Darkest Depths
Hotfix Alpha .19
Necromancers corrupted hand attack now spawns area denial orbs at 50% chance instead of every time.
More environmental details added to level 1.
Lighting tweaks - more dark, less flares.
Started adding environmental lighting at the room level.
Fixed Main Menu buttons directing to the new main menu in the pause and death screens.
Added Quit button to death and pause screens.
Please keep in mind that this is a complete rebuild and currently in alpha. Every single thing is being built up piece by piece from the ground up.
Hotfix Alpha Version .18
You can now select the frame rate that you want to cap at.
Added a Vsync option which fixes the horrendous screen tearing that I personally have been experiencing. As well as some of the artifacting issues that I've seen.
Re-did the main menu. I broke some things so the main screen will need some love in the near future.
Adjusted the Brute's environmental collision.
Fixed high GPU usage
Hotfix .17
Tweaked Yellow growth brightness.
More environment lighting tweaks.
Replaced the base floor tile texture.
Brutes have more health.
Fixed the Seer not taking explosive damage.
Tweaked lens flare.
Reduced motion blur.
Adjusted rocket explosion effects to match the explosion radius differences.
Added a new rocket to the random rocket launcher rolls.
Adjusted rocket projectile size to match the explosion radius differences.
Increased damage for rockets that only explode on hit. Cluster and bounce rockets stay the same.
Added Seeking cluster variant to rocket launcher cluster bombs. These might not be perfect yet.
Added the Leech enemy type. Expect them to leap at you soon.
Exploders now spawn Leeches on death.
Fixed an issue with Hotfoot. It now correctly spawns a burning AoE field when landing.
Enemy health scales off of difficulty. This is a light scaling so 1 difficulty = + 1 health. The goal is to scale the difficulty with the player progression and add a slight risk of falling behind but currently difficulty only scales on difficulty+ pickups.
The Brute is back
Added special enemy number 2 the Brute. Any one who played the game before the rebuild will know of them as the rock slinging big guys. They are completely remodeled and reworked to be much much more aggressive. No more rock throwing they now live up to their name.
Updated most enemy textures.
More lighting value tweaks.
Slightly reduced Shield Rusher shield size....Again.
Hotfix .15
Fixed explosion FX size for the cluster rocket.
Added more environment detail to level 1.
Added some environment detail to level 2.
Enemies are no longer contained to their rooms in level 2.
Slightly reduced the size of the shield for the Rusher shield variant.
Difficulty adds 1 damage per difficulty levels from enemy attacks.
Fixed an unobtainable upgrade chest in a room on level 1.
Tweaked light exposure to make it less jarring.
Ammo crates no longer spawn upgrades.
Darkest Depths Rebuild Release
Every single piece of the game has been remade with the exception of some models, enemies most specifically.
Guns are now randomized on pick up and on start. There are five in this release. I have eight total but the other three aren't ready yet.
Guns use ammo and you can only hold two. You can get a new gun at the end of each room.
There's a bug currently with weapon saves which unfortunately forced me to disable them. For now until I can fix the issues weapons will be re-rolled between levels.
Upgrades -- This release comes with 20 upgrades.
Active upgrades -- I added Q and E abilities that you can find. Q abilities are damaging like grenades that summon meteors, slam the ground while in the air etc.. E abilities are support like throw down barriers, slow time etc.. There are four for each slot. Eight total active upgrades at release.
Wall running is no more. I loved it, I loved what it added but I hated developing with it.
The first floor is essentially finished minus some artwork that is coming later.
The second floor is being released now but is basically blocked out with it's core art. Future updates will be around finishing the second floor, adding challenges and so on.
The third and final floor is coming after the second floor is finished.
Bosses -- There is only one for this release. I have two more in the works for the near future.
The game loop as it stands and until the real ending is finished with the third floor will be a constant loop from all of the existing content.
Sorry it took so long. I spent months on what should have led into the game's official release. That was all lost and it sucks. I didn't want to disappoint the people that enjoy the game so I worked to rebuild it from near scratch.
Next Update Preview and the Future
I told people over a month ago that I was dropping the next release in two weeks. I definitely missed that mark but that's because I really wanted to get over the fail hard and fail fast bump. With the scope of this update there are some issues that I need to iron out before I can push it live. Almost the entire game aside from gun play has been reworked. I feel like I've learned what you guys like and don't like. I also feel like every one will like the visual changes. I've been spending most of the time completely reworking the art and removing every piece of programmer art or random texture that I pulled off of the internet. Everything art wise is officially hand done by me (excluding animations and effects). The player now has arms and some animations to add a better feeling to game play. The bosses are all being reworked to actually feel unique and use different strategies instead of find a safe spot and shoot. There are still static levels that are randomized but there are also procedural levels as well. Once this patch is ready there will be two different level types or floors as I'd promised what feels like ages ago. I plan on pushing that further into at least one more floor type but for now two will do. I will be adding more rooms in updates that won't take as long. I know it's taking forever but I promise that I have a huge list of patch notes that I'm dying to post.
Anyway before I rant on for an hour. I just wanted to let you guys know that there is a huge update coming just not at the speed that I was able to deliver before. I hope that it was worth the wait for you and I genuinely appreciate every one reading this and their time.
https://youtu.be/kduUAZhZZg8
Leaderboards, Survival Mode, New Boss
Survival game mode has been added. It was going to launch with a changing arena and new areas opening up over time. I unfortunately found some exploits. Normally I'd be fine letting people play with my mistakes. With leaderboards coming out though I didn't want to give anyone an advantage that other people couldn't have later.
Fixed the broken combo system. It's more clear now and it also now has a countdown timer.
Fixed damage over time effects.
Backend optimizations.
Bombardier Minis are now pretty much finished. They can no longer clip through walls and Atomizer rounds can now hit them. Their deaths are much more impactful they also are less likely to kill themselves. They still can kill themselves and other enemies but not as often. They also count towards combos as well.
Updated the Atomizer alt fire to shoot a spread shot as well as the bouncing round.
Added a new boss Big Mamma. This boss doesn't just sit still and shoot. She also isn't a bullet sponge. This brings us up to six bosses now. I'll try to have a few more ready in the coming weeks so that every run has different bosses but no promises on how fast. Big Mamma is very new and still needs animation/texture work. I'm planning on re-doing her textures very soon but I wanted to release more content.
Fixed Big Head and put him back into the boss rotation.
Elite Enemy, Bug Fixes, Leaderboards coming soon
Not all Graveheart Wizards spawn enemies.
Added a new elite enemy type. You'll recognize them when you see them.
Bouncing bombs from mini Seers lifetime has been randomized. This should prevent a ton of explosions at once. After testing I'm not ready to make them no longer bounce just yet. I know that people hate these guys but I like what they do and they are mostly limited to specific sections.
Hounds are much more aggressive.
Fixed the Razerback alt fire. I broke it when I adjusted the bullets to not allow enemies to stand on them in the air.
Reduced energy cost of the Razerback alt fire from 4 to 1.
Normalized some room spawns.
Reduced hitching from enemies spawning in other rooms.
Added a Killed by message telling you who or what killed you to the death screen. This isn't perfect yet as it's having issues tracking projectiles and area of effect damage. It's going to take some time for me to set up projectiles and explosions but it's a start.
Added telegraphs for Big Head and The Seething Heart's large Area of effect attacks.
Big Head now properly locks the room.
Increased door closing speed to prevent people from getting locked out of a boss fight by immediately running out.
People have been asking for leaderboards for a while now. I just wanted to focus on getting the core game into shape first. Leaderboards are finished for the most part but I want to do a little more work on it and ship it with the new survival game mode.