The Dungeon Paradox
EARLY ACCESS BUILD 14
When a Ranged Attack is carried out and a projectile travels through 3D space and hit an opponent, the intended target or someone else, damage is not just allocated to whatever is the damage set for the projectile from a specific weapon. Instead a D100 is rolled to determine what kind of hit it is. Depending on the Attackers Skill-level and the hit units Dodge skill-level, we get the dice-roll needed for the hit to be considered a 'Full Hit' - applying the full damage of the projectile. The amount needed to roll is a direct ratio based on the values, so if an attacker has a Skill Value of 75 and the hit unit has a Dodge Skill Value of 45, the 'Full Hit' chance would be (75 / (75 + 45)) * 100 = 62.5 ('62) or below on a D100. This is what is called as the Success value.
The base chance to get a critical is the chance for a 'Full Hit' divided by 10. So an un-adjusted roll of less than 62.5 / 10 = 6.25 ('6) would be a 'Critical Hit', giving a +50% Damage for the hit. But also note that Luck impacts the chance to get a Critical Hit. For example an operator having a Luck of 12 will have a 20% bonus to the chance, 6.25 + (12 / 10)% = 7.5 to roll. The opposite is also true, an Operator or Monster with a very low Luck value gets penalized by having less of a chance in rolling a Critical Hit. Please note that no matter how low the skill-level or Luck value, a roll of 1 on a D100 is always considered a Critical Hit.
A roll attempt failing to score under a Success value (i.e. perhaps a roll of 87 in this scenario), will be a 'Partial Hit'. It still does damage, but on a gliding scale, based on attackers Luck versus defenders Luck. The damage-range for normal projectiles (not magic based), is from 50% up to 100% of the projectiles set damage. The calculations to determine the actual damage is a Luck-ratio where the final value determines the mid-point in a simplified pseudo-Gaussian distribution. So an attackers luck being 12 (higher than normal) hitting a monster with a low amount of luck such as 6, gives ((12 / (12 + 4)) * 50) + 50 = 83.33~ % as the median point of damage. That means if we rolled 1 million partial hits we could be expecting the average damage we saw to be this percentage of the projectiles damage for this kind of hits. The actual math and technique on how these rolls are performed to actually achieve this distribution would take up too space here to go over, but it hopefully gives a slight insight into the attempt to allow Luck for both Attacker and Defender to impact the damage being taken.
Next step will be to also introduce this weighted distribution of damage to Close Combat attacks for glancing/partial hits. It is currently using the old approach of a linear distribution of 50% to 100% damage of the weapons potential damage.
A Quality of Life addition is to now be able to directly issue an Interact Order without having to click the Interact Order button, if hovering the mouse cursor over an Interact Actor. The mouse cursor will change to indicate this fact and a left click, as if already having clicked the button first, will issue it. Moving the cursor away from the actor resets it to normal move-selection behavior.
Full Changelog
* Added ability to issue Interact Order by directly clicking relevant item while still having Actions Points left
* Added new dice-roll for damage allocations using Attacker and Defender Luck to adjust median of distribution
* Added a new Operator Selected Highlight
* Adjusted Ranged Attacks now use Dodge as the defending skill affecting projectile damage distribution
* Adjusted the minimum Tick-count remaining to issue a Look and Interact order from 60 and 95 to 10
* Fixed issue where queuing both a Move and Interact Order in the same Round carried over the wrong start-position to the next one
* Fixed animation issue that could be seen while ending a Move Order and transitioning to an Interact or Look order that has a move-component before reaching final tile
EARLY ACCESS BUILD 13
A QoL improvement added is the centering of the camera on any Operator that is double-clicked or re-clicked, either directly on the Operator or on their Team Overview panel. This will help in situations when the squad is highly spread out.
Full changelog
* Added behaviour that double-clicking or re-clicking on a selected Operator or their Team Info panel center view on this Operator
* Added chance to all Monsters to drop a 10% Healing Potion when defeated
* Added to Tutorial level an animated hint of the Button a specific ACTION is triggered by
* Adjusted Normal Healing Potion from 20% to 25% of full health in healing amount
* Adjusted some colours of soil and dirt decals
* Fixed problems with sending multiple consecutive Feedback Reports and the later ones being rejected due to size-constraints
* Fixed so opening a Report dialogue pauses the game and prevents inputs from impacting it
EARLY ACCESS BUILD 12
For other weapon-types, and even for special weapons within the same type, there can now be other kinds of Attacks with different kinds of bonuses and penalties. It will be interesting to see how this changes the gameplay for Close Combat weapons.
Another change that is worth explaining is the introduction of higher detailed textures for more decals, as well as all Operation Uniforms and Weapons. In general, the wish is to use as high quality and fine detailed textures as possible. During development this often means the texture quality is kept very high, with the knowledge if the performance impact it can have for some with weaker cards. While it is fully possible that some of the textures will be optimized to a lower resolution version in the end, if there is no benefit from using more details, this is something that will be handled when the game goes Gold (aka v1.0).
Until then, for those that can, enjoy higher level of textures on the Operators and their gear - as well as on other items now and on more in the future.
If you have an old computer that cannot handle several Gigabyte of loaded textures, there is now the added startup quality option of 'Medium', that is brutally forcing the Textures to be halved in resolution (even those with non-super high detailed textures, sadly) and will make every attempt to load only up to 2 Gigabyte of textures into memory at once. Only use this option if you know you have a graphics card that is some 5+ years old and are truly struggling when using the default 'Ultra' quality setting.
Full Changelog
* Added new Close Combat Extension, allowing multiple attack options per weapon
* Added support for primary and secondary damage and damageType for close combat weapons
* Added Reload step Tutorial
* Added 4K versions of more decals, such as gravel, dirt, wall-cracks and potholes
* Added 4K versions for all Operators Uniforms and Weapons
* Added a new Quality setting; Medium
* Adjusted XP determination for Defender in a CC-attack; if carrying CC-weapon, always level the weapon-skill even if Dodge is used
* Adjusted Fishman attack skill-level from 45 to 35, Dodge remains at 50 due to shield
EARLY ACCESS BUILD 11
There has also been another Buff to the BoostInjection Special Ability - it now also removes any Hurt status as well as preventing any Operator that is boosted from entering Hurt state. This not only gives a great buff in scenarios of waking up a passed out team-mate but also when rushing into close combat and taking hits from other Monsters.
Full Changelog
* Added new bullet-hole decals for wall-hits
* Added Time To Live handling for all relevant effects
* Added removal of in-world objects relating to dead monsters
* Fixed memory from dead Monsters not being properly released
* Buffed the BoostInjection Special Ability, it now makes boosted unit immune to Hurt and reduce Recovery time by 50%
EARLY ACCESS BUILD 10
Full Changelog
* Added Level 4 of the Dungeon
* Added Monsters Troll and Fishman
* Improved performance with lights and NextGen Soft Shadows
* Adjusted render-order of enhacning post-process shaders to after NGSS and CTAA to improve graphical quality of shadows
* Adjusted so Minimap is no longer affected by the main camera height
* Fixed issue where IK was incorrectly set for Recovering Operators
* Fixed issue where rotating by holding MMB could pan camera-view if bumping screen edge
* Fixed issue where an Operator having a small fraction of health (i.e. 0.2 etc) was shown as rounded to 0
* Fixed Downed particle-effect so it is self-lit and very visual even in low-light conditions
EARLY ACCESS BUILD 9
In other news, it is estimated that Level 4 will be presented in EA Build 10, containing Two additional new Monsters and a possibly step up in difficulty.
To remind everyone that quicker support (especially if one is stuck on a puzzle or aren't sure how to use an Operators abilities etc) can be found over Discord, there is now also a link to the Discord Server in the Main Menu. This will hopefully handle the cases where in some instances the Report system was used to ask questions, instead of reporting problems, which makes it very hard to help an individual player that actually filed the report since there is no two-way communication built into it.
Full Changelog
* Added Rich Presence - gameplay information shown in Friends List
* Added new Monsters, Gargoyle and BomberBug
* Added link to Discord in Main Menu, for quicker support resolution
* Adjusted so Levers that trigger single actions are now locked in a down-state after use
* Adjusted so Downed Operators no longer contribute to Team-LOS for Monster spotting
* Reduced damage for Plant Bite and Spider Bite with 20%
* Adjusted Veteran Mummy's Strength to 14 from 12.
* Added 2x Gargoyles to Level 2 Boss Fight
* Adjusted all Veteran variants to Rank 5, giving them a 40% health-boost
* Replaced 1 Golem with a Veteran variant for Level 2 Boss Fight
* Replaced Red Mushroom with Gargoyles for Level 3 Puzzle Room
* Adjusted camera clip range and to-black fading over distance
* Adjusted light bias for all stationary torches to reduce shadow acne at a distance
* Adjusted movement-line's alpha slightly to make it less hard to see against a full-lit floor
* Reduced brightness of a burning Fire Bowl with around 25%, reduced range to 11 from 12 meters
* Added inner LOS-walls and adjusted larger section-pieces to be double-sided to reduce instances of light-bleed
* Fixed an issue where Corpse Particles wasn't drawn for a specific angle
* Fixed shader-issue with some wall-vines
* Fixed issue where Downed operators could receive Moral based debuffs, they are now immune while unconscious
* Added the ability to trigger effects based on animation-events, used for a coming Monster
* Adjusted the amount of XP that is gained from Veteran-class Monsters for Mummy and Stone Golem
* Reduced Strength for Plant from 10 to 8
* Reduced Mushroom step-sound for all variants to half
EARLY ACCESS BUILD 8
In the last Early Access Build we saw the introduction of Vulkan being used - this was set as the primary choice, with a fallback to Direct3D11 when lacking it. This turns out to be not a perfect solution, as there is a chunk of players with graphics cards from the last 2-3 years that never update their drivers - making them stuck on a very early and incomplete version of the graphics API, either causing them performance issues or in worst cases crashes due to driver-issues (reported as sourced from nvdisp.dll etc).
So in this build Direct3D11 is back as the default choice - but when starting the game via Steam library there will be a popup to optionally start the game using Vulkan. This gives you as a player full control what API to use and is also the approach some other games have opted to do things for now.
Full Changelog
* Added NextGen Soft Shadows
* Adjusted DirectD11 to be primary Windows graphics API and Vulkan being reached by the Steam startup dialog
* Adjusted Healing amount of Small healing Potion to 20% from 10%
* Added graves and additional Healing Small potions to L3.R3 area
* Increased Spider_small amount to 2 from 1 in L1.R1
* Added 4 free-roaming Spider_small's to L1.R2
* Added 2x Spider_Small spawner for L2.M1, second to trigger after opening gates to exit Throne Room
* Fixed audio-cue missing on Secret Wall opening on Level 3
* Fixed a texture-misalignment issue for Secret Wall actor
* Added Candles, lit by distance, next to the tables in L3.R3
KNOWN ISSUES
The reporting-tool is currently limited to 1 report per play-session - depending on size of log and content of the written report-part, a second or third report may be rejected (reported as an error to upload the report). This is known, reproduced and we are looking into solutions for it.
EARLY ACCESS BUILD 7
Full Changelog
* Added Vulkan as the new main Windows graphics API, with the old Direct3D11 as fallback
* Adjusted Tutorial step 3 to allow Shift to be hold, step 4 allows C/V or -/+ for height-adjustment
* Adjusted some Tutorial descriptions to be more clear and added one additional Tutorial step to highlight progress through the gate
* Adjusted idle-animation for Attribute section of Character Creation stage
* Added an interactive flashlight controlled by the mouse-movement in the Character Creation stage
* Adjusted specularity for some vegetation
* Adjusted light-falloff for Shotgun laser-pointer
* Adjusted some larger decals to 4096x texture resolutions for increased details
EARLY ACCESS BUILD 6
So, with that in mind, this Build introduces Downed.
This occurs when a Operator reaches 0 in health. They are effectively knocked out, and fall to the ground. This hard debuff has a duration of 20 rounds, so it is not recommended to leave them like that. So to allow team-mates to help a Downed Operator, every Operator is now able to Interact with a Downed team-mate. Reaching a team-mate and carrying out an Interaction will put them in Recovering-state with 10% of their health, a hard debuff that lasts 2 rounds, which during they can be injured again. If they recover successfully, they are able to continue as per normal, but suffer an Applied Effect of Hurt for 5 rounds. There is no permanent injuries at this time.
A minor note is also that an Operator that is Downed will still be allocated their XP-share from any slain Monsters by the team-mates, but will gain nothing of the points allocated. This means, team-mates will continue to gain experience in the normal speed, but the Downed operator will miss out on anything gained while being fully Downed. When in Recovering state the unit gain XP as normal again.
Another minor change around this is the Special Ability Boost Injection -- this ability is now a ranged one (was only allowing injections in the 8 neighboring tiles before) up to a distance of 6 meters. And this ability will put a Downed operator into Recover state without needing to run to the Downed team-mate and Interact with them! This will also hopefully give this ability a minor buff in attractiveness and usability.
Full Changelog for EA Build 6
* Added new Downed and Recovering mechanics for Operators
* Added so a state of all Operators as Dead or Down boots one back to the main menu (nicer end-slate will come later)
* Adjusted impact from Frozen spell to -100% for all attributes (from 90%), and -100% for all skills but Dodge (-90%)
* Reworked code to handle situations where attributes is 0, based on Applied Effects (debuffs) or special states
* Adjusted longer swords to be 2H
* Improved animations used for 1H and 2H close combat weapons, both for Attack and Guard Stance
* Added support for Immunity_Terror for selected Monsters
* Adjusted left-hand IK for Operators to be triggered based on animation-frames instead of triggered based on Order state change
* Adjusted BoostInjection to be a ranged ability, max-range of 6.0 meters
* Fixed so Operators no longer say duplicate lines in the same round, even if triggered to
* Fixed Morale-boost from Team-mates to now depend on the asking Operators Perception-range
Early Access Week 1
It has also been very interesting to see the reactions to the concept and game-mechanics. While a lot of the finer aspects of it is partly clouded in a lack of a manual or wiki-pages as of yet, some players have managed to find them just from playing, which highlights two things; there is several decent pieces of mechanics in the game, but it is also very important to make it clear to more players what they are so no-one miss them or is left confused. A very interesting area to improve in.
There is also some adjustments to the game-mechanics planned - one interesting area here is the area of positive vs negative feedback-loop. More specifically, if a player has issues and is still learning or struggling, one of their Operators may die in an encounter, and will remain died when transitioning to the next level. This leaves them worse off in future encounters. While this harder game-play will be maintained for the Hard Difficulty, for Normal and Easy I will later on introduce the concept of Down But Not Out, where an Operator can be Revived by another Operator that is up, during or after en encounter, with a small amount of their health left (depending on difficulty level).
There is also some other interesting changes being sketched out that we will talk about later.
Here is a summary of the patch-notes from the past week:
EARLY ACCESS BUILD 5
* Added Brightness Option to the Options Dialog, adjusting the camera exposure level
* Added Informative Titles to Character Creation's three stages
* Adjusted Screenshot Mode (F11) to now also hide Minimap
* Increased banding-dithering for smoother low-light luminosity transitions
* Increased the number of samplings used for Depth of Field
* Increased quality of Depth of Field rendering pass
* Fixed material issue for unlitBlack
* Fixed light cookie bleed for all flashlights as seen on the minimap on some vegetation
* Adjusted some bullet-hole materials for better color-matching and nicer normal-mapping
* Fixed edge-case where Operator and Monster animation-speed wasn't properly reset between state-changes
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EARLY ACCESS BUILD 4
* Added Tool Tip to Selected Operator UI
* Added Option for showing the Tool Tip - default setting is to show it
* Fix slight camera drift when holding activator (default MMB / Left Shift) but not actively moving the mouse
* Fix issue when Look and Interact's Orders carried across rounds could allow one to interact with Actors from a distance
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EARLY ACCESS BUILD 3
* Added Volume slider to the options menu, impacting both in-game and menu audio
* Deactivated Monsters saying lines in Build, useful for debugging but somewhat breaking narrative when playing
* Adjusted a lot of long sentences said by Operators to now be row-broken for easier reading
* Adjusted Camera height to 4.9m from 5.0m
* Adjusted Mouse-scroll tick to 40cm from 50cm, and key-press (def. C/V) to 80cm from 1m, for adjusting Camera height
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EARLY ACCESS BUILD 2
* Added a Options menu and enable it for Main Menu and In-game Menu
* Added higher quality grave models and replace out the existing ones in the levels
* Improved BloodRock and BloodDust effects
* Fixed showing Continue (Main Menu) and Reload from Savegame (In-game menu) options if lacking a savegame
* Adjusted encryption on the savegame files
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