Genre: Hack and slash/Beat 'em up, Adventure, Indie
Striving for Light
Improved Controller Support
Update 0.6.1.3 marks a milestone for the controller support for Striving for Light by adding a node navigation system for controller input on the skill tree and the pathfinder system. Also a lot of controller functionalities have been improved and reworked to make using a controller a much more enjoyable and time efficient option. We will now also head towards steam deck verification.
Controller Support
Added a new node navigation system which makes it possible to jump between nodes in the skill tree or the pathfinder system by using the D-pad-buttons on your controller. Pressing right on the D-pad will move the cursor to the nearest node on the right side, moving the cursor down will move it to the nearest node below. This simplifies the cursor navigation and makes controller input on the skill tree/ pathfinder system much more time efficient. You can even use the new node navigation on your keyboard with the arrow keys.
Focus locking has been added whenever you perform a certain action to keep active focus in place. For example when placing a skill gem from the skill gem list moving the cursor with the right stick was as well moving the focus in the list which could accidentally swap out the current selected skill gem on placement. Focus is now locked and resumed once you have placed your skill gem or skill shard. Focus locking will also make using the pop up menu in the pathfinder system less confusing and much more enjoyable to use.
Added scrolling option to the key rebind menu when using controller input.
The skill gem window is now opened and closed by the controller button X which makes it possible to use the B button to cancel an active skill gem placement, which is a much more logical choice.
Deactivating and activating a skill node is now done by button B as well.
Using the virtual keyboard on controller input will now also lock the cursor in place while typing.
Fixed health points of ravaging companions
In a recent update we also added further controller support improvements: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1646790/view/3316360267017649407
Thanks to everyone providing helpful feedback, which is what drives the development forward! You are invited to join our discord and participate in the ongoing development of Striving for Light!
Frenzy mode now scales until a max remaining time of 1s (was 0.5s before). Also initial exp gains are increased slightly. The amount needed to trigger frenzy mode on higher dungeon floors has been lowered slightly.
Fixed fog of war reset for the map after entering a gatekeeper portal.
Fixed first player spawn with 0 health after character selection also on existing save files.
Hotfix 0.6.1.2b
Player movement is now more responsive.
Swamp bug bullets now have a glow effect for increased visibility on dark backgrounds
[Skill] Meteor: Meteor damage increased to 30 (was 20). Meteor now hits a random area in attack direction making possible to aim which area the meteor will hit. This should make the meteor skills much more usable. Improved meteor SFX.
Fixed a bug which caused certain skills (mainly meteor) to only damage enemies once
Fixed a crash related to the character selection on loading save files
Fixed respawning objects after scene switch in gatekeeper arenas
Fixed a bug from last update 0.6.1.2 which sets your health to 3 hearts after switching a scene
Update 0.6.1.2
Controller Support
Added a new radial selection menu which makes it possible to open the skilltree and the pathfinder with the same select button on your controllers.
Added functionality to attack at all angles with the right stick on the controller. You can still use the A/X/Y/B buttons for attacking in fixed angles.
Now new maps only can red modifiers by default. If you also add new modifiers now also never a green weaken or empower modifier will be added. Those green modifiers can now only be added additionally.
Improved frenzy mode. Now the frenzy mode is harder to activate the deeper you dive into the dungeon floors. Also a new time scaling algorithm has been implemented to shorten the remaining time based on the amount of already defeated enemies in the frenzy mode. Overall the exp bonus has been lowered to compensate the new time scaling algorithm.
Improved map modifier shard highlighting. Now only those map modifier shards are highlighted that can actually be applied to a map.
Changed the drop chance distribution between the map shards.
Fixed a bug which lead to crashes after character selection (v.0.6.1.2a)
Fixed a bug which caused parts of old save files to be copied into new save files when switching to a new save file (v.0.6.1.2a)
Fixed a bug which caused the pathfinder map to open in menu on controller input. Fixed a bug which caused piercing blow to fly in random directions. Fixed wrong displayed keybindings for opening the pathfinder on the displayed ground tutorial on the first dungeon floors
Fixed respawning of captured hearts in various gatekeeper arenas.
Fixed a crash related to the character selection save data.
Thanks to everyone providing helpful feedback, which is what drives the development forward! You are invited to join our discord and participate in the ongoing development of Striving for Light!
The town got complete redesigned, adding new elements to the town.
New interaction system
Interactible objects (weapons, portals, events) now have a reworked interaction system which only allow one object to be interactible at the time. This should fix unexpected behaviour when a weapon drops in the range of a portal and is not interactible without triggering the portal.
Save System Rework
The complete save system got overhauled which should make it much less vulnerable to save file errors.
Items which are dropped in town are now saved and can be picked up also after switching to the skill tree or leaving through the town portal. Once your run is over also the town instance will be reset.
Increased the size of the merchant trade UI.
[Condition Damage] Fixed a bug which caused conditions on stacked skills not being applied equal to the amount of skill stacks.
Fixed a bug which prevented the gatekeeper exit doorways on the cave map from opening after the fight is completed.
Fixed type for pheonix staff.
Thanks to everyone providing helpful feedback, which is what drives the development forward! You are invited to join our discord and participate in the ongoing development of Striving for Light!
Visually reworked dialog indicator for NPCs to improve visibility of dialog options.
NPCs now only show the dialog indicator when there are new possible interactions for the NPC. Smith and Librarian will now only show the glowing dialog indicator when you have enough fragments of light to actually unlock new weapons or skills. The dialog indicator for the old man is now only glowing when you have to talk to him to unlock new dungeon levels.
[Skill Node] Increased melee damage: Spawn possibility in the skill tree has been increased to make up for more range options to increase projectile damage.
Dialog indicator now only appears when there are new possible interactions.
Fixed text overflow in stats window for spanish translation.
Fixed a bug which made it possible to skip dungeon levels after a gatekeeper fight when returning to town before entering the activated portal.
Fixed a bug which caused captured heart at cave gatekeeper fight to respawn.
Fixed a bug which made it possible to return to the gatekeeper arena and fight the gatekeeper a second time.
Fixed gatekeeper barriers not opening when dungeon level already has been unlocked from previous runs.
Thanks to everyone providing helpful feedback, which is what drives the development forward! You are invited to join our discord and participate in the ongoing development of Striving for Light!
Changed placement for captured hearts and spider eggs in gatekeeper arena to prevent them being hitable from outside the arena.
First serpent gatekeeper forms of void map now have reduced health in endgame similar to the scaling in the early game.
Faded maps now have 15 % increased EXP bonus (was 10%), additionally they also have 10% increased enemy health and 5 % more enemy spawns.
Improvements
Reduced deceleration of map tree shards when dropping from enemies
Bugfixes
Fixed a bug which caused weaken and empower modifier to cancel out the effect on map mods in an unintended way. If you now apply very much weaken mulipliers on a map to reduce the effects of other mods you can end up receiving negative EXP bonuses. This prevents canceling out mods by throwing massive amounts of weaken modifiers onto a map.
Fixed unlocked maps not being spawned in the initial pathfinder maps.
Fixed gatekeeper arena colliders making player getting stuck while walking around the closed exit door areas.
Thanks to everyone providing helpful feedback, which is what drives the development forward! You are invited to join our discord and participate in the ongoing development of Striving for Light!
Update 0.6.1.0c brings an improved chinese translation as well as in game credits to Striving for Light.
New Features:
Credits have been added.
Improvements:
Chinese translation has been improved. A special thanks to Starling for providing an improved chinese community translation.
Added support for chinese letters in the leaderboard entries for non-chinese language settings.
Updated game stats window UI for improved chinese language support
Added shader functionality for screen sampling
Bugfixes:
Fixed missing font on leaderboard UI elements for chinese language setting
Fixed a crash when loading old save files with active runs
Thanks to everyone providing helpful feedback, which is what drives the development forward! You are invited to join our discord and participate in the ongoing development of Striving for Light!
Added tutorial hint for the pathfinder for first map activation
New maps are now unlocked after defeating the gatekeeper at floor 5 (was floor 6 before)
Balancing:
Incereased sting weapon damage to 12 (was 10)
Incereased spear weapon damage to 14 (was 10)
Incereased sword of the phoenix weapon damage to 11 (was 10)
Increased detection range for corrupted light void map boss
Bugfixes:
Fixed a crash which could occur when loading a save game
Fixed translations for various map shards
If you encounter crashes of bugs please let us know!
Thanks to everyone providing helpful feedback, which is what drives the development forward! You are invited to join our discord and participate in the ongoing development of Striving for Light!
Welcome wanderer, with the pathfinder content update (Version 0.6.1) we are releasing a massive new map progression system which will not only make the endgame much more diverse and challenging but also give you the possiblity to shape the early game maps to your liking. This update is furthermore packed with a big amount of major improvements like a reworked frenzy exp bonus or extended functionality for the shard of refund and long awaited features like a character selection.
Pathfinder map progression system
With this update we are replacing the rather static "jumping from portal to portal" approach with a new unique "pathfinder" system which serves as a world map where you can see what your next destinations will be. You can plan ahead, alter the maps, add modifiers to the next maps to increase the challenge but also the rewards or you can change existing modifiers on a map to optimise the risk-reward-ratio.
With the new map modifiers you will be able to increase a broad spectrum of rewards like increased EXP or the drop chances for hearts, fragments of light, weapons, skill tree or the new map modifier shards.
Use 6 different shards which can be collected within everywhere in the worlds to empower or weaken existing modifiers, add new modifiers, replace all modifiers with random new ones, replace one random modifier or forge the complete map into a new one.
The new map modifier system will therefore also increase the endgame difficulty and prevent getting stuck in an endless grind loop where you almost remain unkillable.
You can also read up on the pathfinder preview on our latest post: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1646790/view/3385038259001709559
Upated map environments, enemies and effects
With this update we also revisited our oldest map environments and enemy designs and redesigned those elements to match the current visual state of the game. We also have redesigned the visuals of enemy AoE effects making it much easier to read and judge which area covers an effect.
Character selection
With the character selection a highly requested feature is coming to Striving for Light. We therefore have reworked the existing female player character model and designed a completely new male player character. Whenever you now start the game on a new save file (or an old save file where you have not selected a player character yet) you will be able to choose your character. Both characters have equal starting stats.
The character design has come a long way since pre-alpha over a year ago. Here is the evolution of our character designs.
Frenzy Experience Bonus
The frenzy experience bonus has been fully reworked since the experience bonus turned out to be the dominating mechanic to gain insane bonuses and trivialising game difficulty in the endgame. Overall experience bonus increase has been lowered slightly. Furthermore the frenzy bonus will now get harder and harder to maintain the higher your bonus rises. To compensate for those changes there are now less enemies required to start a frenzy.
Improved skill tooltips
Tooltips for the skill tree have been redesigned adding dividers for different sections to make them easier to read. Now the damage of a skill is also directly displayed in the tooltip.
Shard of Refund
The shard of refund has received a new respec algorithm which makes it possible to respec all skill nodes as long as they are not interrupting connections of other nodes to the initial centre node.
Damage numbers have been uniformly multiplied by 10 to give us more flexibility in designing weapons. For various current weapons damage numbers have been adjusted to fill the gap between the 1 and 2 damage weapons (now 10 and 20 damage weapons). Enemy health has been adjusted accordingly. This change was also required to support small map modifiers.
Experience values have been multiplied by 100 to support small map modifiers and small frenzy exp bonuses.
The resource regeneration system has been overhauled to remove the current cap of 1 resource per frame and make regeneration frame rate independent.
Hearts now have a unique drop pool to improve consistency of heart drops
With the pathfinder update we are upgrading our enemy scaling system so that enemy health pools scale with the map you are currently playing. So you could start your run with the forest map or the swamps if you want to.
Improved glaring light visual effect
Improved visibility of traps for the forest map. They now have a red glow to make them stand out a bit more.
The layout of the gatekeeper arenas has been improved to follow easier logic. You now enter the area on the left side and leave it on the right side.
Shard of Change could in rare cases roll the same skill which already existed on the skill node it was applied to. The shard will now never roll the same skill node present on the node it was applied to.
Changed cost for skill tree shards for the merchant
Reworked enemy health scaling system
Adjusted drop chances for skill tree shards to compensate for the new added
Fixed missing drop sfx for skill shards from world objects
Fixed blocking edge in the gatekeeper arena collider which made it possible to collide with the border when walking near the east border
Fixed bursting companions being not removed from the world when switching scenes, which could result in duplicated bursting companions.
Fixed pause menu being blocked by other UI elements
Enemy health bars are now also updated on damage over time condition effects
Thanks to everyone providing helpful feedback, which is what drives the development forward! You are invited to join our discord and participate in the ongoing development of Striving for Light!
