Shepherds of the Abyss
SotA on sale this week!
Patch 1.1 is now live!
We've also added a campaign of challenge missions that should help players transition from the tutorials to the harder Survival or multiplayer game modes.
Patch 1.1 notes:
New Content
- 14 Challenge Missions have been added. The purpose of these missions is to expand on the lessons learned in the tutorials and bridge the gap between the tutorials and the multiplayer or singleplayer game modes. Each consecutive mission adds a new mechanic or element that must be studied and utilized to complete it.
- An achievement has been added for completing all 14 Challenge Missions.
Gameplay Changes
- Reduced the base health of all units.
- Increased the duration that Soul Well remains on the ground.
- Reduced the cooldown of Soul Well to 5 seconds.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug where creeps would deal incorrect damage to thrones.
Patch v1.0.1 is now live!
Usability Update
- Additional text was translated to German, Portuguese, and Russian
Gameplay Changes
- Increased the base damage of the Bash Tower from 80 to 150
- Removed the time limit on building between waves for the Survival and Co-op Survival game modes
- Waypoints will no longer spawn immediately adjacent to the portal or to the players’ thrones
Bug Fixes
- The achievement for winning a 1v1 match is now obtainable
- Razeal’s voice lines for collecting souls no longer play on the server when a client collects souls
- Beam Towers whose attack rate has been reduced via a statue buff will no longer stop firing for brief periods
Shepherds of the Abyss v1.0 is released!
Quite a bit has changed over the course of our Early Access, so here is an overview of some of the bigger design changes you'll find in Shepherds of the Abyss v1.0:
The Game's Pace
First and foremost, the game is much faster paced. We ultimately agreed with feedback we had received that the game felt too slow/sluggish, so we greatly increased the speed and action, and then rebalanced accordingly.
Gameplay Clarity
Secondly, in our Early Access builds, it wasn't easy enough for players to always identify cause-and-effect in regards to their decisions and the outcomes. The result was the game could often feel "muddy" because the reasons for winning or losing weren't always clear. Therefore, we wanted to significantly increase the gameplay's clarity, so we redesigned our units and the way we establish the incoming wave.
Unit Buffs
Each unit in the wave is now affected by a set of unique buffs that provide clear advantages (more health, faster speed, shields, etc.) - meaning these strengths are tied to buffs and not to specific units. The buffs are displayed in a grid so that players can easily identify them and respond accordingly (see the game's screenshots for an example). They can also perform limited moves to change the locations and strengths of these buffs by moving them in the grid. This system gives players some control over the incoming wave, to be used in response to the strengths and weaknesses of their current base.
Tower Changes
We also reworked each tower to act as a hard counter to one of the buffs. In doing so, we've shifted the strategic depth to mazing, base-building, and tower utilization, which was one of our original goals at the beginning of development.
In the end, these changes to units and towers should make the reasons for the outcomes of your decisions much clearer.
Co-op Survival
In addition to updates to the Survival and 1v1 game modes, we've also added Co-op Survival, where you and a friend can join together to try to survive as many waves as possible.
There are countless other changes, and we've reworked the tutorial and added achievements, so if you haven't played in a while, be sure to hop in and check out this very extensive update!
Development Update - v0.7
Cooperative Survival
The primary major feature we’ve been working on is Cooperative Survival. In this gamemode, you play Survival with 2, 3, or 4 teammates. Multiple enemy Shepherds (bosses) spawn based on how many players you’re teamed-up with. Hold out as long as you can and see which teams can survive the most waves.
The design and engineering required to make cooperative survival enjoyable or even possible will also pave the way for us to launch 2v2, 3v3, and 4v4 multiplayer modes. Those should be available in a future patch.
Shepherds on Defense
We decided that we needed to improve the enjoyment of defense, and what better way to do that than to make your unlocked Shepherd play a vital role in defending your base?. Each Shepherd will come with the ability to take over a tower’s position and auto-attack nearby units, as well as cast a couple of unique spells to control, debuff, or damage units passing through your maze.
This change also means that Shepherds are available in every mode and play a vital role regardless of what type of match you’re in.
Economy Changes
Because we’re unifying all game modes to include Shepherds on defense as well as offense (where applicable), we’ve also made some changes to the economic resources that are awarded and how they are spent. We’re still playtesting these changes so they are subject to change, and thus why we won’t outline the changes in detail just yet, but we did want to announce that we’re focused on improving this area of the game.
Single-Shepherd Gameplay
And lastly, after building Shepherds of the Abyss for a couple of years now, we decided that having players unlock two or three Shepherds was actually a detriment to the overall fun of the game. While it made for some interesting combinations, the changing hotkeys and micro-management required didn’t live up to our vision of what this style of Tower Defense should play like. Therefore, players will now only get to unlock 1 Shepherd per match. The synergies between Shepherds will still be present in modes with 2 or more players on a team (where multiple Shepherds can then interact with each other) but won’t be a part of 1v1 or single player modes. We intend to make up for the lowered flexibility by adding more on-use items to the Item Shop so you can still unlock, in a sense, some of the abilities that paired well with your favorite Shepherd.
On the Horizon
As the number of this patch (0.7) suggests, we’ve got more features in the works or planned for the near future. Some of these include the multiplayer versus modes mentioned earlier in this post but also leaderboards, ranked mode, and more. We’ll do our best to keep you up-to-date on our current objectives and development progress.
Thanks for taking the time to catch-up on our progress. If you have any questions, comments, etc., feel free to drop them on our Steam Community Hub or contact us on Twitter @TheImpulseGames
Patch v0.6.3 is now live!
Gameplay Changes
- Creatures with the Phase Out ability in Survival are now immune to all debuffs while Phased, such as roots, snares, and stuns.
Bug Fixes
- Updated tower debuffs to correctly ignore targets that are immune to their relative debuff types (snare, roots, stuns, magic, etc.)
- Victor’s spawned Blood Leech in Survival mode will no longer incorrectly reward 100 Abyssal Shards when killed
- Fixed a survival mode crash
Misc Changes
- Removed the placeholder audio from the end of the tower EMP ability in Survival
- Changed the text on defense tutorial mission 6 to better-explain the process of Empowering towers and using Rage.
Patch v0.6.2 is now live!
Usability Update
- Added hotkeys to tower upgrades (keys 1-4)
- Changed cursor icon
- Added in-game options menu.
Gameplay Changes
- Empowered Beam Tower's damage no longer resets when refreshing Empower before its duration has ended, allowing it to grow up to 10x its base damage while remaining on the same target
- Survival Leech’s AOE heal ability will no longer heal itself, only units around it
- Increased the cooldown on the Survival Leech’s heal from 12 seconds to 30 seconds
- Decreased the range of the Survival Leech’s heal from 750 to 500 units
Bug Fixes
- Victor’s Drain Life ability in Survival mode should no longer spawn an invisible creep that lives indefinitely if Victor dies
- Victor’s Hemophilia ability now costs the correct amount of mana per level
- Survival Leech’s AOE heal ability should now cast more than once
- Empowering a beam-style tower that is Web Wrapped will no longer allow it to immediately begin attacking, even while still wrapped
- Web Wrapping the Sunfire Tower while it is Empowered now correctly causes it to stop pulsing flames
- Empowered Poison Tower’s damage-over-time now correctly reduces the target’s incoming healing
- Melee Towers should now animate after being upgraded
- Enemy towers should no longer show upgrade UI
- The ready button now shows the correct text on clients
- Fixed a crash when upgrading towers
- Abilities no longer show incorrect level data on tooltips
- Can no longer target dead creeps with spells.
- Mana cost is now displayed correctly by level on Shepherd UI.
- Fixed a handful of issues that caused Shepherds to not have correct max health values each round.
- Clients now display spell levels correctly in Shepherd UI.
- Fixed an issue that would sometimes cause creeps to fire off multiple instances of an ability when dying.
- Fixed an issue that would sometimes cause creeps to reward income multiple times when dying.
- Spell casting mode will now exit when the Shepherd dies or reaches the throne.
- Tower upgrades window will now close when clicking the ‘X’
- Currency reward text pop-ups should now be correctly colored according to resource type.
- We fixed a number of issues that were causing beam-style weapons to get stuck firing, especially on the client in multiplayer matches. We’re aware of one more edge-case that can cause them to get stuck, but the fix will take longer and we did not think it was appropriate to hold up this patch for this one remaining issue.
Misc Changes
- Optimized Survival Leech’s AOE heal ability VFX
- Changed the sound for the Backstab Tower’s Empowered attack
- Changed the audio for Victor’s Give Life and Send Life abilities
- Lowered the volume on a few sounds
- Added sounds for gaining Abyssal Shards and Income
- Removed the audio and visual feedback on Empowered Backstab Tower’s impacts (will replace when we have new assets)
Patch v0.6.1 is now live!
Gameplay Changes
- The Preparation Phase timer has been increased from 45 seconds to 90 in Classic vs AI mode and from 60 seconds to 90 seconds in Survival mode.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed an issue causing players to be unable to host or rejoin multiplayer games after finishing a match without restarting the game
- Fixed misspellings in defense tutorial 2 and offense tutorial 2
- Fixed creeps not cleaning up and leaving invisible bodies on clients.
- Fixed an issue with the wave queue ordering creeps incorrectly when trying to manually order them.
- Fixed sniper towers attacking dreadnaught inside of their minimum range when taunted.
- Preview path will now update immediately when entering build mode.
- Fixed incorrect warning messages displaying when attempting to cast spells.
- Fixed round timer not showing minutes correctly.
- Fixed tutorial menu not highlighting the selected mission.
Misc Changes
- Lowered the volume of the Flamethrower, Empowered Flamethrower, Empowered Sniper and Empowered Sunfire towers.
- Reduced the size of the Empowered Flamethrower VFX
Early Access Has Arrived!
Also we would like to encourage the community to join us on our Discord @ https://discord.gg/h6bHn. We will be hanging out in here from release forward, and it will be one of our primary methods of communication.
We look forward to seeing you all in game!