Darkest Depths cover
Darkest Depths screenshot
Steam
Genre: Role-playing (RPG), Adventure

Darkest Depths

Spawn Changes and fixes
The entire game now uses a completely new spawning system. This should be more obvious where enemies will be spawning to prevent getting spawned on and killed. It also takes enemy spawning away from the center of a room. With that, the instant room spawns should now always be spawned before entering their room.

Changed Gravemother's explosion trigger radius to make them slightly more forgiving. Now there's a chance that causing them to explode by proximity won't actually hit you.

Fixed Controller Interact button.

Hounds now have eyes.

Nests no longer lock doors.

Small Hotfix...Again
Fixed an issue with doors locking you out of a room if you hit a Hound while outside of the room. Hounds will not lock doors until I completely fix the issue.

There is an issue with controller interact button X on an XBOX controller not opening doors or chests. It was caused by changes I needed to make to fix an issue that some one had last night. It will be fixed tonight.

Small Hotfix
Reduced the amount of coins required to unlock most guns.

Fixed a bug with the Bombardier boss room not unlocking.

Release the Hounds
Added a new enemy type. The Gravehounds lock doors, rush the player and leap constantly. They have no ranged attack and they cannot strafe but they have high health and damage.

Added a new enemy type Bombardier Minis. These little guys strafe around, up and down and rain bombs on unsuspecting adventurers within the Depths. They don't drop upgrades but have potential to drop a lot of coins. These enemies are the first real element of the Valanian's weapons of war crafting that's currently in the game. More on this later when I start adding lore to find.

The boss Bombardier is now animated. It also moves and weaves throughout the fight. At around a certain health threshold (Changes per run) it starts it's second phase in which it teleports near the player and things get crazy. This boss is no longer a free chest. I promise this will be the only teleporting boss. -- The teleporting phase in broken in the released build. It's fixed in the dev build and will be included in the next update.

Large green and blue light crystal altars are now used for gambling coins. When you get close to one you'll get the cost to roll. There's a 50% chance to fail and get nothing. If you don't fail you get a random upgrade from the general drop pool. The price to roll increases by 50% each roll for that specific crystal. Every crystal starts at 10 coins regardless of how many you have previously done.

New rooms. One is the largest multi-room section in the game so far with two different paths to the exit.

Adjusted SLAYER combo to make it more consistent. -- I was far to generous with this one and the time limit per kill will be scaled back a bit later.

Health Regeneration now starts after 10 seconds from the last time you've taken damage.

Relics can no longer have decimal values for prices.

Fixed a bug preventing bosses from taking explosive damage.

Bosses now rain coins but no longer drop upgrades that are a pain to reach. I had always planned on removing that once I added the chest room after every boss.

Barrier upgrade was mistakenly not added to the loot pool last update. It's there now.

Added a visual effect for the area around wave spawners. So that you'll always know if you're dealing with constantly spawning enemies. When the effect is gone the spawning is done.

The Flintlock Pistol no longer causes enemies to ragdoll into the atmosphere on kills.

Uncapped difficulty scaling based on how well you are doing in combat. Previously how well you were doing in combat could only increase the difficulty up to your current level. Now difficulty can scale much higher much faster. Obviously this depends on how well combat is going for you. If you're having a hard time then it's not going to scale outside of Difficulty + pickups. This is an experiment and if it becomes too hard let me know. I've been playtesting myself and it feels fine for now but who knows honestly.

Treasure Hunting in the Depths
Reverted air move speed to the previous speed.

Seeker Rocket launcher's primary fire no longer seeks and instead goes straight and is much faster. The alt fire Rocket Storm still shoots seeker missiles.

Doors now take an input with the interact button to open instead of automatically.

Damage upgrades/downgrades dropped by enemies now have a green core.

Meat Bombs now explode when hitting the environment instead of bouncing.

Added more secrets.

Added treasure chests to about half of the rooms and I'll add more later. Right now they give a random amount of gold. There's two types of chests small and large. Large ones will have a small chance of dropping an upgrade.

Level Stat System, New Boss, 8 New Upgrades
The entire level up system has been overhauled to be much more RPG like. Instead of instantly getting set stat ups you now get a prompt to press the interact button. If you do not use your upgrade all XP gained while the prompt is up will be wasted. This is to prevent people from saving a stat upgrade for when they are low health to always fill their health at the best possible time. You can still do that should you choose but you will lose out on more upgrades. You now have the ability to make builds outside of RNG stat upgrades. So the way it works is when you level up instead of getting +1 health and +1 damage you now get a stat selection screen. The screen will randomly roll upgrades based on the core game stats. The left will always be health based, the middle will be energy based and the right will be damage based. It can roll anything between different stat values to special upgrades. An example would be on your first level the energy slot rolled +5 energy but then on your second level up the energy section rolled jump height. I plan to expand upon this over the course of development but the goal is to make levels more satisfying and give players more agency over their runs. The stat selection icons are Unreal Marketplace icons and will be until I get to the UI overhaul and make all of the game's UI art by hand.

Added a new currency Souls. You will not see these or be able to use them yet but you will be collecting one automatically every time you kill a boss. Souls will be used for permanent progression in the next update.

Added a new boss the Aether Golem to the random boss rotation.

Added an upgrade Flesh Chunks that causes enemies to drop small health orbs when taking damage.

Added an upgrade Meat Bombs that causes enemies to drop bombs when taking damage.

Added an upgrade Hard Stompers that causes a shock wave when you land.

Added an upgrade Explosive Feedback that has a 20% chance to spawn a seeker rocket when taking damage.

Added an upgrade Cold Feet that has a 20% chance to slow enemies down on hit.

Added an upgrade Pocket Grenades that has a chance to drop a grenade when taking damage.

Added an upgrade Barrier that has a 1 in 5 chance of blocking damage.

Added an upgrade Mobile Cover that has a chance at spawning a barrier when taking damage.

Added sprint when on the ground. Sprinting moves as fast as you move in the air.

Added a fire animation for the Seeker rocket launcher and Shoulder Mortars.

Decreased cost of firing Shoulder Mortars to .01 energy.

Door color is now based on whether it has been activated or not. By default the door glow and decal color is blue but once it's been activated it turns into an orange-ish yellow color.

Added Secrets. Some are chests that are put just out of your view while others could be walls with no collision. Some older secrets now actually tell you that you've found a secret.

Along with adding more secrets there are no challenge portals in some rooms. Essentially secret rooms that have you do a task to get a free chest. Right now the only challenge is survive waves of enemies but later I will be adding more.

Updated sound effects to go with bullet time and slow field effects.

Added negative stat drops to enemy loot pool.

Boom Boots now have an instant explosion instead of two delayed ones. It honestly just feels a lot better to use now.

New rooms.

I did a polish pass on almost every room in the game the goal is to make every level look better. The goal has always been to bring you as many levels as fast as possible and go back and retouch everything over time. This is one of those passes. Expect more over time.

New environmental models.

Reduced the chance of Rusher enemies leaping towards the player.

Gravemind enemies now have a proper leaping animation.

Shoulder Mortars no longer pivot wildly when swapping guns.

Reduced most explosive weapon damage radius to be more realistic and typically fit with the effects. Nerfs aren't fun but the game is getting entirely too easy with the amount of insane explosive damage I've been adding. I tested everything a lot and tried to land on what felt good.

Improved Rooms, Razorback Alt Fire
New rooms.

Rusher class enemies now jump at the player.

Some smaller rooms are now entrances to much larger arenas instead of just being small rooms. This makes for more interesting arenas and much less enclosed combat. There are still a lot of smaller rooms but I'm working to make them much more interesting. It just takes a lot of time.

Updated enemy loot tables to make some upgrades more rare.

Updated Shoulder Mortars to take energy. Let's be honest. They are were way too strong and I shipped them like that so people could enjoy some ridiculous runs for a little bit.

Razorback now has an alt fire that detonates all bullets instantly. There's an issue right now where it takes energy even when it doesn't explode any bullets. I also reduced the bullet hit damage.
I also fixed a bug that made the bullets do damage on contact after their initial hit.

New Gun, Upgrades, Maps and More
Added a new gun called Razerback. It shoots sticky rounds at an extremely fast RPM that explode 3 seconds later. It drops from relic chests right now and will be unlockable later. It also doesn't have an alt fire yet but the primary fire is pretty insane.

Added a new upgrade called shoulder mortars that puts cannons on your shoulders. These can drop from enemies and relic chests.

Added a new upgrade called Boom Boots that spawns an explosion when you jump. This can drop from enemies as well as relic chests.

Added a new upgrade called Second Life that prevents death and instead instantly refills hitpoints to max one time. This only drops from relic chests.

Added a free chest room to random room rotation.

Added a chest room after all bosses.

Adjusted the enemy loot tables. You can now get some of the crazy upgrades like shoulder mortars or explosive momentum (kills spawn seeker rockets) from enemy drops.

Adjusted Relic chests by removing things like stat upgrades. Relic chests are more focused on combat upgrades and guns.

Added a delay to firing so you can no longer shoot as fast as you can click.

Added an Invert Mouse option in SETTINGS -> GAME menu.

Added aim assist to help out if you need it and make controller feel better. It isn't too aggressive and if it's not enough let me know. You can disable it in SETTINGS -> GAME.

Fixed a floating Relic chest.

Added a new type of trap.

Reduced Gravetide Crusher health by half.

Added more rooms.

Reduced the spread of the Scatter Gun.

Reduced the lifetime of Dervish Spikes.

Achievements
Added 9 Steam Achievements. Later I'll add achievements for each boss and weapon. Now that I'm finally playing with the API I'm going to try to start on the leaderboard but no promises on when this will be ready.

Fixed an issue with the gravemother's animations.

New sound effect for enemy projectiles hitting the environment.

Updated Weapon Unlock Section, New Sound Track
Finished Atomizer model/textures.

Finished Unlocks page gun icons.

Each different sized version of the Rusher class of enemy now has it's own texture color.

Cleaned up the Exploder class explosion.

Completely new soundtrack from White Bat Audio. Check them out on YouTube. They make some great dark synth music.

Added two new rooms. One is a fight up a large spiral staircase and it's super fun in my opinion. We'll see what you think. We are currently up to over 40 curated rooms now. Let's see how high we can go! Expect them to get bigger and more jumpy very soon.

Updated the main menu.
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