Slaves of Magic
Demo 1.3.2 hotfix
This is a very small hotfix that fixes a crash that can happen when 2 description boxes have been locked at once (like when checking the skill a weapon provides).
Demo 1.3.1 hotfix
This is a small hotfix that fixes the issues that came up during the release of the 1.3.0 demo:
- Fixed that the intro video started again in case the loading has not been finished till the end of the video.
- The intro sound volume is now governed by the effect sound volume, not the music sound volume, which should make it louder by default.
- Fixed a crash that can happen when opening the smith projects when there is no approvable project in the list.
- Fixed a crash when the player successfully finishes the last mission.
- Aimed shot bow skill range is now correctly set to sight range from half-sight range.
- Added a general description for units from the Eastern culture.
Demo 1.3.0 patch
I'm happy to announce that our newest 1.3.0 demo is out with a new gameplay trailer:
New features:
- Reworked traits system. Every character will have a background trait that represents what they did before joining the resistance + 0-3 random character traits. Backgrounds can be region-specific.
- Recruitment cost and starting level depend on the character's background. The worst backgrounds can be recruited for free.
- Removed weapon schools. Every weapon adds its own advanced skill to the character that equips it.
- The Trickery, Teamwork, and Aggression schools have been reworked into 6 classes, one for every region.
- Completely reworked profile images, that respect which region the character is from.
- Added pushing as a core mechanic. A melee attack if hit by default will push the attacked out of the tile and the attacker will take its place. If the target can't step back, it will count as cornered and the attacker receive +20 attack against it. This gives another way (besides flanking) to increase hit chance with better positioning.
- Added a lot more region-specific names for the random name generator.
- Added an overall difficulty estimate to the party builder that takes into account your current party, the enemy composition, and their amount. This should help the player to make a more informed decision.
The eastern region has been opened up. Can host a resistance base and will be a target of army missions as well.
- Added the story introduction video into the demo when starting a new game.
Balance:
- Magic dust has been renamed to etherglow, and the amount that can be earned depends on the enemies faced and the amount of them.
- Added the ability to sell etherglow on the black market (5 dust for 50 gold by default).
- Reverted the extra starting unit change of the previous patch. Now, the ability to sell etherglow and the possibility to recruit units for free should give enough options for players to manage their unit count.
- Level 1 units do not have access to any skill, besides the one that their weapons provide.
- Redid the starting roster of every region.
- Unit cannot be retrained for free anymore, it will cost 20 gold to reset their skills. Except for universal skills, they can still be swapped around freely.
- Simplified and rebalanced stamina usage. The second action no longer costs 1 more stamina. Instead nearly all skills cost at least 1 stamina, but every character regains 1 at the start of the turn.
- Missed attacks now do not cause distraction by default. Normal hits cause 1 (previously 2) and critical hits 2 (previously 3).
- Rebalanced and simplified equipment point costs. Now by default, every smith creates 1 equipment point.
- Updated AI to be able to handle the new cornered and pushing mechanic.
- On the escort VIP mission, one pod will guard the exit rather than hunting the VIP. In addition, the enemies' spawn points have a minimum range from the VIP.
- The strategist move order skill causes a forced move condition, that makes that unit unavailable for further move order commands till it activates.
- Rebalanced headquarter bonuses.
UI:
- Made the combat map overlay thicker, to make it better seeable while zoomed out.
- The camera will only jump to the next possible unit when the other one is finished moving.
- The fog of war will only be updated with the unit's dead after it happened.
- Added a loading screen when starting a game, to avoid confusion.
- Reworked the UI for choosing headquarters.
- Reworked the research and project tabs.
- Added a purple cloud over units that have been converted to a redeemed to make them visually distinct.
- Added a unit overlay to the team builder screen when a player hovers over a unit to make it clearer that it can be clicked on.
- Made the victory and defeat screen pop up in combat after the last action finishes, not when it starts.
- Redid the visual for the enemy counter in the combat map.
- Enemy reinforcement teleport circles are seeable behind walls.
- Reworded and added new tutorials.
- Combat map settings preferences are saved.
- Added a new music track for team builder.
Bugfixes:
- Fixed a map generation hanging issue that was more prevalent the higher the enemy unit count was.
- Fixed a dead zone where commands were not accepted in the combat map left size.
- Fixed pop-ups being obstructed by the tabs in the barrack scene.
- Fixed mouse wheel affecting combat map zoom level while on the tutorial page.
- Fixed blood appearing instantly when an attack is successful, spoiling the result before the animation finishes.
- Fixed buttons not gradually transitioning to the not hovered over state.
- Fixed when a unit was being attacked while it was standing on a corpse, the corpse knew the result of the attack sooner than it was visually shown and it moved in anticipation before the unit died.
Story introduction video
I'm happy to announce that we will participate in the upcoming Turn-based Thursday Fest with our updated demo which will start on April 4th!
While there is still a bit of time till you can try out our new demo, you can check out the new story introduction video:
Devlog #26 Sneak peak into the upcoming Immersion patch
I wanted to give you a status update on our upcoming new patch to our demo. The original plan was to do it in multiple smaller patches, but feature creep had other ideas! Some big changes are coming that just simply couldn't be implemented in smaller increments. We still need some time to deliver the patch itself, but I didn't want to leave you all in the dark so read on if you are interested in the upcoming major changes!
Reworked resistance members
Every resistance unit will have a background trait that describes what they did previously. This affects their starting statistics, possible additional traits they could have, and their hiring cost. In addition, the possible backgrounds change depending on which region the unit is from.
The eager-eyed could notice that the portraits have been completely reworked as well. Now with a quick glance at the portrait, you will know which region the unit is from. Updated the name generators as well with more names so that they can generate more unique names.
New core combat mechanic, pushing and cornered
I always had the back of my mind that flanking in itself to increase your hitchance is not enough as that is relatively hard to do consistently. Plus it always felt a bit unrealistic that standing right next to a wall is the best defensive position as in that case, the unit is physically impossible to be flanked. Then came the idea of the cornered mechanic.
Now, units will count as cornered when they can't move backward from the attack direction and suffer a 20 defense penalty. In addition, every melee attack that hits will push the target back 1 tile while the attacker takes their place if possible. These changes make positioning a lot more interesting even in situations where flanking is unfeasable.
Advanced skills rework
Weapon attributes have been removed. Instead, every weapon will have their own advanced skill that comes with it. This gave me the possibility to differentiate weapons more besides damage, especially the one and two-handed variants of the same weapon. For example, that wide slash attack on the previous gif will be only available to units using two-handed swords!
The other 3 skill attributes (Aggression, Teamwork, and Trickery) have been heavily reworked into 6 classes (Ranger, Assassin, Protector, Strategist, Barbarian, Warrior). This means that every region now has a unique class. In addition, because the weapon does not take up one of the 2 available skill school(the new name for attributes) slots of a character, it opens up the builds space.
New eastern region
We have finished the eastern region combat map as well, so this last region opens up! The region itself is research-focused and will provide the resistance access to the strategist skill school!
Closing thoughts
And that's it for today's devlog! One important point is that because of the extent of the changes on the skills system, the new patch will not be compatible with previous saves. In addition, the patch will include a lot of other smaller balance and bug fixes as well, plus something else that I do not want to spoil just yet!
As always, if you have any questions feel free to drop by our discord here.
Demo 1.2.5 patch
I hope everyone had a great holiday session! "Behind closed doors", we are hard at work for our new content patch, but I wanted to address some of the feedback the demo received since the previous patch. So without further ado, the 1.2.5 patch notes:
UI:
- All bars transition into the correct value at creation/when the value changes, rather than being there instantly.
- Added markers to other units showing sight range from the hovered-over location on the combat map while deciding movement. This helps to see exactly where ranged skills can be used.
- All buttons transition into the hover overred state over time, rather than instantly.
- Updated the barrack/laboratory background
- Instead of blocking the time advancement button in the campaign map, there will be a flashing exclamation mark on the science lab button when no research has been chosen.
- Added a flashing level-up marker in the character sheet for the empty skill slot while removing it from the character profile picture, to make it clearer that a new skill needs to be chosen to level up.
Balance:
- Increased armor values (medium to +3, heavy to +6). This means that a tier 2 light armor (like in the case of dark elves) that gives +5 armor still does not invalidate a tier 1 heavy armor completely.
- Increased weapon damage across the board to compensate for the increased armor. Time to kill is around the same against armored units, but unarmored ones became easier to kill.
- Weakened the inquisitor soldier's heavy armor to provide +4 armor instead of +6.
- Reduced the enemy amount at the base defense mission at the end of the demo.
- Reduced the default range of ranged units from double their sight range to their sight range. Despite the reduced accuracy, the potshots were still too potent without counterplay. Now only the Aimed shot skill allows ranged combatant to shoot beyond their sight range.
- The range penalty for ranged attacks starts from half their sight range, rather than from sight range.
- Swapped the point-blank shot and the distracting shot position in the skill tree. The arbalest now starts with point-blank shot skill.
Bugfix:
- Fixed a bug which caused to remove 1 day from the ongoing research when the player loaded a saved game.
- Fixed blocked clicking on the right side of the campaign map, inside the area of the reminder scrolls, even when there are no scrolls there.
- Fixed units not receiving wounded status in the campaign map after being damaged in the combat portion.
- Fixed wounded time for units. Previously the less damage the unit incured, the longer the wounding time was.
- Fixed shielded units sometimes cause the game to soft lock.
- Added a max timer for animations so that if similar bugs happen in the future, they will not cause soft locks.
Demo 1.2.4 patch
Welcome to the last 1.2.4 patch of the year mostly focuses on polishing up the demo according to your feedback. Before I jump into the patch notes I want to thank again everyone who shares their feedback with us!
Visual/UI changes:
- Made the party builder more intuitive. Removed the changed button, the unit selection now opens when clicked on the character portraits. To open the character sheet to see detailed statistics and to change equipment, the player can click on the units themself.
- Added the damaged units to the campaign map reminder so that the player can see exactly when they are healed. In addition made the reminder list scrollable, so it can contain more than the 5 most recent reminders.
- The random time generator of the missions has been tweaked to generate more missions that are not in daylight.
- Changed the enemy counter UI color from green to red when you see at least 1 enemy.
- The amount of time necessary for things sometimes was represented by an icon, sometimes it was just a text. Now everywhere it will be represented by an icon.
Bugfixes:
- Corrected main menu scaling for various resolutions. Now when scaling the original video it will not stretch it, rather it will zoom into it to fill up the screen.
- Fixed equipment point tutorial pop-up counted as seen in the beginning.
- Fixed that sometimes clicking on the tutorial pop-up does not open the relevant tutorial.
- Fixed end-of-month scene not correctly displaying the mission names that were stopped by the resistance.
- Fixed that the default team builder could build teams that are over the equipment limit.
- Fixed when a unit position was set for teleporting in, it was shown with the wrong facing for a frame.
- To help with future bug fixes, added session logging into the game. This can be found in the game's logs folder. Including this log with a bug report will help me to identify and fix problems.
Balance changes:
- The resistance always starts with enough units to be able to fill up to 2 teams at the start of the game. This is to avoid the situation in which the player spends all their starting money and then can't replace their losses after a failed mission.
- Reduced the starting gold for the resistance by 150 because of the previous point.
- I underestimated the difficulty increase because of the improved AI, so that plus the increase of enemies felt a bit too much for new players. It represents well what I envision to be a normal difficulty for experienced players, but the demo should be on the easier side, so reverting the enemy amounts to what it was in 1.1.7.
- Buffed ranged combatants with a general +1 damage buff. With the increase in health from our previous balance patch, we felt that they were a bit over-nerfed.
- Reworked quick shield skill into shielded advance. This is a movement skill for 1 action that in addition adds the raised shield (+30 block) to the unit. This makes it possible for shielded units to advance at full speed while keeping their shields up in exchange for stamina.
- Changed shield mastery skill to quick shield for the dwarf soldiers. This helps them to advance faster toward the player units.
Demo 1.2.3 hotfix
A small hotfix has been released with mostly some small visual and UI fixes, plus an important fix for certain AMD integrated video cards (Ryzen 5600G was the one we got a notice about, probably there were others affected by this issue) which had a problem rendering the texts and the world map in the demo.
Demo 1.2.1 content patch note, the arrival of the dark elves
I'm very excited to announce that our new 1.2.1 content patch for the demo is live! Let me show you some of the biggest changes:
- Dark elves have arrived. They are expert in hit-and-run and ranged combat, but fragile if you manage to get to them.
- Sadly, their pet spiders will make it a bit harder to get to them!
- The desert region is unlocked, and it brings a new skill school called trickery with 4 new skills focusing on maneuvering and critical damage. Plus it means the enemy armies can target the territories in this region as well from now on!
- Added the universal skill school with 6 new skills. The universal skills are unlocked at the beginning of the game no matter the starting location of the resistance. These are various passive skills that do not count toward the maximum amount of skill schools a character can have.
- Completely reworked new player experience. Reduced the time till the player reaches the meat of the demo, the tactical combat! In addition, broke up the tutorials into smaller more digestible parts, plus they don't obstruct the scene when they pop up anymore.
- General rebalancing of existing skills and the economy of the game. Simplified the way gold income works, territories now simply provide their gold income if they have higher than 0 loyalty.
Saves should be generally compatible with previous versions, but for full effect, I would suggest starting a new game.
Demo 1.1.7 hotfix
Another small patch has been released:
- Fixed a crash related to vakondog enemy.
- Some small visual bugs have been fixed, like the health value updating before an attack actually connected, spoiling the attack result before the animation.
- Now the game saves the party composition when the player leaves the party builder for a mission. That means if the player leaves that scene for some reason to check something when he/she opens it again it will have the previously set party composition.