New rooms, Blessings, Heirlooms, Unlockables (Patreon)

New roomgen 

One of the things we were unhappy with was the old level layout, it was way too linear, with only 2 splits in every level. We wanted stage discovery to be a part of our mechanics however, so we had to rework our levelgen from 0. There were also a bunch of issues regarding the levelgen, such as there not being enough different room variations (they always had to be a multiple of 4x4 tiles, making complex forms harder.

Now that we are reaching a "final" state with our roomgen, this also means we can finally start working on creating additional variety in terms of the different rooms. We are also getting a solid order of new sprites in the coming days. The below screenshot is an update we got, but we the artist is reworking the grass tiles to have a better color still.   

For reference, the below image is an old version of our roomgen.

Blessings

This was a mechanic we previously covered already, but now the code has actually been implemented (don't worry, the art is temporary). 

As a quick refresher, blessings are powerful stat effect that you can increase in strength throughout a run (such as life steal). In the homebase, you can select one of 3 blessings, all with a different effect (these are the top row). 

Then, in each stage, there will be a shrine room, where one of the bottom stones will be. By going to that shrine room and "praying" you will increase the effect of your blessing (for example 3% -> 7% lifesteal). These should encourage exploration of the entire stage, and not just trying to rush straight to the boss room. 

Unlockables

Right now, everything was always unlocked, which kind of kills the fun of a roguelite you know. Whilst gear items and artifacts will be dropped randomly, the goal is to unlock new heirlooms, weapons and characters through the unlockables system, which rewards you for doing a run in a specific way, or hitting other milestones (such as based on the follower system).

These unlockables are also used for our Steam achievements, so we can start working on those as well soon (the question now remains, what is achievement worthy...)

Heirlooms

Progress Grab Bag

Some extra, smaller improvements we added over the past week:

- We've started working on some SFX, making the game sound a lot better already (goodbye gun reloading sounds upon item pickup)

- We got a whole bunch of item sprites made (not just heirlooms), and are reworking all of are (in hindsight) crappy looking item sprites. 

- We squashed a whole lot of bugs that were starting to build up.

- Our store page in now translated in Korean

What's Next

Next week will be all about getting ready for our next big Playtest, and we want to focus there on 3 main things: 

1) Sound: Our music/SFX was just plain bad/missing last time, which caused a lot of the gameplay to feel 'eh' at best and bad at worst. We want to add a whole lot of new SFX for pretty much everything the player does, so everything feels more impactful. 

2) Levels: We only had about 8 rooms before, as we knew that they would all have to be reworked with the new levelgen. Now that this has been implemented, we can start on creating a lot more varied rooms, with different challenges and enemy spawn positions, to make each run feel vastly different. 

3) Content: We've been ordering a lot of icon sprites the past week, and have been implementing more heirlooms. We want to keep this content train running the next week, so that the "each run is unique" aspect of the roguelite becomes apparent as well.