Genre: Hack and slash/Beat 'em up, Adventure, Indie
Striving for Light
Hotfix 0.8.0.0c
Improvements
Game now starts in native full screen mode which should fix issues with wrong display resolutions being detected.
Bugfixes
Fixed duplicated projectile spawns when picking up a new ranged weapon. This has lead to a massive performance issue on projectile shield but also doubled projectile spawns for normal shots.
Hotfix 0.8.0.0b
Bugfixes:
Fixed player effect transparency slider not being saved in the options menu. The option should now work as intended.
Fixed builds not being transmitted to leaderboards.
Hotfix 0.8.0.0a
Improvements:
Pet now move faster
Balancing:
Tree of Light legacy skill nodes for endurance and energy regeneration now grant +30% reg (was +15%)
Flated out enemy hp scaling a bit for higher delve counts
Bugfixes:
Fixed not displayed attack cost in the stats window
Fixed crash when interacting with the leaderboard stone
Removed duplicated crit stats on skill node tooltips
Fixed bear caller converting to magic shield when picking up the weapon
Fixed map completed achievements triggering wrong achievement ID
Fixed frenzy UI not being show
Fixed crash when using bear caller
Fixed bug that caused wrong soundtracks to be played
Update 0.8
Welcome back Wanderers to the biggest Update we have ever done for any of our games. Since our last content update for SfL we worked hard to try out and evaluate new directions and concepts with the release of SfL: Survival. We have gathered plenty of feedback and consolidated everything to this massive update that will make SfL appear like a new game with so much new content and QoL improvements. This being said thanks for all your feedback and suggestions that helped bringing Striving for Light to the point.
New Features
New League Start - EA Season 8
With the first warm breezes the remaining snow is melting and heralding the spring in Ankerath. So with Update 0.8 we are starting off the new Early Access Season 8 for Striving for Light. We did heavy balancing changes that speed up and intensify the early game experience but also tweaked endgame to make it more challenging. More about balancing changes later on. New NPC models have also been added to the game.
5 Difficulty Tiers To Compete
For the very first time we are introducing difficulty tiers to Striving for Light. You will start with Tier 1 and progress as usual. But once you have reached level 60 the next difficulty tier will be unlocked. For the next run you can now choose between those unlocked difficulty tiers in the pathfinder on the new difficulty tier UI.
You can only change the difficulty setting before you actually starting your run. Once you have activated your first map from the pathfinder the difficulty setting is locked and can earlies be changed on the start of your next run. All difficulty tiers come with their own leaderboard. So with update 0.8 you will have 5 seasonal leaderboard to compete against other players. These changes of course also carry over to private leagues. You will also be able to compete against your friends in the private league on those 5 leaderboards.
For each difficulty tier enemy HP get increased by +50% and the elite spawn possibility is increasing by +3%. Yes you have read correctly we are adding elite enemies to SfL. More about them later. Difficulty tiers are designed to impose additional challenges will need optimised build setups and maybe some preparation before taking on a Tier 5 run!
The current difficulty tier is also displayed on the ingame UI next to the delve count.
Armory Build Viewer
Talking or leaderboards we are extending the leaderboard system by implementing a armory build viewer which lets you view others builds on the leaderboard by clicking the character icon on the entry. You will not only be able to see the character stats but also the chosen skills and the equiped weapons including their stats and the embedded legendary ability.
In-game Achievements
With this update we are also adding an in-game achievement system to SfL. This is the first step towards implementing steam achievements. All added achievements are seasonal achievements which are tied to your savegames. The achievements not only give a great overview over all weapons and skills that can be unlocked but also hold some information on how these can be unlocked. It also serves as a tool to check what skills and weapons are currently available in your runs and what still has to be unlocked. This should also help guiding new players. Currently there are over 150 seasonal achievements awaiting to be completed.
Elite Enemies
We are also introducing a new elite enemy mechanic which adds the possibility to enemies to be spawned as elite version. These elite enemies have 10x the HP of the regular enemy but therefore give a guaranteed special light fragment drop, which also grants you additional 3x the EXP of a regular enemy. Since the elite enemy spawn scales with the difficulty tier you will have the chance to grab some extra EXP and light fragments on higher tier runs.
New Melee Weapon: Bear Caller
Each of your melee attacks calls a bear which attacks for you. The bear attacks are treated as your own attack and can trigger all your melee on hit and on attack effects.
New Range Attack Replacer Skill: Projectile Shield
Your projectiles surround you like a projectice shield.
New Melee On Attack Skill: Fissure
Your melee attacks tear the ground and create a fissure traveling away from you. Fissure has the chance to replicate itself with a 50% chance.
New Critical Hit System
All attacks and skills can now deal critical hits if your critical hit chance is higher than 0. Along the new base skill node two new stats are introduced: critical hit chance and critical hit damage. Where critical hit chance is discribing the chance of all your attacks and skills to deal a critical hit. Critical hit damage describes the damage bonus for your ciritical hits.
New Life Leech System
A new life leech stat has been added along a new base skill node. When investing in live leech you will regain 1 HP after defeating a certain amount of enemies.
New Base Skill Node: Collect Range
A bit more specific skill node has been added that lets you increase your collect range which might become useful in endgame scenarios.
Korean, Japanese and Portuguese Localisation
With 0.8.0 We are adding support for Korean, Japanese and Portuguese language.
Extended Twitch Livestream Integration
In the main menu there is now a new twitch icon. Whenever you enter the main menu it will be checked if there are current livestreams on twitch in the Striving for Light Categories. The number of online channels will be displayed along a red dot if there are some. Clicking on the twitch icon will open up a livestream browser giving you more information about the current live stream options. You can quickly jump to a livestream by clicking the twitch icon on the channel entry. We hope that this feature helps further connecting the community.
New Damage Number System
Damage numbers are now colour coded to display your damage amounts. With higher damage the damage numbers are also scaled bigger. Critical hits have also received their own critical hit icon.
Striving for Light: Survival Soundtrack Option
We added the recently composed Striving for Light: Survival Soundtrack as an alternative OST to switch between.
Improvements
Performance improvements for player projectiles and companions
Performance improvements for enemy movement and enemy collisions
Improved responsiveness of player character movement
Improved enemy hit visual effect
Chests now always spawn in front of the gatekeeper portal to reduce backtracking and make the overall game experience more fluid.
Player effect transparency slider has been added to the options menu to make your projectiles, skill effects and companions partially translucent.
Completely reworked all enemy projectile + trap colour and contrasts to make them better visible.
Added option to give enemies a red outline to make them better standout on various backgrounds.
Updated some of the skill node textures with clearer representations of the skill node.
Added option to display player damage screen overlay effect to improve player hit feedback.
Environment effects got reworked.
New weapon trails and a new weapon swing visual effect was added.
Reworked skill tooltip damage and trigger possibility calculation. Skill tooltips got some futher reporks.
Improved widescreen support for environment effects.
Added new player level up effect.
Added new button hover and button click sound feedback.
Melee constructs can now trigger double hit.
Fissure has been added as legendary effect.
Visual Improvements for Double Hit and Clash of Steel.
New NPC models for Darokin, the old man of Ankerath, Heleja, the scholar of Ankerath and Goladir the blacksmith of Ankerath
Exploding dodge now shows that the skill is actually scaling with your projectile damage
Random starting skills have been replaced with static skill selection to ensure a balanced distribution of skill variety.
Balancing
Increased default endurance and energy regeneration on fresh run to 1.5/s (was 1.0/s)
Max endurance and max energy skill nodes now increase your max resources by +2 (was +1)
Increased endurance and energy regeneration now increase your regeneration by +100% (was +60%)
Increased companon damage skill nodes now decrease your endurance and energy regeneration by -30% (was -25% attack speed and -15% dodge regeneration)
Increased condition damage skill nodes now decrease your endurance and energy regeneration by -30% (was -15% attack speed and -20% endurance and -20 energy regeneration)
Reduced frenzy exp bonus and rebalanced frenzy time limit scaling for high frenzy stacks
Trembling ground now has -50% attack speed
Increased melee damage has been decreased to +70% (was 80%)
Constructs have been removed from the legendary effect pool.
Enemy HP scaling has been increased for the endgame.
Bugfixes
Plenty of smaller bugfixes
Known issues
Since this is the largest update we ever did on one of our games with many fundamental changes we are aware that there might be a bit more bugs introduced as on the usual updates. So we recommend going to gown as often as possible so that your run gets saved on a regular basis in case you encounter crashes. Backing up the save files now and then is also never a bad idea.
We wish everyone a lot of fun with this new update and the new early access season 8. See you in the leaderboards!
If you encounter any bugs or issues please let us know. The best way to engage in the ongoing development of Striving for Light is our discord:
As many might already be hyped about the upcoming 0.8 content update we want to give you some news on our progress and plans for all the new stuff coming to Striving for Light.
Actually the scope for 0.8 has steadily increased since we last posted our initial plans for the 0.8 content update.
So lets summarize what was already planed for 0.8:
New Side Dungeons
New Item Type
Difficulty Tiers
In-game achievements
Pathfinder rework
With this already being a massive update we decided to add another feature:
Armory and Build View Integration
We are currently developing back and front end for an armory and build view system that lets you check out the builds, stats and weapons from all players on the leaderboards. This will grant players a whole lot of new inspiration by checking out what other players have played or which weapon and skill combinations they used. Furthermore this will help us balance skills and weapons and also make cheating obvious. Overall this should be positive additon to the online seasons and leaderboard experience.
Performance Improvements
We did a lot of fundamental from the ground up testing and refactoring the code base to improve performance and convert some of the few remaining older cpu based particle effects to use the GPU. This will further increase the endgame experience for Striving for Light.
Since more content and features also means more time needed until you can get your hands on all of this, we decided to repack all of those features into two seperate updates so that you can get your hands on them sooner.
Update 0.8.0 will contain
Armory and Build Viewer
Difficulty Tiers
Endgame rebalancing
In-game achievements
Pathfinder rework
Update 0.8.1will contain
New Side Dungeons
New Item Type
more to be announced...
With Update 0.8.0 we will also kick off the new Season 8.
With the introduction of in-game achievements and difficulty tiers that can be unlocked we will give players even more to achieve in one season.
Difficulty Tiers
With update 0.8 you will get access to 5 difficulty tiers. In the beginning only the first difficulty is unlocked but as you progress in your runs and reach certain level thresholds you will be unlocking new difficulty tiers. These higher tiers come with a complete fresh leaderboard. So you will need to start a fresh run for these higher tier runs. These difficulty tiers will mainly impose additional challenges and do not come with additional rewards. You will get the chance to compete agains the best players on the highest tier leaderboards.
We will release some further information about the 0.8 content update as soon as it is ready, so stay tuned for this.
Let us know your thoughts about the new armory and build viewer!
Join the official discord and participate in the ongoing development of Striving for Light! Join the official discord!
Developer Livestream
Join the next Igniting Spark Games Developer Livestream on Twitch on Sunday 29th Jan. at 7pm CET/ 10AM PST.
Early Access release will be on 20th Februrary 2023 for 2.99€ / 2.99$ for windows and linux. There will also be a demo where you can already dive into this new experience pretty soon!
So what is this game exactly?
Striving for Light: Survival is a roguelite arena survival game where you try to survive waves of enemies unlock achievements and climb the ladder in various leaderbords for different maps and difficulty tiers.
What makes it different from Striving for Light?
Striving for Light: Survival is much simpler in its mechanics and playstyle. You choose your weapons and skills for each run, select a map and the difficulty tier and jump right into the action.
Attacks are performed and aimed automatically, so you are mostly focusing on your movement. Movement is crucial in this game as defeating enemies does not grant you experience directly. Each defeated enemy drops light fragments which only grant you experience if they are picked up in the current wave. So if you take a look at a full run there is a finite amount of enemies where experience can be obtained. This makes a perfect foundation for competitive leaderboards as its all about performing best in the given timeframe.
A futher big difference is that there is minimal resource management. Melee and range attacks are all based on cooldowns. Managing plenty of resources (energy, endurance, dodge regeneration) in Striving for Light can be very overwhealming for new players at first. So those resources are completely removed from the skill tree which makes the tree much more compact and impactful when placing a skill point.
Overall the player progression is much faster than in Striving for Light. No endless runs, but defined compact runs of around 20-30 minutes.
Both games can be played independently without the need of having played the other game.
We hope that you enjoy this new experience with Striving for Light: Survival and are looking forward to hear your feedback!
Get involved in the ongoing development of Striving for Light at our discord: Join the official Discord!
Update 0.7.2.5
New Features
New dynamic healthbar
Last update we introduced an alternative healthbar which replaced the lengthly healthbar in the endgame with a numeric alternative to display your current health points. We received a lot of feedback regarding the alternative healthbar, and heard your voices about the need of a visual representation about how much of your health is acutally missing without having to do the math to keep the focus on the important stuff.
So we worked on an improved healthbar concept that combines all the positives from the legacy and the alternative healthbar and removes all the negatives of each individual healthbar design.
So how does the new healthbar look?
But wait isn't this just looking like the legacy healthbar? Exactly for low max health points the healthbar is looking like the legacy healthbar. We especially wanted to keep the legacy design for now as it matches the collectible hearts perfectly and makes the health concept easy to understand for new players.
Once you increase your max health pool the healthbar will at first extent in length but then decrease the heart sizes up to a point where individual hearts are still clearly visible.
If you further build up your max health pool the hearts will gradually fade into a bar-type health bar with the additional numeric information about how your current health versus your max health points.
There is technically no limit for the new healthbar concept. Even going way beyond 100 health will yield a readable bar-type healthbar with additional numeric information.
We hope this new health bar concept will meet your requirements on your journeys into the deepest corners of darkness.
Let us know your thoughts and experience using the new healthbar!
Improvements
NPCs in town now recognize immediately that you have enough light to unlock weapons and skills.
Replaced shadow behind player character with additional light source. This should make the player outline better visible in dark environments.
Bugfixes
Fixed unlock notification window blocking pause menu buttons for mouse input.
Fixed wrong tooltips on stats window elements.
If you encounter any issues please use the bug report button in the main menu to report them to us. Also consider attaching your save file for any issue which frequently comes up during your run.
An alternative health bar is activated once you reach over 20 max health to improve visual clarity of the health bar. The alterative health bar will display your current health points and your max health in numbers to keep it compact no matter how much max health you gain.
Improvements
All companions (melee and range) now are able to trigger enemy on death effects that are not bound to your weapons like fragmentation.
If you have multiple of the same skill nodes active the stats window will now display the total amount of each skill node
Bugfixes
Fixed a crash when pressing a button in the skill tree while the placement of a skill gem or skill tree item is active
Fixed blocked UI elements when crafting window in the skill tree is open
Fixed a bug which caused to large window/ game resolution settings from other system (steam cloud) to launch the game in very suboptimal settings. Its now checked if the saved settings are valid for the current system and if not they are replaced with the native OS settings.
If you encounter any issues please use the bug report button in the main menu to report them to us. Also consider attaching your save file for any issue which frequently comes up during your run.
New side dungeons & new item types - Patch 0.8 preview & beyond!
We are already working on the next major update (Version 0.8) for Striving for Light. There is a lot to cover so this is what it will bring to Striving for Light.
New Side Dungeons
This update will bring new side dungeons to Striving for Light where you fight through random generated rooms all the way to a dungeon boss. Here you fight for acquiring a new item type that can also hold new active skills. You might have asked yourself what the 4 unused slots in the crafting window are for. Yes, exactly these will be able to hold 4 of the new items.
New Item Type
The new item type introduced with version 0.8 can hold both, passive stat improvements and active skills which can be used by the right mouse button. Those skills have a higher cooldown and can be used to temporarily protect you from received damage or cast an aura that increases your damage output for a short amount of time with also making you more vulnerable to incoming damage. But this is not all these items can also hold completely new skills that do not cost any additional resources. You will be able to carry 4 of these new items in total. These items can hold set bonuses which grant you powerful skills when you have a set completed. So you will have to enter the new dungeon multiple times to find the perfect item combinations to suit your current build.
Difficulty Tiers
Players constantly push the limits on the leaderboard so we want to provide additional challenges for players that already reached their level goals in the current season. Therefore, we will introduce new difficulty tiers that can be unlocked reaching a certain level on a run. This unlocks the next difficulty tier where you can complete on a new leaderboard specifically for this difficulty tier. With this we will also rebalance the endgame difficulty of Striving for Light.
In game achievements
With 0.8 we will add a new achievement system which will give you transparent goals to aim at. These achievements can also grant unlocks if completed. This should make it easier for new players to get into the game.
Pathfinder rework
The pathfinder system will be reworked slightly to support the new difficulty tiers but also to make the start for new players much easier. Your feedback made us clear that the pathfinder especially for new players is hard to understand and does not bring value for the first runs in a new season or in a new save game. Therefore you will need to unlock the pathfinder in order to use it. Most players don’t utilise the pathfinder until enough map shard have been collected so we want to remove the additional needed interactions to activate a map for early runs in a new season and make it available later when it will actually be used.
Beyond 0.8
Different Character Classes
Moving towards the full release of Striving for Light we will add new playable characters to Striving for Light. These characters can be unlocked completing specific challenges. Each character will have a different starting weapon set and a unique twist on starting stats or special abilities.
Changes to Unlocks
We will do some experimentation on alternative unlock systems that give you a better overview on what weapons can be unlocked and a better possibility to set your goals to unlock the weapons you want.
Changes to skill system
We will do some experimentation with changes to the skill system that will grant you possibilities to modify the skill pool that will be active for your next run in some extent. This will make it possible to plan a kind of build or playing style at the start of the run to some extent. We still want to keep the randomness of the skill tree and the available skills since this gives players great opportunities trying out new skill combinations and experimentations during runs. The skill tree discovery and experimentation playground will be preserved.
And there is even more to come.
Since the next major update is holding a lot in store for you it will not be directly around the corner. But there is another Striving for Light related project in the works that we are already hyped to talk about in the next days. So, watch out for this announcement as it will keep you entertained until 0.8 lands.
Join the official discord and participate in the ongoing development of Striving for Light! Join the official discord!
