The wait is over! The card system update is finally here. I will try and break down the main changes. Buckle up.
All is common now
The first thing you will notice is that all your cards are now of common rarity. Yes, you read that right, the old common/rare/legend system has flown out of the window. All cards you knew are now common. Additionally, all unidentified cards you might have had before the patch will be identified at no cost, you will find then in your inventory after starting the game.
Pave way for Card Variants
From now on every card can be found in multiple variants. The common rarity has to be found first. After that, there is a small chance that a rare more powerful variant will drop.
There are two variant rarities: Magical and Legendary. Each rarity has modified icon and card template. Magical and Legendary cards use silver and golden templates respectively. Those used to indicate card level, which now will be indicated with stars on the left side of the template and card icon.
Magical variants
Each Magical variant will have one special effect. The effects vary between card types (Artifacts can have different effects than Items or Spells). He are example additional effects:
Mighty Blow of Tsunami - the Tsunami variant will cause all shockwaves generated by the player to be bigger. Effect does stack.
Left-winged Mana Potion - the Left-wing variant secures the card to the left of it and that card can't be cursed by a boss! However, if this variant gets cursed and disabled the protection expires. So if you have that one crucial card that must be protected against curses better find the Right-wing variant as well!
Lavender Boots - Lavender artifacts increase hit chance against spiders (did you know that placing lavender in your room scares spiders aways? True story!)
Legendary variants
Each card has at least one legendary variant with a very low drop rate (and guaranteed drop from a Quest Boss, making the quest mastering a potentially profitable activity. Once it's added to the game, that is).
There are rumors about a legendary Hourglass card that has the power to prevent caster’s death when active. In the event of death it is supposed to be able to reset health and mana to levels from the moment of casting. And it is also said to reset him back in space to the spot he was standing at the time of casting.
Then there are stories of a legendary amulet that damages monsters standing near to a picked up health globe and self-replicating chain ice bolts. Surely most of them are just exaggerated nonsense and hearsay. Then again we have the dead swarming up from under the cathedral and no one believed that could happen either. So who knows.
Upgrading and Downgrading
Each card variant has to be upgraded separately. Some variants' effects improve with card levels, other's don't.
Since this means a lot more occasions for upgrading more rune cards will be dropping in dungeons and we also introduced card downgrading. Each downgrade costs gold and returns random rune cards. Two rune cards for downgrading a Magical and three for a Legendary card. This means that if you are lucky when downgrading you might get better rune cards than the ones you invested into the upgrade!
So how does all that work?
Once you find a variant of a common card, a stack of cards will appear under it in the Card Pane. Since each card now has only one active variant, the variant you see on top is the active one. You can change it using a small button that will appear near the bottom of the card.
How does this mesh with other mechanics? When the card is cursed or disabled in another way all variants are affected. When the card is in tombstone all variants end in that tombstone. However, when the card is destroyed on higher difficulties, only the active variant is destroyed.
Mana Burn mechanic
Until now standing in fire boiled and depleted mana pool over time. Since no one needs additional encouragement not to stand in the flames we modified this mechanic. Now Mana Burn is a special Demons’ skill on Hell tileset. Whenever demons hits you a flame is struck under the mana pool. When there are three flames each consecutive attack from a demon burns one mana point. Of course, flames under mana pool eventually die out, the trick is not to get hit by demons multiple times in a short period of time.
The most important aspect of this revised mechanic is that even the green mana is affected by it. This means that damage coming from demons can disable your equipped artifacts! As the mana level drops artifacts on the right will be mana starved first. Once you replenish your mana they will automatically activate again.
This means that now order in which you equip artifacts matters on hell tilesets and demons will be more challenging there, too. You have been warned, watch your mana pool.
Improved Cauldron
It was long in the making but we have also redone how the cauldron works. Before every three rewards of one type were converted to one reward of a higher tier. It was confusing since it was not obvious if that silver reward will be better than three bronze ones.
That’s why now for every three rewards of the same type one reward of the higher tier will be added but the three rewards stay in the cauldron! This means way more rewards with each cauldron buyout!
Other stuff
Of course beside the big things listed above we added a ton of stability improvements, bug fixes and general polishing like autumn leaves in the town. You can read full changelog in the game and in the forums.
What's ahead?
This is a big update that includes refactoring of many core system and game logic. We expect to be working on balancing and general bug fixes during the next week. Keep the reports coming in!
Once things settle we will begin work on the Rogue. The careful estimate for Rogue’s release date is one and half month from now. She is already implemented but in the light of recent changes to the card system and all the polishing and tweaks we did to the other to classes we believe some of her cards can be more awesome.
This update was not initially planned but once the idea of adding more variety to card system came up during the early access we knew it has to be done. Now that it’s behind us we reevaluated the production and marketing plan and it looks like the launch will happen in Q3 2017.
Guys over at culture.pl, one of the best polish-language cultural portals, surprised us with a nice write-up about the idea behind Book of Demons and the whole series. They pinpointed what we are striving to achieve, which is a pleasant surprise since they didn't contact us beforehand. Looks like our homebrew marketing outreach is working and we are getting the message through after all!
We thought it would be a nice idea to keep you all up to date with the development. Usually, I sneak information about what we are working on into patch notes. However, since this update is shaping up to be quite big and takes more time I will dedicate a separate post to it.
Card system changes
During the last few months of early access, it became obvious that Book of Demons could use more variety when it comes to cards. Initially, we were planning on adding more cards close to the launch date but a neater and broader solution came up.
We are working on introducing card variants. Every card that is in the game right now will become a common card. Once you find a card, there will be a chance a rarer variant of that card might drop later on. A variant will add an extra mechanic to the card. It might reduce mana cost or it can have an effect on cards in the slot to the left. There are many possibilities. And, of course, every card is rumored to have a legendary variant that introduces twists on existing mechanics.
Because each variant will have to be upgraded separately we are also adding the option to downgrade cards (also often asked for feature, that now is properly justified).
As always we are not planning character wipes, the transition to the new system will be seamless.
Other changes
Many other systems will be influenced by the card system update:
The cauldron - good news everyone, it will give way more rewards than before :goldpile:!
Mana burn mechanic will change as well. After the update demons on hell tileset will be able to drain hero's mana with successful attacks.
During their downtime guys are working on fancy atmospheric effects in the town (right now we have falling autumn leaves :D)
Since we had some trouble with antivirus software raiding save files we are adding smart backup features and we will also rework save system to be more power-failure resistant
The Roadmap
“No Battle Plan Survives Contact With the Enemy” Helmuth von Moltke
So how does all that affects the schedule? As I mentioned before card system changes were not planned when we prepared the initial production plan for early access. That means that the plan has to be updated. We also now have a better feel of overhead related to early access, bugfixes and efforts required by the marketing. We are in the process of preparing a detailed plan, which will take some time since only one person can work on it full time while the rest of us works on cards and other stuff.
I will post details once it's ready but it's safe to say that there are going to be some delays. The rogue will be delayed by a month or two since the cards are getting a major overhaul. The launch will be delayed by some time as well. We initially aimed at Q1 2017 but not we can see that we will need more time to polish the game to the quality levels we find acceptable. We will also have to intensify marketing (gah :paperdeath:) efforts before the launch and this will take time and resources.
Rest assured that we will work as hard as possible to get all the features in the game as soon as possible and only then we will focus on polishing stuff. We are also recruiting a programmer to speed up the efforts.
Less frequent but bigger updates
You also probably noticed that recently updates were mostly focusing on stability and backend. We made a concentrated effort to address all known bugs and enable features that will allow for easier debugging in the future.
Thanks to that, right now the game is pretty stable we have the lowest crash rate since launch and we are gathering info on the few remaining bugs. For that we have to stop issuing updates for a few days, so we can get more feedback from the same build (it's the only way to get reliable data from Steam).
This will also let us save some time on preparing builds and we will be able to focus on new features.
So, unless something urgent comes up, the next update should be the one with cards.
As always,
Stay safe in the dungeons :paperheart:
Card Changes The First Wave
Today's update is the first part of the card system overhaul. The less revolutionary part, that prepares the scene for the second update that will come later. I will talk about card changes in more detail at the end of this post. Aside from cards and various fixes and small polish changes main highlights of this update are:
Steam Leaderboards are now browsable in-game (in the Hall of Fame)
New musical jingles for some events in the game
Improved safeguard against antivirus software interfering with the save system
Icicles when hit with ice element shockwaves now create smaller echoes of the shockwave, which should allow interesting synergies
Card Changes
In all cases cards on higher levels retain features from lower levels, often increasing the chance for the lower level effect to happen.
Ice Bombs spawn icicle when exploding
Magic ring (replaced Ring of Balance)
Level 1: Dispels all spell caster's by monsters
Level 2: Dispel is 2x faster, each dispelled spell spawns 4 mana crystals, 40% to stun dispelled monster
Level 3: Each dispelled spell spawns 5 mana crystals, 80% to stun dispelled monster
Corrupted Ring
Level 1: Healing poison launches guided poison bolts from the player, poison acts faster on monsters, chance to resist poison damage
Level 2: Chances improved
Level 3: Chances improved
Phantom Ring
Level 1: Resist slow, chance to spawn icicle when monster is killed (3% per every :paperheart: the monster had)
Level 2: Player is immune to freeze for 10 seconds after being frozen, when icicle is spawned a small shockwave is spawned, monsters colliding with frozen monsters are slowed
Level 3: Monster colliding with frozen monsters have 30% chance for being frozen
Demonic Ring
Level 1: Monster in flames are 50% slower, when player is standing in flames ice damage is reduced by 50%
Level 2: Monsters receive double damage from standing in flame, when monsters are hit with fire shockwave a fire can be spawned (20%)
Level 3: Monsters dying in fire fuel it, monsters standing in fire are missing more often
Chaotic Ring
Level 1: One click on shield now destroys whole shield's level, breaking regular shield spawns 2-4 hearts and magical shields spawn 2-4 electric bolts
Level 2: All shields are now destroyed with a single click.
Level 3: Destroying magical shield prevents it from respawning.
Heal no longer prevents monster's from healing
Book of Ice on level 3 now spawns small ice shockwave when icicle is clicked
Frozen Flail no longer had monster freeze/slow on collision mechanic but now spawns a small ice shockwave when icicle is clicked
Burning Axe no longer slows monsters in fire and doubles their damage. Now has chance to spawn small fire shockwave when monster is hit
Blade Storm no longer stuns monsters and chance to trigger card effects is lowered :paperdeath:
Disarmor No longer stuns unpacked monsters
Lightning: every segment now has 50% chance to deal 1 dmg to monster, lightnings splits into two lightnings shorter by 1 segment
Meteor now deals AoE dmg and breaks shields on impact. On level 2 it spawns shield breaking shockwave. On level 3 that shockwave breaks whole shields.
Mana potion no longer resets cooldowns
Golem doesn't die when left alone but rather teleports to the player, explodes on death and should be more responsive and less derpy ;-)
That's it for now. If your favorite card got nerfed and lost mechanics don't despair they might return in another form ;-) You can also check the changelog thread to see other changes.
As always, stay safe in dungeons :paperheart:
Offical Steam Avatars!
Turns out the games can have official Steam avatars, and we had no idea ːsteamfacepalmː In order to rectify that we added our in-game avatars to Steam.
Check them out, maybe you will find something you like. And thanks Mans for enlightening us!
In other news work on the card system overhaul is progressing smoothly.
Stay safe in dungeons :paperheart:
Konstanty
Major Update: The Mage has arrived!
Book of Demons just got the biggest update so far. After a short testing phase on a different branch on Steam, we are happy to announce that the long-awaited Mage character is now available to everyone and playable. You can, at last, fight monsters in the paper dungeon using real magic ;-)
Mage is a powerful mystic proficient in all kinds of magic. Wearing only a robe he leaves direct face-to-face combat to his summoned minion, himself bringing devastation from a safe distance.
Mage’s attacks work a little different from Warrior’s. His projectiles are guided and will avoid other monsters to reach their target, but they can still hit walls. That’s why, for a Mage, fighting in tight spaces can be problematic and requires more tactical approach.
But for those (and any other) occasions he has some awesome cards up his sleeve. Mage class comes with 16 new unique class specific cards. Master each of the 11 new spells, 4 artifacts, and 1 item find synergies between them and use them according to situation – and no monster or boss will stand a chance!
--== Mage spell cards at a glance ==--
Fireball – This spell card charges Mage with multiple flaming missiles that you can shoot using your RMB. You don’t even need to click exactly on a monster. Those crafty little balls of fire will seek the target by themselves.
Cold Nova – For a Mage, fighting up close is undesired. When monsters jump at him or come too near, use this spell to throw them away, slow or even freeze them. Try hitting icicles in the process for more devastating cold power!
Teleport - No need to run when you can simply teleport out of danger. Or right into the eye of the storm.
Lightning – Nothing like a little spark of electricity cast into a group of monsters. Even better, a lightning that jumps from one target to another.
Ice Wall – One of Mage’s favorite way of protecting himself against charging monsters or incoming missiles is a wall made of icicles. And if an upgraded version also freezes enemies, that’s even better.
Mass Dispel – Mage likes to be the only casting one in the dungeons. Using this spell interrupts every skill that can be dispelled.
Golem – He may be a little dumb and not a good conversation partner but in terms of protecting his master, Golem is second to none.
Meteor – No one really knows how a Mage can summon a meteor inside the dungeon but who cares when a rock heated to a thousand degrees falls down burning everything on its way.
Holy Bolt – When fighting Demons, Skeletons, Zombies or Ghost try greeting them with this holy spell. For hellish monsters, that’s what heaven feels like.
Ice Bolt – Freezing bolts prepared by this spell can be shoot using RMB. Best to use on fire monsters. The effect is guaranteed.
Mana Sphere – This protection spell can not only absorb incoming damage but also spawn mana globes when doing so. Very handy.
--== Mage artifacts ==--
Book of Fire – When you have to remember so many spells it’s good to have some written help that can not only enhance your normal attack with fire but also those of your Golem.
Staff of Lightning – This mystical artifact spawns bolts of electricity from unsuspecting monsters when they are hit with Mage’s magical attack.
Magic Robe – Orbs summoned by this magic piece of armor knock nearby enemies out. Perfect for keeping them far away.
Book of Ice – This manuscript is filled with ice magic that can boost Mage’s every action.
--== Mage items ==--
Hourglass – Mage has only one class specific item card, but it’s extremely powerful. With it the Mage can slow the time around him. It can be used both offensively or defensively depending on the situation, so use it wisely.
___________
Together, there are 16 class specific Mage cards to collect. Of course, they can be combined with the 16 common cards that are shared between character classes in Book of Demons.
To play a fragile but powerful Mage you need to have at least a level 5 Warrior character already on your profile. So if you don’t have one, you will need to learn the game basics playing Warrior first. But leveling, in the beginning, is very fast, so, either way, you will be able to check out the Mage in no time.
And please remember that Book of Demons is still in early access and this is the first version of the game featuring the Mage character, so things might be rough at places and it might take some time before every quirk is ironed out.
Besides Mage, this update introduces a lot of fixes, balance changes and some quality of life tweaks. You can find the full changelog here
Roadmap update
The next major update will, of course, be the third and last Rogue character class, but before it’s ready we want to do a big card system overhaul, that will make discovering rare and legendary cards really exciting. That's why we moved Rogue update for later January. Check out our roadmap for details
Stay safe in the dungeons :archduck:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/449960
You can also check out Warrior class in our free demo
http://store.steampowered.com/app/529980
The Last Update Before the Mage*
*unless something urgent comes up of course.
Today's update focuses on balance, usability, and bug fixes. It's probably the last update before we introduce the Mage character.
Version 0.75.11310+ - 28 Nov 2016
Bosses and special chests can now drop special pouches containing 3 cauldron ingredients
Monster's double attack now works as intended
Boots now protect from fire for 8/10/12 seconds (a bit longer than before)
Remedy card description now hints what effects are enabled on higher levels
Heal card tooltip now better describes card effect
After being slowed or frozen, you are now immune to slow/freeze for a short period of time
Bosses (especially quest ones) have a chance now to resist stuns
Mighty Blow’s cooldown increased by 1 second (3->4 secs)
Burning Axe upgraded to level 3 now properly increases damage inflicted by fire to monsters
When Burning Axe and Frozen Flail cards are equipped together, attack enhancement (fire or ice) is now selected automatically
Each consecutive poison tick on player is shorter now
Bosses in timed state now have 25% larger activity radius
Regular monsters near the final boss in the Archdemon quest have been removed
Improvements in Archdemon death sequence
Throw card will no longer stun monsters that are about to die
Balance changes in Antipope quest
Artifact cards loosened by stun can now be fixed with controller
Increased leaderboard score security (scores from backed-up saves won’t be uploaded anymore)
Snakes won’t get stuck on barrels anymore
Slimy spores won’t play charging sound twice
Fixed a bug where player’s character would sometimes make wrong turns on complicated crossings with looped paths
Fixed number of collected upgrade cards shown in stats window
Elemental Corpse spawn more on death
After upgrading cards other cards could incorrectly be added to “requirements met” group until the window was reopened. This will no longer happen.
Fast clicking on Cook’s doors or Statues won’t allow for spamming voice message
Ghost will no longer be highlighted by loot highlight function when traveling through walls/objects
Visual upgrades in Hell Tileset
Minor visual fixes in Catacombs
Fixed an uncommon visual glitch when junk was rendered if a controller was used to open in-game menu.
Fixed rare crash when lob type missile was tossed by a boss and loaded from save
Fixed a crash so rare it’s basically legendary: when master monster was removed from map with slaves still present and alive
Ghosts spawned by bosses will now collide with other objects as intended
Countermeasure for WASD fast attack exploit is now twice as strict.
Loot can no longer be picked up when the input is blocked but loot highlighting is on.
Fixed Slithering Soldier too small collision radius
Fixed a possible crash when dungeon with saved flying spore was loaded
Improved stability of Cluster and Throw cards
The Steam Awards
Hey, Everybody!
I just saw the new Steam Awards thing and I thought it would be cool if someone nominated us (and by someone I mean you :paperheart:)
The "I Thought This Game Was Cool Before It Won An Award” Award looks perfect of Book of Demons. Although from what I see in the leaderboards the “Just 5 More Minutes” award fits the bill too ;-)
If you think we fit in any category please consider nominating us. No idea how it works but it is safe to assume that it could give us a great boost in visibility if we even got into the contest. And more nominations would probably increase our chances.
I will leave this in your capable hands and get back to work. The Mage needs me :archduck:
One of the major complaints we were receiving is that the game is not challenging enough, especially on higher difficulty modes, and that there is not enough incentive to try different card combinations. What we’re launching today is our first attempt to address all of that.
Bosses can now curse cards
From now on, bosses in Freeplay mode will be immune to certain cards, forcing players to adjust their strategy during the encounter. This takes advantage of the game’s hallmark feature, a card system that unifies spells, items, skills, and character stats.
Imposed cards on higher difficulty levels
Additionally, when starting a game on Hard, Nightmare or Massacre difficulty, the game will select 2, 3 or 5 cards at random and equip them in a mandatory fashion. This will force players to build a hand around the weaknesses and strengths of those cards for the upcoming game.
Better way to switch cards during combat
Imagine such situation: you stumble upon a pack or skeleton archers or other ranged units, so it would be great to swap one of your cards and equip the Shield. In previous builds, players would rarely change cards during combat, even when encountering a considerable swarm of enemies with certain special abilities. This was because swapping a card takes time, and it’s often better to just push ahead rather than open the cards pane and take the damage while adjusting your hand.
With the current update, once you open the cards pane, the game time slows down so that you can make tactical changes and respond to the threat in a better way.
Players ready for an even greater challenge can try Daredevil Mode, which adds a brutal permadeath mechanic. Once you die, it’s game over, but the depth you achieved is written to the hall of fame. For now, the hall of fame is local only, but if it works nicely we’ll be enabling Steam leaderboards in the next update!
Update: Everything was working just fine so we went ahead and enabled the leaderboards for Daredevil mode now!
And much, much more
The changes described above are only part of the update. There are hundreds of bugfixes, lots of balance changes and other minor improvements. You can read the whole changelog here or in the game.
In the next update…
For those who were waiting for the next character class, we ask you for a bit of patience. It will be included in the next major update, which we’re already working on. If everything goes per plan, it should be ready by the end of November. And it won’t be “just” the new class, there will be a usual bunch of other exciting features we can’t wait to share with you!
FREE DEMO AVAILABLE
Intrigued by Book of Demons but haven’t tried it yet? No more excuses now!
Offering a demo during early access is something very few developers do, but we’re confident in our game and are working hard to raise the awareness. It’s a kind of experiment for us and we’re very anxious to see how well it goes and what will be its impact on our sales.
For now,
stay safe in paper dungeons! :archduck:
Slimey update to spores and more!
This week's update focuses on controls, UI usability, and various other fixes. Slimey spores got some special attention this week. They should now be much more responsive and easier to kill before they burst. Which is a good thing because we noticed they rarely spawned zombies and we fixed that. So better smash them quick!
Without the further ado, the patch notes:
Changelog:
Slimy spores now spawn zombie hogs and regular old zombies again
Game tips are now displayed during game loading screens. You can disable them (as well as the requirement for pressing any key to start a game) in game options.
Improvements to mouse controls - now mouse can be clicked on the ground and if quickly dragged over monster it will count as if it was clicked on that monster. This will reduce misclicks (especially on monsters that are clicked when in appear animation) - thanks Peter92 for the idea!
Improvements to mouse controls - after killing a monster by holding the button down cursor can be moved to the next target and it will be selected automatically.
Slimy spores can now be clicked and killed during appear animation and while charging before exploding.
More tutorials added - this means that all tutorials are reset and will be displayed again, sorry!
Fixed improperly blending tutorial texts in browse mode
Fixed slot highlight staying on after unlocking the slot if the player was able to afford next slot.
Improved NPC window’s responsiveness.
Game now allows selecting resolutions higher than 1920x1200 and this results in the game being upscaled. This should fix issues with mouse sensitivity that some players reported.
Catacombs update - fixes in double corridors chambers, added lots of columns.
Custom key bindings are now displayed in tooltips on character and cards buttons and under equipped cards.
Now when player forces movement (by holding movement key while monster is targeted) an arrow will be displayed under the avatar
Bosses in timed state now summon monsters in their area of influence
Visual improvements to lob missiles (shadows, smoother appear and disappear effects)
Increased level-up button visibility
Items can no longer be picked up regardless of player range when using loot highlighting function
Fixed some of the bosses that should have hopping warfare but didn't
Fixed multiple graphical glitches on monster deaths
Fixed a rare bug when player became invisible after using doors
Stay safe in the dungeons :paperheart:
PS I learned how to embed gif in the announcements. Steam mastery +1
