Necromancer
3.2.1 Patch
• Changed some scene elements, notably the middle altar to have a less raised platform, terrain simplification
• Fixed an issue with Dreadnought balls getting rendered incorrectly when killed
• Modified powerup timing to be a bit better (also first resurrection comes in sooner)
• Some slight timing changes to spawnset
• Some improvements to grappling hook collision
• Improvements and bug fixes to particle effects to show an upgrade is available
• Added a slight dropshadow to some UI elements
• Improvements to visibility for Dreadnought and Juggernaut lob projectiles
• Fixed issue with "Killed By" text being replaced by PB debugging text in GameLog text
• Fixed an issue with casts (summoning) getting interrupted when the cast doesn't have player consistently looking at it during the cast process
• Fixed an issue with the Resurrectible Soul not beinghighlighted and summonable correctly
• Slightly more speed and health for Dreadnoughts
• Slightly more speed for Violators (Green Guys™)
• Improved visibility for powerup holograms
• +damage, -charge time, -speed for Banshee shots
• Greatly increased gauntlet damage but range is now basically melee
• Greatly increased Goregun damage
• Greatly increased Judgement damage
• Reverted Sledgehammer shot timing to be more like it used to be, but using raycasts rather than moving projectiles
• Removed friendly fire
• Increased Crucifier shoot rate and clip count
• Increased Longinus damage
• Added a damage floor to all raycasting weapons to improve long-range damage
• Increased Shotgun close-range damage
• Increased Triptikoss damage
• Slight changes to gauntlet audio looping
• Fixed an issue with new resurrections slowing down time when the buff is active
• Made player hurt sound play when resurrection is used
• Added a small UI animation for using resurrections
• Added ability to grapple onto friendly units
• Changed death animation functionality so "corpses" can still be targeted for hooks, but not collide with player model
Version 3.2 - The Big Arena
In any case, here it is! Demo version 3.2 features a whole bunch of changes, most notably an expanded arena, a brand new grappling hook to help with mobility and improve the movement feel, a far more simplified upgrade system and an overall massive boost in gameplay speed. There's a lot more to it, so have a look below for a more detailed changelog.
If you have comments or feedback, please head on over to https://discord.gg/BQUrRZX where there's a channel dedicated to feedback. And also just memes, dankness and general sh*tposting.
Major changes
- Removed health system and replaced it with resurrection system (extra life, get a temporary buff when you die)
- If you don't have a resurrection token you die in one hit. Resurrection tokens are one of the power ups.
- Power ups (annihilation, resurrection) no longer spawn in the blood altar/shrine, these spawn in the middle instead
- All shrines are now active and allow you to purchase upgrades from them. The variant system has been reworked so that the variation is now less based on RNG, but you now have upgrade "tiers" that all net variations of the same upgrade type. However, variation costs are slightly randomised every run.
- You no longer have to press a button to bank for upgrades, simple walk over to them and pick them up as they become affordable / available.
- Added a grappling hook. This has quite a long range, but its cooldown is variable based on the distance travelled. (close range distance CD is ~3s, long range is ~8s)
- Arena expanded to multiple platforms for use with grappling hook
- Improved general game speed, especially projectiles and enemy movement speeds
- Removed tutorial mode and replaced this with a small pre-game tutorial
- Summons no longer cost souls or are able to be summoned simultaneously, and are instead summoned out of resurrectable souls that periodically drop from certain enemy kills
- Leaderboard cleared
- Some spawnset changes
- Several weapons (snubnose dual-wields, railguns, reaver) now use raycasting (laser check) instead of projectiles, so projectile speeds are instant for these
QOL and aesthetic changes
- Improved casting animation speed and responsivity (for summoning)
- Added an automatic swap-out after 2 clicks of trying to fire an empty weapon (no ammo)
- Improved particles and shaders in main menu
- Added some parameters to options to start with gauntlets / skip tutorial if you have found gauntlets already, or have completed the tutorial
- Made in-game UI towers face player at all times. Shrines have progress bars and greyed holograms to show availability or progress to availability
- Added large (main) UI tower in the middle
- Added a "Sh*tposter" tower that floats around giving words of "encouragement"
- Some sound changes, including hit confirm / armour hit fail, some terrain hit sounds
- Added sounds for confirming spells coming off cooldown
- In-game UI simplified, some scaling improvements for 32:10 - 5:4 aspect ratio ranges
- Improved animations for player deaths
- Some changes to enemy colouring and materials
- Some changes to loading screen
- Some minor lighting changes
Balance changes
- Shotgun also does raycasting, has larger radius
- Shotgun and Snubnose type raycasters do damage based on distance
- Sledgehammer rate of fire massively increased and clip size increased, damage decreased
- Judgement charge rate decreased
- Goregun spread pattern is now a charged wave of explosions
- Gauntlet range reduced
- Hand cannon and Snubnose rate of fire decreased
- Friendly revenant health decreased
- Changes to terror enemies, including visuals, speed, spread pattern
- Several enemies now have improved projectile speeds, movespeeds and higher health pools
Honestly there's a lot more changes than that in all sorts of miscellaneous nooks and crannies but that's about the most noteworthy stuff.
In any case, hope you enjoy it, it's been a blast to develop and I've had a lot of fun in testing as well.
More soon!
Love,
V0ID
Version 3.1.1
V 3.1.1
Changelog
- +
- Banshee and Longinus charging time reduced
- Added "Killed By" text in the bottom-left corner Game Log for learning cause of death
- Goregun projectiles more accurate, faster
- Friendly Juggernaut cost decreased to 4000
- Lowered Elite necro count in some sections around 300-400s in
- Fixed incorrect tutorial start instructions
- Increased soul gains for Elite Revenants as they have more health and spawn in fewer number
- Bonebag tooth damage increased from 40 to 50
- Improvements to Skybox shader
- Lots of visual material changes to try reduce colour saturation levels, balance out palette more
- Improvements on finding operations in pre-game loading
- Made banking not possible when all weapons or upgrades from an altar have been attained
- Changed the sizes of a lot of units to make them easier to hit / more imposing
- Made units die if their y position reaches a certain level (below ground) to prevent clipping issues with AI
- UI towers no longer use roman numerals. This means towers near the weapon and passive altars can be used to see how many souls have been banked when playing HUDless
- Made Tutorial script show what weapons are given when multiple upgrades are auto-unlocked at the tutorial for player to try out
- -
- Spectral Demons (green guy / Lacerator spawners) now have two other spells, a wandering pillar that one-shots and a "shotgun" of 3 avoidable pillars
- Terror Necromancers have more health
Thanks for all the support through the last 2 years!
Love,
V0ID
V 3.1.0
V 3.1.0 is here. Give it a try and shout out if you notice any problems!
Changelog -
- Fixed an issue of the timer still running when falling off a cliff
- Revenants now use boid logic (flocking behaviour)
- Collision walls on altars improved
- Targeting has an element of randomisation added so that aggro can't be completely negated by positioning and summoning
- Summoning buffed, slightly more units are now summoned at once. Summons also have a chance to pick a random target rather than the nearest unit.
- "Coyote time" added for jumping (short delay of being considered not grounded after walking off ledges etc)
- Slightly faster walk speed
- Elite revenants are tougher, both revenants faster and more aggressive.
- Revenant orb speed faster.
- Revenants now attempt to flank and skirt around the player at close range, while lobbing melee explosives.
- Snubnose shots faster and more accurate
- Dreadnoughts now oneshot, but shoot less often.
- Juggernauts and Dreadnaughts now ignore other targets and prioritise the player on spawn.
- Recommendation for tutorial at the beginning for 0PB.
Version 3 is here!
Well it's been a total clusterf*** of a year, rife with a bunch of craziness.
After realising that an update to the newest version of Unity ended up decreasing performance significantly (absolute garbage FPS), along with realising how many things were just messy and not how I wanted the game to be looking and functioning, it turned out the best solution to it was just rebuilding the Unity project from the ground up.
It wasn't a complete do-over; at least I had all the old scripts, models, and audio assets, but the project scenes needed to be completely built again. I also went through the models for all the environment and units, doing cleanup operations to dramatically reduce the vertex counts (the average vertex count in V2 was over 1 million (usually more) and now it's closer to 3-400,000. I did a bunch of debugging and looking at performance sinks, and reduced unnecessary graphics draw calls and inefficient object find operations. (Always fun looking at your n00b work from way back and having to rework that stuff)
Having now done that, and though it took a good month of backtracked progress, I can now say it's fully been worth it. The game is now looking and playing much better than it used to, and a lot closer to being something I can be just genuinely proud of. There were a lot of delays, such as life stuff, a covid lockdown, work stuff, my computer just deciding it wanted to end itself and needing a replacement CPU and Motherboard, and other miscellaneous shenanigans. Regardless, I've been able to keep myself sane (comparatively) with this project and it's been a blast making it better than it was before.
Anyway, on to the updates!
- New leaderboard! Since the mechanics have changed a bit by now, I figure it's time for there to be a refreshed leaderboard so people can compete with the new mechanics.
- The store page now has an updated trailer! Please do share it around if you're so inclined, it'd help a lot!
- Most important enemies now have actual animations! This should help with making them a bit more dynamic rather than just floating statues. Revenants (basic enemies) also have a melee bomb attack to discourage letting armies of them get too close to you. (More melee attacks and enemy dynamics to come in later updates)
- Numerous other stat tweaks.
- Complete visual overhaul, not only for performance purposes but also for visual clarity (visual clarity being a big focus of the rebuild, as this was a common complaint for a lot of people)
- Launchpads removed (at least for now) as this tended to increase issues in visual clarity and also ended up making for pretty cheesy gameplay as it allowed for very easy dodging tricky situations, and get people into loops of just running for launchpads constantly. This has been replaced with a teleport mechanic (acquired from the spirit altar), which allows you to instantly relocate to another location/altar, but has a 40ish second cooldown. (I'd recommend redoing the tutorial to familiarise yourself with this.)
There's still a long way to go before I can call this project done, but hopefully not too much longer before I can do something like a proper early access of the full game. If there's bugs, please do let me know!
Thank you everyone for your support so far, I couldn't have gotten to this point without the people cheering me on to keep this going and not just lose heart.
Merry Christmas, Happy holidays, and much love,
V0ID
Release Date moved to TBD
It's honestly been an nightmare trying to gauge how much time is required to have this project finished. Every time I get some work done, the workload remaining seems to be as big as it was before. Not to mention I'm trying to do this by myself while working as well.
I think in the end it'll just have to take as long as it needs to; but rest assured, I'm dedicating to getting this out as soon as I can; I don't want this to drag on forever, but at the same time I'm not gonna settle for a halfass game that I'm not satisfied with; and neither should you. I have big plans for this game; I just need the time to make them happen.
I'll try do some neat updates for the demo as much as I can while I'm looking at getting the full game out.
Anyway, stay safe everyone.
Love,
V0ID.
Demo Version 8
We've got 8 new weapons now, built into a "variant" system that means that each run your main 5 weapons each have a chance of rolling one of three weapons that serve similar functions. (however the standard weapons have a higher chance in the demo.)
We've also got partial controller support now! This has involved migrating the entire input system to Unity's new Input System package, so there is likely to be some bugs and miscellaneous shenanigans, but hopefully this doesn't affect gameplay too much (but please let me know if it does).
I also realise I forgot to post an update for Version 7 - the main feature in this was a tutorial and a fair reworking of how the mechanics work with banking for upgrades.
In short - you kill enemies to receive souls. Souls can be spent on healing you, summoning allies, or it can be banked in to one of two altars to receive permanent upgrades.
Give it a jam if you get the chance! We need some more people challenging the leaderboard.
Cheers guys!
Love,
V0ID