away by the sheer number of Trailmakers in our community and we hope to smash all of these records in 2024. Again, thank you so much for playing our game. We promise to keep it exciting in the new year. ♥

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