Genre: Role-playing (RPG), Hack and slash/Beat 'em up, Adventure
Mortal Sin
Level Rework Progress
Hi all, I've been hard at work at a major update coming soon. I usually don't make posts like this, but the scale of this update is so big, and it's been a while since the last update so I figured it might be good to share a little of what I've been working on.
This next update will involve a complete rework of all the main procedurally generated areas of the game, which includes the Dungeon, Cave and Forest. I found myself limited by the old level generator code, and so I painstakingly replaced all of it with a new, more robust system as well as a proper level editor (of which I had an early prototype for the portal room update). Rooms will now be handcrafted for more interesting and complex designs, but still have random spawns within them to keep them varied. Each area will also feel more visually distinct than they do now.
The layouts will be a little bit more streamlined now. Rather than the boxy mazes of before, there is now a clear main path of random rooms connected to each other with the traps, enemies and floor plates you are familiar with. In order to reduce down time looking at items, these rooms will mostly contain breakables rather than chests and loot bodies to keep the action flowing. However, going a little off the beaten path into the optional branching rooms, you will find some additional traps and enemies, and also a proper treasure room at the end to reward your efforts.
Thank you for your patience, and I can't wait to share this update with you when it's ready!
2/15 Optimization Hotfix
-Greatly optimized the combo icon performance, which caused noticeable hitching before on steam deck and some lower end devices. It should now have equivalent performance to using combo text -Greatly optimized some other parts of the code that would lead to frame spikes. The performance should be more stable now -Combo text now show thrust / whirlwind / punch / cast to have better parity with the combo icons
Combo Icons / Berserker and Duelist Buffs / Bug Fixes
Doing a quick update turnaround this week! Wanted to try a new combo icon representation which is hopefully cleaner and faster to process in the heat of combat compared to the text. Next I plan to do the level rework update as I mentioned last time, but figured there was no reason to hold back these changes in the meantime. See the full patch notes below:
Combo Icons allow you to more quickly identify combos at a glance by their color, allowing you to focus more on the action. If it doesn’t work for you, feel free to click and toggle back to text, but I’d recommend giving it a good chance first as I can guarantee it will lead to smoother gameplay!
Content
Added new combo icons option as replacement for text. You can still toggle to text by clicking on the combo popup UI
Made the starting area in all portal rooms more of a proper jump / airdash tutorial which can be safely practiced without risk of falling
Balance
Made the duelist’s blade dance ability do a fast whirlwind instead of slow whirlwind to make it more appealing to use
Buffed Berserker’s starting health and speed significantly in order to compensate for his weak early game
While combo shuffle is active, a full moon combo will be skipped if you are not actively in combat, so that you don’t have to initiate a fight with such a long combo
Exiting an area with unsold armor and weapons will now instantly sell those items and give you their essence value.
Polish
When crouching in tight areas, the game now checks to make sure your head won’t clip through the ceiling when you stand up
The invincibility radial meter now accurately represents the time left for the part that is visible on screen
Pressing the progress screen (T) will now show the current round you are in addition to the difficulty
The ability icon is now color coded for each palette to better match the new combo icon color
You can now move the combo popup with the mouse or dpad / analogue stick, rather than the clunky button mapping that were there before
Navigating the combo list with controller / keyboard will now automatically select the last selected combo rather than always scrolling to the top of the list
Bug Fixes
Fixed the platform height not lining up with tiles in one of the portal rooms
Removed an invisible wall in one of the portal rooms
Fixed bug where some quest rewards carried over between runs were permanent
Fixed bug where starting the game with any health modifier skill such as vitality made you start at less than full health
Removed a rock in the cave entrance tunnel that was possible get stuck and soft locked in
Fixed bug where grain setting would reset to zero regardless of what value was saved
Fixed bug where exiting a portal room normally could cause your weapon to be destroyed
I wanted to make a note that I am trying out a switch from the IL2CPP scripting backend to Mono for this update. Mono is a lot more common for most unity games, and allows for easier modding potential. I did not notice any major performance difference in my testing, but if this affects you a lot, please let me know as this is not final and I want to get more data on it. I’m also hoping it might possibly help the users who get abnormally long load times on their setups.
Secret Portal Room Update: 60 new levels!
Hello Sinners, it’s time for another update! Sorry this one took so long, I’ve been working on a brand new level editor tool that allows me to generate a mix of randomly generated and premade rooms. Because I spent a lot of time on the tool itself, I decided to first use it to replace the secret portal rooms in this update, but in a future update I will rework all the existing levels as well. See below for the patch notes!
Explore all new portal rooms, which are a mix of premade sections randomly stitched together to provide a varied, but also balanced experience.
Portal rooms are now much better built for platforming before, whereas they were kind of an afterthought at the game’s launch. Try the new air dash technique and improved platforming physics!
Content
Added 60 new portal rooms, replacing all the old ones! They have much cleaner layouts and are more fun to navigate
You can now perform an air dash in the portal rooms with bash. You can immediately cancel out of a kick jump with a bash in order to make this feel smoother. You can control the direction of your air dash based on your movement and facing direction (cannot gain height though).
Greatly improved platforming physics! You will no longer slip off of uneven surfaces, allowing for tighter control.
Reworked the Overpower skill. Now does an area stun every couple of ticks, rather than resetting your combo timer, which was exploitable for infinite combo shuffle levels
Balance
Traps now have their damage constrained to a minimum and maximum percentage. In general, no trap will deal more than 50% of your health in a single hit. And also if you have a lot of defense, it will at least still do some damage so it doesn’t become trivial.
Increased default base yellow essence drop value from 50 to 100
The Immortal Construct’s base spawn time has been reduced from 30 to 20 seconds
Falling in a portal room now breaks one random weapon or armor piece, and causes you to lose 10% of your gold essence (instead of breaking all your equipment).
Capped the amount of portal rooms in a single level to one (down from 3 max)
Increased Light Foot skill’s dash distance, and increase it per level (from .75 to 1.5 seconds max)
Polish
Added fall landing sound effects
Randomized sound effects will no longer play the same sound twice in a row
Fade in the invulnerability sound so its not jarring when spamming an invulnerability effect such as quick step
Kicking while crouching in a secret room will no longer jump
Getting damaged by poison will now blur the screen and cause the character to grunt for more feedback
Vsync starts disabled on first run to avoid choppy frames on some devices
Enemies will now only flash for attacking instead of blocking
Made the metallic weapon switch sound a little quieter since it gets spammed a fair amount
Made rotor / saw traps a little louder
Bug Fixes
Added fall landing sound effects
Forest grave skeleton scare always returns you to your starting position, since it seemed to have various buggy interactions that would throw players out of the map
Fixed getting stuck to the side of platforms in secret rooms (you will now fall)
I wanted to make a note that there is an intermittent crash that is due to a unity bug with their AI / Navigation system that I’m using. I told one of their developers about it, and they are currently working on a fix for a future unity update. Basically the position I am in is that I can either wait for them to fix it, or completely replace their pathing system with a new one, which would be likely a significant amount of work. But I will do so if they don’t fix their system in a reasonable amount of time. Thank you for your patience with this issue, and I want to be clear that I don’t intend to ship the full version with this annoying bug!
Combo Shuffle Revision, New Audio, Bug Fixing, Polish!
Hello Sinners, it’s time for another update! There’s been a lot of traffic lately which has been amazing. I am more inspired now than ever to keep improving the game, so thank you for the support! Here is the update:
Combo Shuffling and managing your invulnerability frames has never felt smoother!
Content
Revised Shuffle Combos to be smoother, easier to use, and closer in behavior to playing without it. Your combo chain will no longer reset, so you can continue in one long flowing sequence. Recommended combos will now smartly filter based on the weapon you’re using, what last combo you performed, etc, so it should flow a lot better.
Shuffle Combos are now weighted differently, so you perform more of the simple combos and the longer whirlwind combos are more rare
Failing to execute a Whirlwind or Thrust combo that comes right after another sequence will now reset and move to the next combo, instead of leaving you hanging to try and build it up again.
Reworked the Tempest combo. It was interfering with a lot of other combos, and I found that things flowed a lot better without it. Now it is the first combo where the finisher involves using your ability, and will trigger a powerful explosion if you execute it correctly.
Added a progression tutorial to Divino that explains in detail how the A, B, C route system works.
Added a combo shuffle tutorial to Divino.
Balance
Escape Artist now makes you immune not only to movement slowing, but also attack speed slowing as well.
You now have .5 seconds (or your combo multiplier timer if it’s higher) after stopping an action to continue your combo. This should make chaining combos much smoother and forgiving, particularly with very fast weapons
Shuffle Combos no longer grants extra combo multiplier
Shuffle Combos invulnerability time has been reduced to .35 seconds x combo length, down from .5. This is to compensate for the execution being easier now
Polish
Added a more prominent invulnerability aura effect along with a UI that sits at the bottom center of the screen showing exactly when your invulnerability will expire, so you know whether you have to block or continue attacking.
Reprogrammed the entire audio and music system for more flexibility and power for the future. The differences are subtle, but generally from a player perspective crossfading between music and ambient tracks should be a lot smoother, and some sounds have been adjusted.
Rewrote various systems to better support future updates. The effects are not super apparent at the moment, but it will matter a lot further down the road.
Reworded God Hand description to specify that the explosion happens on impact
Many audio tweaks!
Bug Fixes
Fixed a bug where your weapons would become invisible until you drink a potion
Fixed bug with save system where exiting a run and returning to it would cause you to keep your quest rewards, essence and other progress which could lead to some huge exploits
Fixed bug where save slot deletion button prompt could show the wrong key if equip unarmed was rebound to something other than the default
Fixed a bug where God Hand and Eye of Storm would not trigger in Shuffle Combos
Also, great news since the last update, Mortal Sin has gotten over 1000 reviews! This is a huge milestone, and I want to thank everyone who has chipped in. As the game continues to get more popular however, there is an increasing amount of more unreasonable sub ~30 minute, borderline troll reviews that come in unfortunately. I am all for constructive criticism, but judging the game in 5-10 minutes based on one run doesn’t help anybody, and I’d encourage these folks to simply refund. I don’t think people take these too seriously, but they do drag down the average at the end of the day. So that being said, if you enjoy the game please make your voice be heard, it helps me out tremendously. Thanks again, and keep on sinning!
Save Slots, Content, Polish, Bug-Fixing!
Hello Sinners, it’s time for another update! Have a long run going and don’t want to lose your progress just to try something new? I’m happy to say this is no longer an issue with the addition of save slots!
Keep multiple runs going and experiment freely! See below for the rest of the patch notes which includes some new bits of content and several impactful polish / balance / bugfix changes:
Content
Added multiple save session slots! Store up to 10 runs at any given time, freely experimenting with multiple classes and long runs without losing any progress.
Added a new item skill, Transcendence: Reduces your ability cooldown by half. More commonly spawns on helmets, and very rare on other items
Added a new curse, Durable Enemies: Enemies have increased 35% increased health
Added 8 new achievements, all of which have to do with how many rounds you can complete. These achievements go from 5, 10, 15, 20 rounds respectively, and also there is a path of torment variant for the truly hardcore sinners.
Balance
Any player damage, including ranged spells and attacks, will now refresh the combo timer but not increase the multiplier. This allows ranged characters to better sustain their combo shuffle / combo multiplier
The speed boost from the Perfectionist skill now either increases your speed by 100 temporarily, or doubles it depending which is higher. This makes it scale better in later rounds.
The Spell Dance skill now increases your whirlwind speed with staves, instead of automatically whirlwinding. This allows it to work better with combo shuffle.
Quest rewards that were stored after death will be removed if you die again. If you complete a run with quest rewards, these will remain. The idea is to make it similar to the rules of essence retention between runs.
Polish
You can now see the specific quest reward of a completed quest in the progress screen so you can plan accordingly
Timed floor plate quests now show the first phase of their objective now in the top right corner (to find the special floor plate)
The bonfire progress screen icons now show a more descriptive text (“This is the starting area”)
Reworded Power Infusion skill to reference “skills” instead of “perks”
When comparing two items, the item on the left is now marked explicitly as “Equipped” to make it less confusing which is which.
Bug Fixes
Fixed a bug with ultra-wide / 4:3 UI screens not scaling correctly unless you refreshed the resolution
Fixed a bug with the curse removal, and armor / weapon crafting quest rewards where they would sometimes not give a reward if stored from a previous run
Fixed the mouse cursor getting locked to the center of the screen briefly while loading into the game for the first time
Fixed a bug where the progress screen cursor could drift at some resolutions
Once again, thank you for all the support! If you are enjoying Mortal Sin, please consider leaving a review as it is close to approaching 1000, which would be a huge milestone. Enjoy, and keep on sinnin’!
New Weapons, Rebalancing, Polishing and More!
Hello Sinners! It’s time for a sizable update. Although there is no single major new feature, I was able to knock off a lot of items from my list which should help make for a more polished, varied and balanced experience overall. Enjoy!
Go full boxing mode with the newly added Caestus! Detailed patch notes below:
Content
Added a new rare polearm: Guan Dao! The guan dao is a slower, harder hitting, wider hitbox and different grip style alternative to the usual Halberd.
Added a new ultra-rare fist weapon: Caestus! They have a much wider hitbox than the claws, hit harder, and are more durable.
You can now retain up to 3 helena quests after death. This should give a slight boost to newer players who die early before getting to turn their quest in.
Every class now has a small chance to spawn a weapon outside of their usual weapon pool. This creates some interesting possibilities with particularly rare combinations you wouldn’t have normally, and also helps make some of the more limited weapon pool classes more varied.
Increased the level cap for player level and helena to 99. Although the rewards do not go that high, more level rewards will be added in the future anyway. And also some people simply like to see the number keep going up!
Balance
The Hunter class now uses polearms rather than only thrusting weapons. As such, added the Halberd and Guan Dao to his spawn pool and removed the Rapiers.
The Reaper death projectile spawns now spawn double the distance from before to give more time to react
The immortal construct has a base 30 seconds added to its timer regardless of the level size to prevent really fast spawns
Reduced the maximum number of parries in the parry quest from 20 to 12
Purging the hunter’s mark quest during a level will prevent the immortal construct from spawning on that level (only applied to future levels before)
Removed the Sadistic Tendencies delimb quest objective. It was simply too flow breaking and makes nearly impossible as your power scales in later levels.
Buffed claw durability by 20%
Deliverance now immediately releases you from a scare instead of forcing you to watch the whole animation. The tooltip has been updated to be more clear
Each new round will either give you a new curse, or refresh one purged quest. I want to keep things tense as you get late into endless runs instead of purging every curse and then having nothing to worry about.
Made curse bonuses percentage based instead of flat values, which should make them stronger overall and scale much better into later rounds.
Polish
Always show comparison values for stats when looking at a new item, even for stats that the two items don’t share so you can get a better sense of what you are gaining / losing.
Made wall spikes go in only one direction with some magic trickery, which prevents situations where it clips through the wall on the opposite side in awkward positions like coming through a portal for example.
Made it so fist weapons will glow just like fists during power strike attacks / charging
Made a more detailed combo shuffle tooltip so people know exactly what they are getting for their combo chain rewards
Made the forest branch a brighter red color, and added a skull above it so it’s easier to see from multiple angles
Bug Fixes
Fixed bug where navigating right on the visual menu settings sliders wasn’t working
Wall spikes will now only deal damage going forward (was damaging going backwards before in some situations)
The dungeon sewer grate head on stick scare will no longer clip through the floor
The dungeon wall rotor trap will no longer clip through the floor
Fixed cave guillotine trap trajectory so it doesn’t hit through the wall
Fixed bug where helena passive skill quest reward omitted some valid options (again)
Fixed bug where fractured limb headless spawns would ignore headless behavior and track the player aggressively
Also I want to mention, thank you so much for your support and so exciting to see the growth from the past two months! Mortal Sin is nearly at 1000 reviews which would be a huge milestone. If you enjoy the game and haven’t reviewed it yet, I would really appreciate it if you could take a moment to write one. I have some big stuff in mind for the next update, and can’t wait to share more when the time comes!
Nominate Mortal Sin!
Hello Sinners! If you are enjoying the game, I would appreciate your help in nominating me for this year's steam awards. It's been an incredible, life-changing experience creating Mortal Sin and getting to share this experience with the community. Although I think the "Best Game You Suck At" category could fit as well, I decided to choose the "Outstanding Visual Style" because this is the initial draw it seems for most people. Love it or hate it, the art style is certainly unique and I'm glad there are players out there that are open minded to appreciate something new!
This also seems appropriate given I spent quite a bit of time recently updating the art with gradients, outlines, more pronounced shadows, and more visual accessibility options, contributing to an overall more polished and refined look. Thank you for all the support, and I am excited to continue bringing a steady stream of updates to unlock the full potential of Mortal Sin!
Combo Shuffle Update
Hello to all the new and old players alike! The past couple of months have been very exciting for the growth of the game, and I'm very grateful for the support! I wanted to introduce a commonly requested feature in this update: A combo list! But it’s much more than that so check out the details!
Select any unlocked combo to pin it to the screen, allowing you to keep track of it during gameplay. Each input will light up if you do it in the correct sequence, so you don’t lose track of where you are. You can freely move this UI up or down to find a position that best suits your preference.
While this solves one problem in making combos easier to remember, I also want to encourage people to mix it up and utilize more than a few techniques (or even zero sadly in some cases where some will insist on pressing a single button repeatedly). Activate the Shuffle Combos mode, completing each random combo sequence (without letting the combo timer expire) for very powerful rewards.
Shuffle Combos Rewards
Increased combo multiplier based on the length of the combo (in addition to multiplier you already gain from hitting normally)
Temporary invulnerability based on the length of the combo. Sometimes you have to decide in the moment if it’s better to block, or finish a combo to get the invulnerability and keep the offense going.
Gold essence based on length of combo (after 2 chains)
Magic essence based on length of combo (after 4 chains)
Vital essence based on length of combo (after 6 chains)
Skill boost based on length of combo (after 8 chains)
Repeats rewards after with more gold essence rewards in between. See how far you can go!
I hope that these changes will make combos more appealing and rewarding for those who chose to ignore them in the past, and give them a new meaning to veteran players as well who may have gotten comfortable playing a certain way. Ultimately, I just want more people to experience the game at its most fun, which is skillfully chaining different combos together in a flurry of unstoppable offensive power.
Other Patch Notes
Moved the color palette options to the visual settings menu
Reset the damage timer for when you step out of poison / corrosive gas clouds. This means that if you move quickly enough through them, you won’t get damaged and thus don’t have to wait for them to disappear.
Fixed the colliders on some of the rocks in the starting area so that you don’t clip through them.
I've been closely monitoring the feedback on the new enemy, and decided to make it an optional encounter for now rather than push something so experimental on everyone. It's likely I will re-use this enemy in the future for something else though, perhaps as a fightable version in a very difficult encounter.
Patch Notes
The Immortal Construct pursuer enemy only appears now if you take the Hunter's Mark curse.
Hunter's Mark now has +4 item level bonus (up from +2), and will cause the pursuer to spawn in a fixed amount of time rather than a random range of time on each level.
Fixed bug where starting the animation for one potion and pressing the other potion button would cause you to regenerate the resource of the opposite type of the potion you are drinking
Fixed bug where helena's max passive skill quest reward could sometimes not give you three options even if they are available
Fixed bug where setting contrast to certain values could cause strange colors / artifacts
