Early Access Update #4 - A bit of everything + Difficulty analysis!
Hi!
Today we're releasing an update for the game with plenty of changes based on suggestions and feedback, that we think will improve the overall feeling of the game and rate at which skills are unlocked.
Improvements:
Elite enemies have now a teal aura below them.
Added a "Huge" UI Scale setting to show even bigger texts. Useful for Steam Deck, but some UIs may overlap.
Now up to 50 previous attempts are saved per level.
Completion reward is now shown in the stage selection screen.
21:9 aspect ratio is now supported without borders. In 21:9, enemies will be spawned from further away, which may affect gameplay and performance.
Toxic Stench vissual effect is now easier on the eyes.
Added an option to select specific controller button faces.
Gameplay changes:
Increased money rewards for completing a challenge. This increase is applied retroactively, you'll receive additional money upon loading the game for every challenge already unlocked.
Increased money rewards for completing a stage.
Rerolls now try to avoid showing repeated items whenever possible.
Reduced minion difficulty growth rate on the boss wave.
Adjusted difficulty of some specific waves (see below for detailed information).
Bugfixes:
Fixed Evolved Jellyfish not having the proper starter values and being weaker than the base version.
Fixed Luck affecting money drop rate.
Fixed a softlock in the game when the controller is disconnected on the level up screen.
Fixed UI and minor gameplay issues when dying while using a timed skill (only possible with Ker's)
Difficulty analysis
We also wanted to discuss a bit on the topic of difficulty, as there's been a lot of talk on it and we wanted to be transparent and share some data we have thanks to the game's telemetry.
First of all, we want to say that our goal is to have most of the first stages rather easy to complete as long as you don't mess up too hard with movement or upgrade choices, and slowly increasing difficulty in later stages, making them more challenging to compensate the upgraded skills and features that are unlocked along the way.
It's not our intention to "force" players to grind for money or pick specific weapon/trinket combinations, and we want everything to be viable when properly combined, and we'll be on the lookout for underpowered/unpopular choices to make them as interesting as the popular ones. Aside from super-strong outliers, we don't plan on nerfing equipment, and will try to improve the weaker items so they become equally powerful or interesting to choose.
Now, on to the data!
Here are some graphs of the distribution of wins, loses and cancellations of every stage in the game, per minute.
Graveyard 1 and Forest 1
The shapes of Graveyard 1 and Forest 1 are most in line with what we were looking for: A few deaths here and there, but most people manages to complete them, and there's no major difficulty spikes along the stage (a small one in minute 2 of Graveyard 1 can be spotted, when the ghosts show up for the first time, but it's not too drastic and we'll reduce it a bit anyway).
Forge 1 Forge 1, however, doesn't entirely have that ideal shape: There's a comfortable difficulty along the stage, but once people get to the boss, the number of loses increases considerably, and fights drag on for longer than in the other two stages, with loses getting to their highest value at minute 15, when minions become so strong that players can't survive against them.
Our guess as to why this happens is that the boss is harder to kill than the previous ones because of the saw attack blocking projectiles and forcing players to dodge it, so they can't spend as much time attacking the boss (Note that currently Forge 1 and Forest 1 bosses have the same health). We'll try to solve this by lowering the boss health a bit and lowering the rate at which minions get stronger once the boss spawns. This should increase winrate of the stage noticeably.
Graveyard 2 Graveyard 2 shows a healthy distribution, with a couple spikes of deaths towards the end of the stage that we'll make a bit easier.
Forest 2 Forest 2 is more rough and has a much lower success rate, with many players dying halfway through the level, and many others dying to the boss as well. We'll reduce difficulty of the waves at minutes 5, 9 and 11, as well as the aforemented change to minion strength increase, so it becomes more in line with the intended difficulty.
Forge 2
Forge 2 is in a rather good spot, no need to change anything important here!
Graveyard 3
Graveyard 3 shows a new situation: While the early and mid sections of the stage look fine (with a small difficulty spike at minute 12), minutes 17 and higher, including the boss, become incredibly easy and almost everyone wins! This is the result of increased mission length paired with evolutions and skill upgrades becoming too powerful for the enemies to overcome, to the point that adding new enemies may even work in favor of the player.
For now we'll not address this, as there's no major issue with a single stage being a bit easier than expected.
Forest 3
Forest 3 shows a huge spike of deaths at minutes 15-16, probably related with a deadly combination of invulnerable golems and fast berserkers, paired with a rush of boars in the next wave leading to player's deaths. We'll reduce the intensity of this wave so players don't get stuck in there so often.
Forge 3 Forge 3 shows another nicely spread out distribution, without huge spikes (although we'll reduce a bit the difficulty of them at specific spots).
Of course, we're not just using the data to decide our course of action in regards to difficulty, and we've heard your comments that enemies feel a bit too spongy later on. Our first action in regards to this is to reduce "spongyness" of boss minions, so they don't become as hard to kill as time goes on (they will still become stronger, just not as fast). We probably also want to reduce overall difficulty a bit, but since we're increasing the amount of money earned in today's update, we'll wait until we can see how that turns out before doing additional changes.
Early Access Update #3 - New powerups, lots of QoL improvements, and Roadmap!
Hi!
Today we bring a new update for the game that mainly brings lots of UI and quality of life improvements to the game, along with some balancing adjustments, a couple of bugfixes and two new power ups that can be found while playing.
New features:
Two new power ups added: The Shield (provides invulnerability for some time) and the Piggy bank (attracts all coins on the stage plus additional ones).
Gameplay changes:
Added secondary effects to some of the weaker trinkets.
Lanyz: Added a small posion explosion on skill activation.
Bhask: Improved passive stats a bit.
Increased (again) difficulty of tier 3 stages.
Improved Meteorite Blast (both base and evolution)
Improved Blaze (both base and evolution)
Improved Elven Bow (base only)
Improved Daggers (both base and evolution)
Improvements:
Improved level up screen behavior to avoid navigation problems and misclicks when using a controller.
Health bar no longer has a minimum width, so it's not as misleading when you're really low on health.
Added current/maximum health values to the pause screen.
Challenges button is hidden in the level up screen when all challenges are unlocked.
Added an arrow indicator to show the stage boss position when outside of the screen, or close to the borders.
Added a tick to the character selection screen telling with which characters you've already passed the stage (will only work from this update onwards).
Added an indicator on top of the character when a powerup effect is active, which also can help determining when it's about to end.
Bugfixes:
Fixed Saul and Ker skills not increasing damage based on character level.
We also have prepared a Roadmap with our planning for future updates. Given the level of success we've managed to get so far, we've decided to increase a bit the expected time spent in Early Access to add new features and content:
Surely you'll have questions regarding some of these things, such as what "Ruin level" or "Charms" mean! We'll explain them a bit more in detail at a later point :).
Please note this Roadmap is just an estimation and can be subject to change. Also it's not exhaustive, and other minor features can be added at any point during development.
Early Access Update #2 - Game balancing and some quality of life additions
Hi!
It's been a hectic weekend, with so many people trying out the game and giving feedback on basically everything!
Incredibly there have been almost no bug reports, with just one minor graphical glitch on Mac (if you're experiencing it, please try increasing Shader Quality), so we've been able to focus on game balance a bit more after the quick difficulty update we did past Friday.
Now that we have more telemetry and data, we've been able to pinpoint more effectively at which points in each level people do usually get stuck, as well as which characters, trinkets and weapons have been performing below expectations.
We'll leave a detailed analysis for a future post, but suffice to say that we found out that the third tier of stages was a bit too easy when compared to the others, and some trinkets and characters proved a bit too weak.
So today we're releasing an update trying to address these imbalances. Not everything is finished (for example we want to add some damage to Lanyz's skill), this is just a numbers change update before we start working on more interesting features (we'll prepare a small roadmap to share with you in the following days).
Gameplay changes:
Increased Regeneration skill values by 5.
Increased values for Elixir of Health, Soul Container, Ice Mirror, Fire Mirror, Crimson Flask and Sacred Effigy.
Graveyard 1 and Forge 1 (boss) are a bit easier now.
Forge 2, and all Tier 3 stages are now more difficult.
Improvements:
On the level up screen, a star icon is shown telling you if an item is required for a specific challenge.
Added a sound when a pickup is spawned far away.
Reduced visual clutter of the evolved javelin
Added an option to enable direct mouse movement (the character moves towards the point the mouse is clicking)
Changed pitch of the XP pickup sound as you keep getting closer to level up.
Early Access Update #1 - Quick difficulty update
Hi! Given the overall feedback of the first day coupled with the data telemetry, we've released a quick update featuring a number of changes that should make the game more approachable:
Reduced unlock requirements for extra lives/rerolls
Reduced the ReRoll price from 2500 to 250. The difference in spent money will be reimbursed.
Adjusted difficulty of specific waves in the first 5 missions.
Increased base damage of many weapons
Reduced debuffs of most trinkets that had them.
Increased effectiveness of many non-damage trinkets.
Increased chance of getting pickups that grant more money.
Increased chance of getting a health pickup.
Increased amount of money earned when leveling up with all equipment already on the level cap.
Increased base movement speed of all characters.
Army of Ruin - Day 1 report
Hello everyone!
First of all, let us thank you for your support! We really hope you're enjoying the game and look forward to your feedback in the forums and Discord server.
While we usually spend the first day of Early Access on bugfixes and quick changes, this time there hasn't been any report that requires an urgent change, so we've been able to dedicate some time to check on the game's telemetry data, and we wanted to share some of this data with you.
Stage analytics
First of all, here are some graphs showing the mission duration distribution (that is, on which minute do missions tend to end):
At the moment of gathering data, nobody with telemetry enabled had reached Forge 2 or further. Also it doesn't tell if it was a win or a lose, that's something we'll change in future updates.
These graphs shows us really interesting and useful data. For example, we can see that on Graveyard 1 most people finishes the mission at Minute 11, so until we can determine if they won or lost, we can safely say that most people is reaching the boss stage.
However, there's a spike of deaths at minute 2 that bleeds a little into minutes 3 and 4, so maybe there's a surge of enemies at that minute that causes more deaths than intended for the first stage.
Forest 1, on the other side, has really distributed values, which is indicative of a difficult stage: While most people end the level on minute 11, there are also some spikes in minutes 2, 5 and 9, so those waves will need to be looked into.
Forge 1 has an important difficulty spike at minute 3/4, so again we'll need to tune difficulty of it a bit.
You can see data for the other levels too, with nobody being able to get past the 8 minute mark on Forest 2 yet.
Character analytics
Now, here's a table with information on pick rates/win rates of each character. Note that the amount of people that unlocked Lanyz is still small, so a Win rate of 0% is not as worrying as it could be (yet).
This data shows the strongest (and most popular) character right now is probably Saul (I say probably because it doesn't tell on which stages they were played, which is an important factor). So we'll probably need to improve the others so they feel a bit more powerful.
We'll wait to show weapon/trinket charts until we have a bigger sample size, however most weapons are rather balanced in popularity and effectiveness, with a few outliers, such as Meteorite Blast being the weakest one. On trinkets there's a bit more variance, and we'll need to boost strength of non-damage trinkets to make them more powerful and interesting.
Difficulty discussion
We think this topic needs to be discussed a bit. We wanted Army of Ruin to be an autoshooter that's generally easy to approach and play, but that can offer a challenge at some points to be interesting. This means that you should be able to win stages if your skill distribution is adequate for the mission and your level up choices have a decent synergy between them.
Currently the game is probably a bit on the "too challenging" part of the scale, but we wanted to wait until we have feedback and data before performing the necessary steps to tone down overall difficulty.
We'll prepare a patch next Monday with some quick balance changes, so please keep the feedback coming so we can be sure we're changing the things that you feel are problematic!
Army of Ruin - Available now on Early Access!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sIroXzaDBc
Wreak havoc on countless foes with mighty weapons and deadly spells! Enhance your skills to face even greater dangers! Army of Ruin is an auto-shooter where you become the Bullet Hell.
Army of Ruin is now available on Steam Early Access for a very low price, and with a temporarly launch discount on top of that! Go get it now!
The Forge City
Just 2 days until we begin the Early Access period!
Today we'll be sharing some information on the third and final area that will be available in the early access release of the game, the Forge City:
This enslaved city, working day and night, produces heavy machinery and military equipment for the kingdom.
The forge usually features enemies in smaller amounts compared to the first two areas, but they are tougher and trickier to deal with! If you survive long enough, the giant Mechanical Scorpion will be waiting for you.
Here are some examples of the enemies you can find in the forge:
Robots: The most common enemy in the city, robots programmed with just one directive: Kill everything in sight. Not too tough and not too fast, but still a threat!
Cannon: These cannons will relentlessly shoot huge bullets at you, forcing you to stay on your toes. Deal with these high priority targets as quickly as you can!
Armored demons: Huge, sturdy enemies that can take quite a beating before going down. They will even become invulnerable for some time after getting hit!
Drill Tanks: These creations will speed up and try to ram you when in range. Avoid them at all costs!
Mechanical Scorpion: The boss of the Forge City is a huge mechanical construct that will try to slice you to pieces with its circular saws!
The Ancient Forest
Hi!
Today we'll be sharing some information on the second of the three areas that will be available in the early access release of the game, the Ancient Forest:
Goblin tribes have claimed this sacred place, surrounded by mysterious runic structures built by a lost civilization.
The forest is packed with goblins, wild animals and shamans that will test your skill and focus. If you manage to best them, you'll face the Forest Spirit as this area's boss.
Here are some examples of creatures you'll find in the forest (they're not the only ones):
Goblins: Complete pushovers, goblins will go down easily, but they're so many that they'll be an effective cannon fodder to protect their bulkier cousins!
Ogres: Bulky creatures with anger management issues, these big guys will speed up when hurt. Watch out!
Wild Boars: These fast and sturdy animals will run in packs from side to side of the screen. Make sure to open up a path before they trample over you!
Shamans: Powerful spiritmongers with a strong connection to a higher plane of existence. Upon death, they will come back as wisps to haunt you!
Forest Spirit: Protector of all the forest creatures, this Boss will keep her distance while summoning dangerous carnivore plants near you. Make sure you don't end up being their meal!
The Defiled Graveyard
Hi!
Today we'll be sharing some information on the first of the three areas that will be available in the early access release of the game, the Defiled Graveyard:
This cemetery, abandoned dozens of years ago, is now bursting with dangerous undead abominations.
The graveyard is full of dangerous undead creatures, with the fearsome Gravekeeper waiting you as the area boss.
Here are some examples of creatures you'll find in the graveyard (they're not the only ones):
Skeletons: While a single Skeleton shouldn't be any kind of problem for any seasoned hero, a myriad of them may be a bit problematic! Make sure to bring some area-of-attack weapons to properly deal with these groups of tight packed enemies!
Zombies: Slower than skeletons, but much tougher! It's easy to just walk around them to avoid attacks from these brainless enemies, but if you don't kill them quickly enough, you may end up getting surrounded with no way out!
Ghosts: These ghastly creatures move in tight packs, capable to move through obstacles to get you from unexpected angles! Thankfully, they're quite weak and will die from pretty much anything, as long as you manage to get them before they get to you!
Bone totems: These unholy structures are able to bring bodies back to life, bringing new zombies to the fight constantly! They are a high priority target that needs to be dealt with as soon as possible, before you get overwhelmed.
Abominations: The result of forbidden experiments, these abominations are incredibly tough and will surround you, blocking your way out. You'll need to focus on killing a few of them to open a path before they get to you!
The Gravekeeper: A fearful foe and boss of the Area, the Gravekeeper is a slow but relentless enemy that will follow you until you submit! Surrounded by hundreds of creatures, you better take him out quickly or face your demise!
Presenting Saul & Ariana
Hi! To make the wait a bit less painful, we'll be sharing some information from time to time about the game.
In Army of Ruin you will select which character you want to play with before every mission.
The Early Access version offers 6 playable characters, each one with its skills, both passive and cooldown-based.
Two are unlocked right away, while the other 4 will be unlocked when meeting specific conditions.
These are the two starter characters:
Saul, the Wizard
Starter Weapon: Magic Staff
Passive Skill: Reduce attack cooldown by 1% for every level in your equipped trinkets.
Active Skill: Magic Missiles - Shoot 8 magic pellets around you.
Saul is an easy-to-play, balanced character with a decent single-target starter weapon, and his skill can deal a nice amount of damage on packed groups of enemies. His passive stacks nicely with most weapons, and you'll become even more powerful as you keep leveling up your trinkets.
Ariana, the Warrior
Starter Weapon: Quicksilver Spears
Passive Skill: Increase Attack Damage by 10% every 5 levels.
Active Skill: Shell - Become invulnerable and deal damage to enemies you touch for 6 seconds.
Ariana is a short-range character, which can become strong thanks to her passive, and her active skill can quickly deal with bosses and elites. However, her starter weapon requires some skill to be used effectively, and the active skill has a long cooldown, so she needs to use it wisely.
Being the starter characters, both are well balanced and don't have particularly strong points or weaknesses, however characters unlocked later will be a bit more unbalanced and favor specific strategies.
Don't forget to wishlist and follow to stay updated with the latest news on the game, and be sure to join our Discord Server to chat with us if you want!
