tl;dr; New ability called Nightmare, combined the Tic ability and the Tac ability to be Tic-Tac-Toe
Hi All,
This patch was focused on adding a new ability and reworking the Tic and Tac abilities. My next goal will be to add more Characters to the game. This new ability was based on an idea from a player so please share your idea over in the Chess Survivors’ discord. A quick note, I’ve recently started a new job and have had less time to dedicate to the development of Chess Survivors. I fully plan to execute on the roadmap I posted previously, but please adjust your expectation for the frequency of major patches. As always, thanks for playing my little game. Stay safe out there!
Cheers,
Aarimous
New Ability
Added a new ability called Nightmare. This was another great idea from one of you players. This ability is themed around dealing damage to specific nearby tiles. My hope is that this will reward careful movement to deal large burst of damage to a targeted location.
Added “Nightmare” to the base ability loot pool.
Nightmare’s description: “Automatically target nearby tiles based on normal knight movement patterns. On cooldown, spawn projectiles on the targeted tiles dealing damage to any enemies on those tiles. The targets will then be rotated clockwise.”
Reworked Ability
The Tic ability and Tac ability are boring. I had originally created these hoping to add a hidden interaction “Toe” which would trigger if you got both abilities (get it Tic-Tac-Toe). I think this is still a great idea, but that doesn’t solve the core issue here, Tic and Tac are just too close to the same ability. My design goal for abilities is for them to feel unique or at provide meaningful tradeoffs for early power vs risky late game scaling. So my solution is to combine Tic and Tac to be one new ability called “Tic-Tac-Toe”. The feels way more thematic and makes the ability stand out on it’s own. Previously Tic and Tac felt like nice to have’s but never part of the core build.
Remove Tic from the ability loot pool
Remove Tac from the ability loot pool
Added Tic-Tac-Toe to the ability loot pool.
Tic-Tac-Toe’s Description: “Fire a burst of projectiles around the player for 3 turns in a row. First burst is X’s in the diagonal directions. Second burst is O’s in the cardinal directions. Final burst is both X’s and O’s. Number of Projectile modifiers have no effect.”
New Relics In a future patch I plan to do a massive update to the relics system. But I had a nice request from one of you beautiful players to add these two relics and it wasn’t to hard so here you go. Go find out what they do. :)
Added “Gift to Plebs” to the base relic loot pool
Added “Gift to Protectors” to the base relic loot pool
Bug fixes:
I’m sure there were some bugs fixed, but I can’t remember them.
What am I working on?
Hi All, In this update I discuss my plans for the next major patch. As a solo dev, I am also going to share some personal notes to hopefully set your expectations correctly. I appreciate all your feedback and can't wait to bring you the next major update. Cheers, Aarimous
What am I working on next?
New abilities, relics, and characters. It’s just too easy to assemble a good build with the current amount of abilities and relics. This is a problem, but I’ve held off on any major changes to loot as I think simply adding more things will fix this. With more things the loot pool will be larger, thus making the chance of seeing any given ability or relics lower.
Why have the updates slowed down?
Two reason:
My goal for the first few weeks after the launch was to fix bugs, add small QOL changes, and balance the game. I believe I have achieved this goal. You can see more info about all these changes in the patch notes I've previously posted. I think I've done a fairly good job documenting all changes as well as providing my reasoning.
Personally, I took a small break for the Thanksgiving Holiday. I’ve been grinding very hard on Chess Survivors in the run up to the early access release (and post release updates). As a result I burned myself out a little bit and needed to get some rest and relaxation. On top of that I started a new job and consequently have less time/energy to dedicate to Chess Survivors. This does mean moving forward changes will be less often, but that also means I will have more time to think about and design good systems while also adding meaningful content.
When will the next major patch drop?
To be honest, I’ve been playing a bunch of the new World of Warcraft Dragon Flight expansion and am planning on becoming a degenerate Path of Exile player for the new 3.20 league (let's goooo). As I said above, I burnt myself out on programming, playing these games is helping me relax and just have some fun playing games instead of making them. That being said, I’ll try and get the next major patch out by the end of the year.
QOL and Balance (0.6.4.2)
tl;dr; Nerfs to Yo-Yo and Marble, setting to turn off the Gambit Challenge Mode
Hi All,
Small patch to remove some power from the Yo-Yo and Marble abilities. Both of these abilities are designed to be risky early, but can scale well into the late game. However, both the early game and the late game felt too strong and as such were basically auto includes in any build.
I have some plans for a upcoming to patch which will add more abilities. I will also review all the abilities to ensure they are up to my standards for design and balance.
Cheers, Aarimous
Yo-Yo
I want Yo-Yo to scale with number of projectiles and size. As such I've toned down the base damage numbers. The current number were just silly high (and probably something I set initially but never when back to review).
Damage [4,8,12,20] -> [3,4,6,8]
Marble
Marble simple scaled too well and was basically an auto pickup. As such I've pull away a lot of early game power. Most notably the pierce now starts at 1. To compensate for this large nerf, I've increase the base number of projectiles to 2.
Pierce [3,4,5,6] -> [1,2,3,4]
Damage [3,4,5,6] -> [3,4,6]
Number of Projectile [1,2,3,4,5] -> [2,3,4,5]
Cooldown [4,3,2] -> [4,3,2,1]
Miscellaneous
Added a checkbox to enable/disable the Gambit Challenge Mode
Hotfix (0.6.4.1)
Fixed small bug where the first time you unlocked Gambit Mode you would first see the level 5 mod. You should now see the 1st level, well first.
Cheers, Aarimous
Gambit Difficulty Mode (0.6.4.0)
tl;dr; New Gambit Levels which allow you to add more difficult modifiers to the game as you beat each level
Hi All,
This patch contains the first real feature for early access, the Gambit Difficulty Mode. This system is designed to progressively add more challenge to Chess Survivors without making the base game too challenging. I've had a hard time trying to make the game challenging but not impossible for all players. My hope with this system is that the base game will be winnable within your first few runs, and then you can start pushing more difficult runs as you’d like. I’m only releasing this mode with 5 levels, but I do have plans to add up to 20 (or more) levels.
Cheers, Aarimous
Gambit Level
Added a new system to the game for player who want to push more difficulty
Gamit Levels are unlocked once you beat the game on Normal of faster difficulty modes
Each gambit level will make the game harder in a different ways
Levels are all additive, meaning if you are on level 3 your run will also have the mod form level 1 and 2
Beating the game on your current highest level will unlock the next level as long as you are on normal or faster speeds
New achievement for beating the game on Gamit Level 5
Only 5 levels are available now, but more will be coming
Character Specials Stats Reworks and Balance Changes
Character Special Stats Rework
The goal with this change was to remove the memory game that was need to know which special stats your character started with
Reworked the character’s “special stats” into a special character relic.
This currently doesn’t have any game play changes, but is a quality of life improvement.
Before there was no easy was to figure out the exact special stats the character had. Which meant the player had to rely on their memory, creating an artificial barrier to understanding how to min/max their build.
Currently these relics are not part of the general relic loot pool, but that might change in future patches.
Updated the relics colors. The previous colors were placeholder which never got updated. I have now adjusted those. These colors don’t have any game play effect yet, but eventually will. More to come.
Update the relic tooltips to show the relics name.
Bullseye
Slight nerf to bullseye scaling values.
Act 1 [1, 1.1, 1.3] → [1, 1.1]
Act 2 [1.5] → [1.22 , 1.4]
Act 3 [2] → [1.6, 2]
It seems this is currently the “meta” build. I love that there are broken builds out there I didn’t think of, but I want to make sure these build are not easily obtainable every run. My goal with the Bullseye ability is that is is pretty weak at low levels, but very powerful if you get the correct relics and upgrades. Which typically requires you to make it to Act 3.
Dice
Dice will now explode after 2 turns (previously 3)
Cooldown reduced at all tiers [5,4,3,2] → [4,3,2,1]
Increased Number of Projectiles [1,2,3] → [1,2,3,4]
Fixed a bug where the level up popup was granting a choice of 9 upgrades. Sorry about that, I was doing some testing for the popup's width and forgot to revert it.
Controller Improvements
Controller Movement
I took a pass at improving the controller gameplay (which also improves the keyboard controls). The old system was pretty dumb and more or less just sucked. I'm calling this new system "Smarter Movement". This dramatically improves both the d-pad/keyboard and stick movement. I've also lowered the input delay for those controls so it should feel more snappy. In the future I will add settings so you can manually adjust sensitivity.
I'll likely make a separate post later this week exampling the exact logic for the "Smarter Movement"
Misc
The loot screens now expands to the edge of the screen before a scroll bar appears. In practice that means you need to be looting 10 items for a scroll bar to appear (which is not currently possible).
More Relic Buffs (0.6.2.1)
Some additional Relic change in addition to the ones from 0.6.2.0 patch.
Less Ring of More Things: Damage Scale Reduced -33% -> -10%
Amulet of Slap Jack: Removed Damage Scale Reduction
Five of Spades: Added mod which grants 10 max health
Larry's Crossbow: Added mod which grants 1 bonus damage to abilities
Doug's Crossbow: Added mod which grants 1 bonus damage to abilities
Witch's Brew: Added mod which grants 7 max health
Balance Changes, QOL, and Bug Fixes (0.6.2.0)
tl;dr; Buff abilities, Lower Level Xp Amounts, Added New Setting, QOL Changes, Bug Fixes
Note for the Dev
Hi All,
The goal if this patch was to two fold. I wanted to take a pass at making Act 3 a little easier. I previously buffed the Characters and nerfed enemies. So in this patch I took swing at buffing some of the lower win rate abilities. Additionally, I removed a few upgrades tiers so it should be easier to fully upgrade certain abilities. The other goal was to start adding in more QOL settings like disabling potentially annoying sounds, and making loot screen fast. See the notes below for specific changes and reasoning.
What am I working on next:
Improved Controller Support
High Contrast Mode for Moveable Tiles
Challenge Leveling System
Rework Character "Special Stats" to instead be a starting relic
Cheers, Aarimous
Patch Notes
General Balance:
The goal here was to push more power into the late game. I'm doing this by lowering the XP Per Level growth. In practice this means you will get to a higher level easier.
Reduced Xp Pere Level Growth from 4 -> 3
Reduced the Number of Kings that Can Spawn in Act 3
Ability Buffs:
In general I smoothed out many of the upgrade tiers. My hope here was to make it easier to max out the upgrades on a given ability, allowing builds to scale better.
Yo-Yo:
Range is now equal to the scale and AOE bonuses. Range was only good if you also got scale. In practice this made range upgrades basically worthless and either made the ability worse or the upgrade was just a dead upgrade. To fix this scale will simply also scale the range. I might need to add in a min/max this effect but for now it seems good (even if you get all the AOE upgrades).
Removed range property upgrades
Adjusted damage tiers was [4,6,10,12,20] -> [4,8,12,20]
Dice Bomb
Increased the base explosion size
Jack Trap
Increased damage upgrades from [3,5,10,14] -> [6,8,12,20]
Added new Scale Upgrades to Jack Trap [1.33, 2, 3]
Lowered the cooldown for upgrades from [5,4,3,2,1] -> [4,3,2,1]
Cribbage
Increased base damage
Removed upgrade tier froma Act 1
Inceased base scale
Relic Changes:
Minor Scale
Increased AOE Scale from 25% -> 33%
Staff of Bigger Things
Reduced AOE Scale from 33% -> 25%
Added a Max Health Scale mod 10%
QOL:
Added the abilities description to the stats and info page
Act upgrades will now show as a darker gray if they are locked
Added a note about upgrades being locked by act
Added the ability to turn off sound effects for:
Yoyo
Xp
Enemy Spawning
Melee
Added a setting for fast loot screens (this applies to Level Up, Relic Chests, and End of Act Rewards
Bug Fixes:
Fixed a bug where the Pai Sho Tile were getting delete if there were no enemies in range
Fixed a bug where the Pai Sho Tile particles were not showing
Fixed bug that was causing some Bouncy Balls to get stuck on the player character
