Hey there fellas, we are finally ready to bring in the beta changes to the main! We have reworked difficulties across the board, the base difficulty (normal) should feel way more challenging than it used to be, easy mode should still be a place for chill gameplay, and the hard mode will feature enemies with empowered abilities and stronger zone mechanics.
Elite fights are now more central to the game, each one themed around the shadow hero with a miniboss-style fight at the end, where the shadow hero has access to its third level skill (or an entire new effect)! You will be able to see what the hero will be while navigating in the node map, so plan your route carefully!
Items and the economy have also received a massive overhaul, we have changed the generic damage type into Intellect and Strength that favors different heroes and brought with it many different effect items from each damage school.
We are aware that the beta testers are just a very dedicated fraction of the playerbase, so we will be hearing extra carefully for feedback on these changes regardless if you played the beta or not.
We are having a lot of fun playing the game in this new direction and hope that y’all enjoy it as well!
Systems
*NEW* Save System
It is finally here! You will now be able to quit and resume a run through the continue button in the main menu.
*NEW* Item Pool
You will now be able to customize the items that will appear in your runs and the free items that you start with.
There are some items that can’t be removed (we are calling them Basic Items), these are your standard +stat items. Besides this rule, you can play with as many or as few items in the pool as you choose.
You can also select Rare and Epic items as favorites, when you roll for starting items before a run starts, you will receive random items among your favorites. If you don’t have any favorites, you will get a random item among non-removed ones.
Combat
We have reworked the difficulty system and added enemy scaling to the game. As you approach the boss, the enemies will get more numerous and more powerful.
The node map was also extended and broken into two acts: Act one you go through enemy Tiers 1 and 2, ending with a chest node that gives you a legendary item; Act 2 will have more elites and enemies from tiers 3 and 4, ending with the boss.
Wicked Difficulty
Beyond a small increase in damage and health, when going from Normal to Wicked, enemy nanas, bosses, and zone hazards will have their abilities empowered. This will mean shorter delays, more Barkskin stacks, less Oxygen, and so on. Enjoy! :)
Sudden Death
After the fight drags for more than 1 minute, enemies will progressively gain movement speed. This feature can be disabled in the Difficulties menu.
Zones
Forest
Boss
-The boss now also throws a volley of Poisonous Mushrooms when he starts his Cleave attack in the second half of the fight. -The Barkskin that the boss gains has been re-scaled to start with fewer stacks on the first half and more stacks in the second half of the fight.
Frost
Frost Melee Nana
-New ability: When under 50% health, gains armor
Frost Ranged Nana
-Now fires two icicles at the same time on an angle
Frost Mage Nana
-New ability: Invokes a miniature Blizzard that slows an area and deals damage after a delay
Deep
Deep Melee Nana
-Now also gains Haste when reduced to 50% health
Heroes
All hero skills have been rebalanced under the new damage system, each skill will now have a specific scale (either Strength (red) or Intellect (blue)). Check the tooltips!
Hero experience
-Tokens to level up increased from 3 to 5 -Now Combat nodes grant MVP heroes tokens: -Normal Combat: The MVP hero gains 1 token -Elite Combat: The MVP and SVP heroes each gain 1 token -If a MVP hero is at level 3, the token will go to the next best ranked hero
Knight
-New ability: At the start of the wave, gains Block stacks equal to armor
Viking
-New ability: When under 50% health, doubles all his armor
Synergies
Synergies that granted damage have been reworked to give Strength and/or Intellect
Heavenly
-No longer gives damage -Now charges based on healing received and unleashes a holy shockwave once enough power has been accumulated dealing massive AoE damage
Shop
-Shop reroll rarity now is displayed in the top center of the shop window -Shop reroll cost now increases by 1 every time you use it in the same shop. This feature can be disabled in the Difficulties menu -Item costs changed from 1/2/3/5 to 1/3/5/9
Items
We have reworked our item selection to include more options with interesting effects for all sorts of niches.
Damage Items
-New basic items have been added to INT, old damage items were converted to STR -Lots of new options for both INT and STR effect items
Healing Items
-Healing power no longer exists as a basic status -New items that should help parties with low/no healers
Tanking Items
-Options have been redistributed at each tier
Movement Speed Items
-Lot’s of new options to go fast
Other Items
-Economy based items
Patch 0.3.11 - Early Access
The King announces new Patch Notes!
In comes a mysterious man, black cape, snow falling from his hat, he is the Coolboy!
Hey fellas, in today's patch we are launching a new Cold-Rusher hero. We wanted to thank everyone that participated in the beta, the feedback we received is incredible! We will still take a little longer to fuse both versions of the game since we still need to polish a few corners and add the save system (almost done!)
Heroes
*NEW* Coolboy
Nerves of cold steel! [Unlocks after beating any zone with 4 Cold heroes]
-Has 6 charges in his Coldt -45C -Fires powerful icicles by expanding a charge at short range -The last charge sends out a Snow Devil that swipes the enemy away! -Then he has a lengthy 5 second cooldown to recharge -Level 3: The Coolboy freezes his charges, giving him unlimited icicles for a few seconds, slowly freezing all enemies in the battlefield, and “quick drawing” any enemy that freezes for instant damage!
Patch 0.4.0 - Beta 2
The King announces a new Beta!
Hello heroes!
We are doing another Beta round! It took us a long time to translate old systems into the new design framework, incorporate suggestions, and bring all the new stuff to life. Sorry for the content delay!
This time we have all heroes available to test, a new pool of items with defensive, aggressive, speedy and meta options to power your heroes, and 3 reworked difficulties levels: easy, normal, and hard (enemies have stronger effects, not only HP and Damage!). We are still locked only to the first zone.
Please, remember to fill the feedback form (link is inside the game) so we can better gauge the impact of the changes and hear directly from you!
Combat
Difficulties
Easy: Enemies have less health and damage than baseline. Normal: Baseline. Hard: A little bit more health and damage than baseline, nanas have empowered abilities (in the first zone they have more barkskin, slow for longer, and mushrooms last longer), boss is stronger as well with tighter cleave delays, more barkskin, and more shrooms.
Sudden Death
After a wave lasts for more than 1 minute, enemy nanas will start chasing you progressively faster. This is an experimental change to avoid boring gridlocks. If you do love the grind, though, you can disable this feature on the difficulties menu.
Heroes
Levels and Tokens
We are trying to make the game less of a level up rush in the early game and make getting items early more appealing, also, we want to make baseline heroes progress better with the increased difficulty.
It now takes 5 tokens to level up a hero, but you gain 1 token after ending combat on your MVP hero (2 if elite). This token isn’t lost if the MVP hero is at level 3, it goes to the next best performer.
Level ups now grant 1 armor and damage per level has been massively increased. The standard melee damage went from (6/7/8) to (6/12/18).
Heroes also unlock all item slots at level 2.
Items
We have new items coming in at every tier, we are trying to cover options for tanking, healing, mobility, strength damage and intellect damage items on every tier, as well as some enabler items for weird stuff and meta items that mess with the economy a bit. Check them at the Compendium!
We’ve added the Item Pool to the first hero selection screen, you can click the item once (green) to make it a favorite item, and a second time (red) to make it a despised item.
Favorite Items are the ones that can appear as your initial items (if you only have one, it is a guaranteed pick, if you have none, it will be a random one among all). Initial items are still restricted to 1 rare (green) and 1 epic (purple).
Despised Items are BANNED from the pool, you will not find them in your adventures. You can’t despise Basic Items, which are the simple stat items (Ex: +2/+5/+7/+10 STR) and banner items (Ex: +10 HP for the party).
Some items have been phased out and we will have to rethink about what to do with them, some are probably coming back in some other form (Looking at you, Vess’ Dirty Spoon).
Shop and Economy
We’ve heard the feedback about the economy feeling strangled and we’ve tried a few changes to the gold amount/elite rewards, but there were so many moving parts coming in with combat tokens, more interesting low tier items, and economy warping items that we are leaving the economy values as they are to better isolate the variables. Still, do voice your opinion if the game economy still feels too constraining, elites don’t feel rewarding enough, or if it feels fine.
Reroll cost now increases every time you use it in the same shop. This is an experimental change to incentivise purchase decisions before the last shop and make you work more with what comes up in the shop. You can disable this change in the difficulties menu.
Synergies
Damage Synergies now give either STR or INT. Heavenly has been reworked to unleash a massive shockwave after healing your party for a large amount.
Check the tooltips!
How to enter the beta
Right click Just King in your Steam Library
Click on “Properties…” Select “Betas” on the sidebar
Select the “beta” branch
Close the window, Steam should download the beta branch
Patch 0.3.10 - Early Access
The King announces new Patch Notes!
We found another fella from the Deep! Well, she says she is not from this Deep, but we found her there, looking at the stars from the bottom of the sea… Pretty weird, but she is pretty strong and that’s enough for me!
Beta
The beta is going to the back oven as we incorporate the amazing feedback that you guys gave us. Thank you for providing feedback in the Google Forms and Discord!
Heroes
*NEW* Lich
Powerful mage that drains the life of foes and allies alike to power devastating attacks! [Unlocks after beating a boss with a 4-Deep party]
-Life Drain enemies to deal continuous damage while healing herself -Drains life from allies to feed The Orb -When The Orb is fed, it seeks the closest enemy to deal massive area damage -Lvl 3: Creates a Phylactery that speeds up the life drain of both enemies and allies -Be careful with how much life The Orb demands…
Deep Cultist
We are shifting the Deep theme to be more about self sustain and the Cultist was doing way too much damage for a hero supposed to be all about tanking in a stronghold. The level 3 is being changed as well to better fit the theme of the hero and provide more interesting moments.
-Tentacle damage (4/4.5/5) -> (2/2.5/3) -Whenever a tentacle attacks and hits at least one enemy, heals the Cultist (1/1.25/1.5) -*NEW* Lvl 3: Spawns 3 tentacles close to random enemies, they attack the enemy once and then remain to be used by the Cultist for 10 seconds
Synergies
Deep
-Now spawns Hooks every 10 seconds -Hooks only last 10 seconds -Hooks deal (25/35)% of the target’s HP as damage (2% for bosses) -If eliminate an enemy with a Hook, heal the party (15/20)
Systems
-You can now fast forward the text from Interaction nodes by clicking with your mouse anywhere. Support for controllers is still pending.
Bugs
-Random ghost sharks should be gone now, spooky!
Patch 0.4.0 - Beta
The King announces a new Beta!
Hello heroes!
Part of the work we’ve been doing in the background between hero releases is reevaluating how the game evolved and where we want it to go. As of now, the game isn't as challenging as we want it, we think that the "normal" difficulty of the game should ask for more tactical choices, be it on party composition, items, or path choice in the combat map.
To reach our vision, we needed better tools to calibrate the game, stronger enemies to keep the challenge in the mid-late game, and a way to bring more agency to choose the best fights for each party beyond "Am I strong? Y: Elite - N: Normal".
In this beta we are only testing the first zone, with the 12 original heroes and with basic status items + healing/defensive items.
The difficulty is locked on "normal", this might be harder than the experience you are used to, but please try this out to see how the new systems interact. We will do our best to integrate feedback and make a cool "fun" difficulty and an absolute nightmare "wicked" difficulty.
We hope you like the changes, we have been having a blast internally!
Feedback
Feedback is crucial for this next step, we want to hear your thoughts after engaging with the new systems so we can adjust and polish the changes.
We’ve set up a Google Forms to get some structured data, but also feel free to jump on the Discord and speak your mind directly to us.
Combat
Scaling
Enemy nanas and heroes get stronger as layers go by, keep up the pace!
Common nanas starts with 25% less health, but ends with about 250% more.
Melee nanas start with 100% more damage and end up with 400% more.
Shadow heroes are even more powerful!
Elites
Elite nodes now show you beforehand what kind of enemy you will face, a node with an Archer will only contain Archer themed waves. The number of waves was also reduced from 3 to 2.
Elite node’s final wave will always have a level 3 shadow hero/miniboss that DOES have access to their level 3 abilities (or something equally as devilish), good luck and plan ahead!
Boss
The first boss received a few touch ups, nothing too drastic. He will be throwing more shrooms around in the second phase to make the fight more engaging.
Length
The map has been increased and split into two acts: The first act is easier and ends in a treasure chest; The second act has a lot more elites and ends with the boss.
The total number of nodes has roughly doubled, with this increase the need to save runs got even needier, this feature will come in the future and has been started.
Items
Damage and Heal Power items have been replaced by Strength and Intellect items, these will provide flat values (2/5…) instead of percentages (25%/50%...).
Strength increases the damage of physical attacks, from Knight’s cleaves to Archer’s arrows. Intellect increases the effectiveness of magical magics, from Mage’s fireballs to Paladin’s heals
Heroes now will have scales on each skill so we can better fine tune each one. If a skill has a 120% strength scale on its damage and you have 10 strength, you will do 12 extra damage.
Item costs have changed as well to better match the extra income from additional waves and force more tactical choices, from 1/2/3/5 to 1/3/5/9.
Heroes
All heroes’ skills have been adapted with the new Strength-Intellect item system, the new calculation looks like this: (Base_Damage + (STR/INT * Scale)) * DMG_Multipliers
Hoplite
-At level 3, can hold up to two empowered spears
Other changes
-Lots of calibrations for the synergies, check the tooltips! -Ranged enemies run away when near danger -Pets will stay close to the party when there are no enemies around -Buff icons have been remade for better readability
How to access the beta
Right click Just King in your Steam Library
Click on “Properties…”
Select “Betas” on the sidebar
Select the “beta” branch
Close the window, Steam should download the beta branch
Bard Fools!
Artificer: Welp, I have to rework this AP/AD converter, but things seem somewhat stable now...
Enzo the Bard: Heeeeeeey buddy, what do you have over there? Seems expensive!
Artificer: Oh this? This is the reality warper I've been working on, don't touch it!
Enzo: Hmm, ok ok... you like scrap metal, right?
Artificer: ... yes?
Enzo: The Knight will give you his helmet if you manage to take it off, it has a cupholder and everything.
Artificer: Say less. ~Runs out of the room
---
Enzo: Well well well... now it is timer for JUST BARD!
P.S. If you want to play the normal version of the game, go to the "normal" branch in Steam config, the special April Fools mode will be up for 24h, have fun!
Patch 0.3.9 - Early Access
The King announces new Patch Notes!
I’ve finally convinced the dude from the patch notes to join the party! He is a genius (just like me), so he will be a valuable addition to our efforts! He likes to plant these turrets that zap enemies, and he is really keen on recycling the iron left in the battlefield, so eco-friendly!
Also, the Artificer told me he is calibrating the very foundations of the realms in his spare time, whatever that means. Don't be surprised if we find some… instabilities… in the future.
Heroes
*NEW* Artificer
A genius that crafts static defense and scavenges armor! [Unlocks by beating a boss with 4 Strategists]
-After standing still for while, spends 2 armor to craft a Turret -Turrets deal ranged damage and slow enemies -Destroyed Turrets leave behind scrap metal that gives 1 armor to the Artificer that collects it -Defeating an enemy grants Artificers 0.2 armor -Lvl 3: Nearby Turrets gain bonus Haste based on the Artificer’s Haste -Lvl 3: Turrets also explode when destroyed, dealing damage and stunning nearby enemies
Items
Wagon Blueprint - now gives stats at the Left position instead of Front
Systems
Hero Pool
The hero pool order is fixed and now shows the synergy symbols of each hero under them. Thanks for the suggestion Alissa!
Minor Adjustments
-Skills with fixed cooldown have a new icon. Thanks for the idea Lamp! -Fixed some missing characters in Japanese. Thanks ikutaN!
Patch 0.3.8 - Early Access
The King announces new Patch Notes!
What is that in the sky? Is it a plane? Is it a bird? No... it is The Sun! Our new Protagonist hero is the literal Sun and Moon! Can't get any more protagonisty than that, eh? Like a super hero, he is mighty, a bro, and have a terrible weakspot: the afternoon.
New music!
Our minstrel Tad has brought us 5 new amazing songs! These will be added to our soundtrack for a total of 10.
Heroes
*NEW* The Sun
Powerful hero that is powered by the Sun and Moon
-Changes forms based on the time of the day, each day has 24 seconds -Morning form (8 seconds): Powerful attack that converts all haste into damage, gains 3 additional armor -Sunset form (4 seconds): Has a very weak attack -Night form (8 seconds): Ranged attack that converts all damage into haste -Sunrise form (4 seconds): Has a very weak attack again! -Level 3: Sunrise form is replaced. The Sun will rise to the sky and bombard the battlefield with solar beams that burn enemies for 4 seconds!
Items
-High Quality Baguette: now gives 50% party damage on the right instead of on the front
Minor Adjustments
-Mouse will now be bind to the screen to avoid it slipping in the second monitor, you can unbind it by opening the pause menu with ESC -Defeated heroes are also greyed out in the MVP post combat screen
Bug Fixes
-Fixed numeric error taht made the Ronin attack slightly slower at level 3
Patch 0.3.7 - Early Access
The King announces new Patch Notes!
Small patch!
-Updated localization files -Polish font has been changed to the same most languages use -Portuguese localization was done by us, on a post carnaval binge, with lots of jokes. Espero que gostem <3 -There will now be an "X" on heroes that died in the post combat screen
*NEW* Perma Death Mode!
-If a hero dies, it stays dead! -You can enable this mode on the difficulties menu. -Clerics can be used to revive your fallen hero just fine, just don't forget: if you move to the shop before the ritual is complete they will stay dead!
Hotfix
-FIXED A DIRTY, DIRTY AND EVIL DEAD PIXEL MAKING THE GAME UNPLAYABLE EWWWWWWW -Fixed an issue that swapped heroes' tooltips in the MVP screen -Tooltip text is now aligned to the left to avoid weird spacing -Made this patch note more beautiful
Patch 0.3.6 - Early Access
The King announces new Patch Notes!
Happy Valentine’s heroes! In this climate of roses and smooches we bring the third Heavenly hero: The Cupid! Pray he gets you a cute pair, because this mad man is throwing arrows at random over here.
Heroes
*NEW* Cupid
It is a match! Couple enemies and support allies through the power of love! You can unlock the Cupid by getting the Heavenly achievement!
-Fires arrows that bounce around madly until two enemies are hit, they become lovers! -Lovers that get too close become a couple! …for 3 seconds at least… -Witnessing a couple forming heals all allies! -Level 3: The cupid shares his burning passion arrows with the hero on the other side of the party, giving them extra damage based on his heal power! That’s way better than chocolates and flowers.
Plague Doctor
Now applies The Cure on all allied heroes whenever he unlocks a new tier.
Slayer
First target damage (3/4/5) -> (2/3/4) -Lvl 3: Secondary first target damage 2 -> 1 -Lvl 3: Catches to activate 3 -> 6
Systems
*NEW* First Shop Buttons
-Added buttons to randomize starting items, first hero pick, and hero pool to the screen, just under the Continue Button!
*NEW* Just King Just King Run
-Yep, literally just the King. Good luck with that one lol -Unlocks after defeating a Shadow King with the one and only King!
Languages
-New text font -Improvements in the language selection screen -Added Polish and Russian to language options -We are adding languages as soon as they hit a reasonable % in Localizor, if you want your language in the game and want to collaborate feel free to join the localization community! (Link in the game, in the languages menu)
Minor Adjustments
-Return option in the zone selection screen -More heroes can appear in the menu doing the happy little dance
Credits
-We’ve added a Credits screen in the menu with the many amazing people that helped us along the way <3 -If you did some cool stuff and we forgot about you, please remind us in the discord! -If you want to appear in the credits, do something cool!
