Ancient Dungeon VR
Hotfix ea0.1.3.6
- fixed boss damage in hard mode being double even with clumsy modifier disabled
- fixed floating tables in one of the new rooms
Small Content Update: Hard Mode Modifiers, new items, new Insight upgrade
Changelog
- return of the christmas slime
- hard mode now has run modifiers, which increase the difficulty of your playthrough, but also reward you with more insight
- 1 new insight upgrade
- 8 new relics
- 4 new achievements
- a few new rooms
- fixed several bugs
Devlog #11 - Multiplayer is coming in 2023!
Multiplayer
It's confirmed! Ancient Dungeon will get multiplayer next year. We do not have a release date yet because we still have a lot of work to do in the coming months to ensure that everything will run smoothly. We also still have a lot to plan out and test to make it work reliably. You can expect more detailed information on multiplayer in the next devlogs, but here are a few questions and answers for multiplayer:
- Release date? Not confirmed yet, hopefully sometime in Spring 2023, but this will most likely change!
- How many players can play together? The default mode will be 2 player coop but we also plan on supporting up to 4 players if we don't run into any issues with networking/data usage or performance requirements
- How do people connect to each outher? People can connect to each other in the homebase via a room code.
- How are relics/coins/keys handled? Our goal is to offer toggleable settings for a lot of things to enable players to play how they want with each other. For example, people can enable coin share (cash is shared between all players) or disable it (every player has the cash they collect). When a player picks up a relic, only that player will get the effect, but we will probably also offer settings to make it apply to all players. We are still in the planning stage for all of these settings so expect some more information on that soon.
- What about dungeon difficulty? We plan on adding difficulty scaling to the game in order to accomondate multiple players. This means increasing enemy HP, spawning more enemies, and making the dungeons bigger.
- Friendly fire? Currently not planned, but we might look into it if demand is there.
- PVP? Not planned
- Will Multiplayer be crossplay? Yes, crossplay is supported.
- Do milestones/etc work in multiplayer? Yes
- Will mods work with multiplayer? We can't guarantee that mods will work out of the box with multiplayer, but simple mods (for example adding new items) will most likely work without issues.
- How will player deaths be handled? We are still looking into it. We will most likely offer multiple options, such as reviving players with food, or losing the run when one player dies, etc.
Release on other platforms
We are currently also working on releasing the game on other platforms. In a few days, Ancient Dungeon should be available on Pico 4 and Pico Neo 3. We are also working on releasing the game on another platform early next year (if everything goes according to plan).
Other Content
Work has already started on the points of interest system. Since multiplayer has been in development simultaneously to the points of interest system, it remains to be seen which will be finished first. Our goal is to get multiplayer done as quickly as possible in order to have a reworked code base which we can then use to add new content. So expect points of interest to release after (or alongside) multiplayer.
We are also almost finished with an improved modding workflow, by releasing a language server for Visual Studio Code, which makes it possible for modders to get autocomplete information (with hints, documentation and more) for their items, achievements, etc. See the gif below:
Once that is release, we will also start producing some modding tutorial videos so everyone can get into modding a lot more easily than before.
Thank you everyone for all the support! I know the wait between updates takes a long time, but I assure you we are working as fast as possible to get all of this content out to you soon! The wait will be worth it.
Hotfix ea0.1.3.2
- lore rooms are now a different color on the minimap (meaning that bat ear can now also identify them)
- renamed a few items and updated their icons
- fixed forge embers bugging out the ghost fights sometimes
- fixed music looping in a weird way when the game is paused when entering a new dungeon
- fixed journal page collection not showing the Cartographer pages until a lore page is found
- fixed modding on quest
- fixed ghost teleport attack not checking if the player is dead, resulting in a softlock
- fixed foam bat resetting when loading a run
- fixed bat ear not working in a loaded run
- fixed bargain signed in blood + dis armor money glitch
- heavy yoke now does nothing when the player has no hearts and only ethereal hearts
- fixed beast journal pages sometimes spawning in cradle corridors, creating a softlock
- fixed homebase not getting disabled when in a loaded run
- fixed cybershoes not working
- the game now creates versioned saves, making upgrading to a new game version a lot safer and also allowing downgrades (also multiple save slots in the future)
- the foundation for localization support has been added. Custom languages can not yet be added to the game, but it will be possible soon
Small Content Update: Lore expansion
- reworked some journal pages to make them more connected to the game
- sealed souls ghost fights are now unlocked by collecting all journal pages that belong to each ghost
- added 6 new items
Hotfix ea0.1.2.7
- fixed game not reinitializing correctly after death when the game window is not in focus
- fixed AppSW causing weird controller tracking errors in Virtual Desktop
- the game now uses the pointer pose for the selection ray to make it more comfortable with the controllers
Devlog #10 - Small update soon, More info on future updates
Small content update on September 15
Ancient Dungeon will release on the Quest Main Store on September 15, 10AM Pacific Time. Along with this release, there will be a small content update on both platforms as well as a rewrite and expansion of the games journal pages to make it align with our future planned content. First, all journal pages that had no real connection to other parts of the game ("The Thief", "The Innocent") will be replaced by journal pages relating to the sealed souls adventurers. Unlocking ghost fights will also change: You need to find all journal pages that belong to a certain soul in order to unlock its ghost fight. This will flesh out each of the soul delves and make the journal pages more connected to the rest of the game.
There will also be entirely new journal pages concerning the **Main Story** of the game. When the player finished a run, new journal pages will appear which will further expand on the lore of the game and hint on future content.
All in all, there will be 24 new journal pages for you to find and read through. We have also added 6 new items for you to find in the dungeons.
More future content
Since we did not have too much time adding content for the main store release update (QA deadlines, preparations for marketing, bugfixing on the OpenXR update, and lots of other behind the scenes work for the main store release), we will focus on a bigger content update as the update after the main store release update. In general there are 4 things we want to add very soon. Depending on the amount of time we need, we might split them up into 2 updates to reduce waiting time for you.
Points of Interest system
This is probably going to be the biggest addition to the game and will make the dungeons a lot more varied and interesting. This system can be understood as a compromise between development time and dungeon variation. Initially, we wanted to have an alternate floor for each of the current floors (except The Cradle), with new enemies, new rooms and a new boss. These alternate floors would be the same difficulty wise as the original floors but appear randomly in order to make runs feel more unique. However, there are a few issues with this approach:
- Development time: Creating a new floor takes a lot of development time. Even if we can reuse some enemies from their original counterpart, creating a new floor will probably take around 2 months of dev time until they are fully functional, balanced and varied enough. Multiply this by 4 and we are looking at more than half a year of dev time just to create these new floors.
- They have the same difficulty: While the new enemies and variety definitely would be cool, the difficulty of the floors would be similar to the already existing ones. This means, the novelty of encountering an alternate floor would quickly wear off, because players that already manage to win runs consistently, would not have a lot of new challenges in the alternate floors.
- More dungeons result in less dungeon variation: The more dungeons we have to manage, the more time we need to improve them. Adding variation or a new enemy to 4 dungeons is a lot easier than doing the same for 8 dungeons. Right now, the current 4 dungeons we have still do not have enough rooms and mechanics to feel like a fresh experience for experienced players each run. We are planning on adding a lot more rooms and mechanics for the already existing dungeons, but the prospect of doubling our workload by adding alternate floors, does not seem like a good idea.
To summarize: Adding alternate floors seems like a cool idea to increase variation in the game, but ultimately would result in extremely long development times and even more managing overhead for us. We think this development time is better spent on increasing variation of the existing floors and working on an even more difficult floor after the Cradle (more on that in a future devlog). The solution we came up with is called the "Points of Interest System".
In general, this system will add more dungeon variation by adding themed room groups into a dungeon that can be randomly found (or with some prerequisites). If you still know the subareas from the beta version, points of interests will act like a subarea, but smaller. For example, the overgrown gatehouse can have a variation which is called "The Barracks". This variation will have a slightly different wall and ground texture, as well as wooden bunks scattered in the rooms. A new type of enemy can also be found there. It can randomly appear in the overgrown gatehouse and fill up 2-3 rooms maximum. This has multiple advantages over the other system:
- More variations possible: Since each variation is only 2-3 rooms big, we need to build a lot less rooms to make a varied point of interest. This means we can introduce a lot more variations with less development time for each dungeon.
- Increases variety of the existing dungeons: We have multiple points of interest planned for each dungeon, which means we automatically increase variety in all of them without creating new "base" rooms for the dungeons. We will still create new base rooms, but we need fewer of them, because we already increase variety with building points of interests.
- Unique challenges: Since these points of interests are often just a small part of the dungeon, we can introduce some unique designs or challenges into them. For example, we could create tall vertical rooms with unique climbing challenges and have them generate as the "Wailing Pits" point of interest. A whole floor made up of climbing puzzles would be too big and tiresome, but a small localized version of it that only spawns roughly every 10 runs could be a fun and interesting addition. There are a few other cool things we can do with this system, such as introducing harder variations in early floors for experienced players.
- More bosses: Since we do not need to create a new boss for each of the alternate floors, we can use that development time to create a new boss for each of the existing floors, increasing the amount of bosses to 2 per floor.
Here is a small graphic that tries to explain our new system:
Points of interest will not spawn on each floor in every run, but they will show up occasionally in order to make a run more varied. They will also be listed in the homebase world map panel so you can see which ones you have already encountered and which ones you have not. I hope this explanation makes sense, we are still in the planning stages so changes to this system are still very likely.
New modifier system
We have removed the current modifier system, because it was pretty outdated and did not have a lot of actual interesting modifiers to offer. It also stopped game progression, which further discouraged players from using it. This is why we plan to rework the modifier system and make it more interesting. We will add new modifiers which change the way the game plays, and also add modifiers which need to be unlocked by completing soul delves. Each modifier will have a "difficulty multiplier" which is a value of how much harder the modifier makes the game. For example a modifier that increases the chance of enemies spawning as abberrants, has a difficulty multiplier of 1.2, meaning the player will get 20% more Insight when completing a run with the modifier active. Modifiers can be stacked, so players can turn the game a lot harder (or easier) if they want to and get rewarded accordingly.
Improved modding tools
The modding tools (especially the room modder) have been neglected for some time now. With the upgrade to OpenXR and a new Unity version, the tools are in a very broken state (that's why there are currently no new rooms being added by us). Since we need these tools ourselves to create most of the rooms and items, we will rewrite them and provide new builds for you in the near future. We will also work on adding new modding tutorials to get more people into modding the game.
Lots of QoL improvements
When looking at the trello page, there are a lot of QoL improvements that we want to do (Reset progress setting, multiple save slots, evasion sounds, better pointer angles, etc.). Some of these will make it into the next update, and some of them will still take some time to get implemented.
Goodbye Thom!
Thom joined the ADVR development team roughly 9 months ago and has contributed a lot to the game (sealed souls runs, new items, helping with the OpenXR port, and much more). Thom has decided to leave the dev team to pursue other career paths and we thank him and wish him the best! He will still remain active on the discord though and stays part of the community.
Hotfix ea0.1.2.6
- fixed deadzone settings not working correctly on some machines
- fixed recentering in main menu and death screen, not recentering the game properly
- fixed knife bugging out when taking a screenshot in SteamVR
- fixed big vine plant parts staying red when killed
- fixed weapon trail showing buggy lines when equipping and unequipping in quickly while moving
- fixed music not being completely muted when volume is set to 0
- improved enemy spawning in hard mode
- fixed dungeon start music interrupting or stopping sometimes
- fixed challenge room failsave not properly working
- fixed loading a save not cleaning up the previously saved activatable item
- improved pathfinding of flying enemies, hopefully preventing them from getting out of bounds
Hotfix ea0.1.2.5
- challenge rooms now have a slightly different theme depending on which floor you are on
- added a sound for the poison spitter enemy
- drastically improved the way objects are being thrown. Potions and food can now be thrown further and take the movement velocity of the player into account. This means that throwing an object up in the air while walking, will not result in the object snapping backwards because of no velocity anymore.
- fixed an issue with the world generator sometimes generating a softlock
- fixed spectator camera not smoothing the movements
- fixed an issue with being able to go into the main menu when in the "run starting" animation, softlocking the player
- fixed insight getting awarded when using the console
- fixed an issue with alchemist marks potions not being able to be picked up when spawned
- the screen now turns completely black when inside a wall instead of showing a few close objects
- fixed dungeon start music sometimes cutting off when too many sounds are playing
- fixed item highlight info sometimes staying in mid air (again)
- fixed some layering issues for UIs during fadeout
- trap rooms now lower their barriers when the player is outside them (failsave)
- fixed enemy alert sounds not playing for most enemies
- fixed potion effects not showing when climbing a ladder
Hotfix ea0.1.2.4
- fixed orb of focus speedup bug and other discrepancies between movement speed in quest and pcvr version
- fixed dungeon generation sometimes breaking when in a loaded save
- fixed challenge rooms sometimes spawning closed in NG+, creating a softlock
- fixed an issue with the Item Highlight Info hovering in air sometimes