And for players who didn't get the game yet, it's 10% off until 09/30rd! :)
We’ve been working very hard on that update all summer, so we hope you’ll like it! It’s the very first Major Update for The Last Spell, so we’re VERY excited! This is why we’re writing this blogpost to go into more details regarding some of the big changes we made for this update!
For this, I’ll let Benjamin, Producer and Game Designer on the game, take if from here!
New Map: Glenwald
Brace yourself Glenwald needs your help and it’s not going to be easy!
Before going into the details of what this map is about, I want to make some disclaimers about it. Currently Glenwald has no boss but instead we’ve done a special wave that is…well…very intense (you will see). To be honest, at this stage of the development, we don’t know yet if every haven will have a boss or if other ones will have a wave like Glenwald, or a random boss pool at the end of the run. Moreover, to be able to play Glenwald you will have to complete Lakeburg at least once. Let’s talk about the details now!
This new map gave us a hard time in the beginning of the summer as Lakeburg has been in the game since the very beginning of the development and there were a lot of things to decide on how to design/implement/make the art for the next map. We knew since the beginning of our reflection that we wanted to make a map that is more difficult than Lakeburg and that would be played by players who unlocked most of the meta content. This orientation was a good thing, we played with a 100% save file and tried to prototype challenges that would fit this configuration.
First thing we did differently compared to Lakeburg is the randomness of waves. In Lakeburg almost everything is pre-defined and there is a strong “scenario” that the game follows in terms of spawn directions and composition of waves. It was our way to control a bit more the difficulty and the player experience to ensure that it was somehow balanced. But for Glenwald we broke this “scenario” thing. Now, randomness is our new “scenario”.
Well of course we’re not crazy, we are still controlling some things to ensure that the challenge is feasible but multiple runs in Glenwald should feel a lot different than multiple runs in Lakeburg. I also hope it will reinforce the seer abilities to predict waves.
We also introduced a new “type” of enemies distribution in waves. There are now waves that can be on a whole side and trust me, this can be very tricky to handle even if it’s “just one side”. In general, waves should be less centered and more scattered than in Lakeburg.
Two more things about the progression.
First, there are a LOT more enemies in Glenwald, to compare there are almost twice more enemies at the end of a Glenwald run than at the end of a Lakeburg one.
Secondly, Glenwald is shorter and is completed in 10 days. We wanted to test this “shorter runs” for a long time and so, we found the challenge interesting to have less time to build your town. But since there are more enemies, there is more experience to get for your heroes and so they should be stronger than in Lakeburg!
Let’s focus on Level design Our goal was to create a level that emphasizes melee heroes and try to give some hard time to range heroes. To do that we thought of a forest to create a lot of variations in the line of sight.
For the global shape of the map we brainstormed a lot, tried to think about different shapes for the haven, different configurations of the sides, we had some ideas but they were too complex in terms of development/design for the deadline and we knew we would have a lot of new things to implement in addition to this map. So we stayed “old-fashioned” with the shape of the haven but we still tried to do something different than Lakeburg.
We also worked on giving something unique on each side of the map to create different playstyles. For example, on the southwest there are ruins of a shrine with some graves, while on the northeast side, it’s more like the forest side with a lot of places for enemies to hide and scatter.
Then we created something new in the level design: destructible obstacles. For now, only Glenwald has some, and that includes graves, wood piles, and dead trees, but we want to extend this later to Lakeburg and the future maps. It’s something we are excited about, bringing more interaction with the environment. With this update we’ve made the first step and we are going to work more on that for future updates!
Finally, our artists made a fantastic job on creating a new atmosphere for this map with some unique props and grounds. So thank you Jacques, Adrien and also Eloise who joined us this summer for her internship and did an amazing work to adapt quickly to our process!
New enemy
Let me introduce you the Guardian, an abomination that only the mist knows how to create (and our artists with weird ideas). This enemy is exclusive to Glenwald waves and introduced a new type of enemy support oriented. We already experienced buff on enemies with the Ripper but instead of the Ripper, the Guardian will buff other enemies and not itself.
Also, the Guardian is block oriented, its main defense is the block stat and it buffs surrounding enemies in block. We hope this will gives some shine to the “No Block” skill effect and will gives you some new challenges! We also experimented something new: the guardian blocks the line of sight. It’s something we wanted to do for a long time and here it is! We will see if it works well and if so maybe we will expand this behavior to other enemies.
New Apocalypse Levels
We worked a lot during this summer on apocalypses, we knew that we had to rework the existing ones and find new exciting ideas! Before going into the details, I just want to make a reminder that this update will erase your completion on apocalypses levels but not the progression. So, if you completed the 4 levels of apocalypse you will still be able to play the apocalypse 4 on the new update but it will be marked as “undone”.
First apocalypse we looked at was the level 2 “Enemy waves are 20% bigger”. The problem was that since there were more enemies, you gained more experience, so your heroes were stronger, and the game felt easier with this apocalypse. To balance that we decided to not increase the overall gain in XP, so your heroes keep the same amount of XP as before this apocalypse.
Then pretty much the same thing happened with the level 3 “Every Gold and Materials cost is 20% more expensive”. Everything was indeed more expensive, but you earned more by selling items, so with this extra gold you could buy more things for your town and heroes and here we go again, the game felt easier. To prevent that, selling costs remain the same as before the apocalypse.
Last apocalypse we weren’t happy with was the level 4 “The Mist is closer at the beginning and gets closer every morning”. We thought this was a cool idea but then we watched players play this level and we read a lot of feedback and we saw that this level was generating a lot of frustration and forced players to do only one strategy. So we changed our mind and decided to replace this level with a new one. Now this apocalypse is “Enemies have +2 Move Points”. This apocalypse should do the same effect as before, enemies will be at your gates very quickly but this time you will have more strategies to overcome this challenge.
Now let’s talk about new apocalypses! But first, we reordered all apocalypse so here is the new order! :)
The new apocalypse 3 has the feature I’m most excited about because it introduced a new gameplay element: The Mist Censers.
As we were brainstorming for the new level, we found this idea of the players forced to play more with the mist. At first, we were prototyping this for Glenwald but we extended this to the apocalypses challenges.
A Mist censer is an obstacle that produces a cloud of thin mist around it. Enemies can go inside this mist. While being inside, they can’t be targeted, and they are invulnerable (just like the Deadly Mist). From there players have several options:
Attack the mist censer, if it dies the thin mist will go away and monster will be once again targetable. To add some more spice, mist censor will regrow every two days.
Heroes can dissipate the thin mist in a radius of 3 tiles around them. So it might be good to send your melee heroes inside this thin.
Just wait until enemies get out from the thin mist (I never said that all options were good)
I’m excited to see what strategies you will find to face the mist censors! :D
Last apocalypse I want to talk about is the level 6 “Every item (initial gear excepted) gets a random negative attribute modifier”.
At one time during the development of TLS, almost every item had trade-offs in their attributes. It was cool but it added an extra layer of complexity on the building of your heroes and it can be hard for new players that are still learning all the games systems. We kept some trade off on specifics items but it’s not something common.
With this challenge we restored this idea to create some unique situations and force players to adapt more.
Consumables Rework
Just before the release we had a debate about consumables in RPG in general. We were saying that often players don’t want to invest on these items because it’s something temporary or if the game gives to the players some they won’t use them because there is a constant fear of using an item for a situation not worthy (we’ve all been there). The result of this is, you beat the final boss of the game and you realized you still have 50 health potions (I’m looking at you Final Fantasy).
In TLS consumable were not very used so we never took much time to make a proper progression for these items. And we had players that didn’t want to waste money on them because it’s consumable (like I said earlier) and players that were buying all of them because they had too much money. We searched for solutions to this problem, and we realized that we liked our system we’ve made for the catapult and it could be applied to consumables.
So now consumables have uses per night. I think that the fact that consumables are not destroyed anymore integrate them to the building process of the heroes and can create some interesting synergies.
Of course, this changed all the balancing of consumable. For example, mana potion and health potion will give less than before in the beginning of the run but can be used every day. We also reworked all the progression of consumables, now every one of them have 6 levels (like every other item).
Last thing I want to talk about this rework is the scrolls. We removed the cost in action point to use the skill, it now only cost mana points. This can be very useful if you need an extra attack for your turn.
Balancing
[Thomas here, Lead Game Designer on TLS, taking over from Benjamin because he’s not a superhuman and thus doesn’t have time to write down everything by himself!] Of course, no update would come without its lot of gameplay balancing, tweaks and changes. This is not a comprehensive list, but rather an overview of what has changed and why.
Dodging alterations Many players complained about dodging a Bulky’s boulder or an Archer’s arrow and still being debuffed… And rightly so! It has never been intended and has been fixed! \o/ Just remember: the combat system is symmetrical, so any mechanic can be a double-edged sword. Enemies dodging your attacks will now also evade the related effects!
Production phase & economy Shop As a global feeling, we wanted to empower the Shop a little bit more. It has always been our intention for the Shop to be more of an early run helper than a late run game changer, but we acknowledged that it wasn’t scaling enough and ended up REALLY before the end of the run.
This is even more important now that we have reworked the consumables and made them scale, as currently the only way of getting some is through the Shop. Highlights:
Additional Item Level upgrade to be able to buy Level V (5) gear and decreased a bit the overall price of those upgrades.
Increased chances of presence of magic/rare/epic gear (epic was impossible before).
A few more consumable items slots.
Houses & Workers We like our system, so this didn’t change at all! But we tweaked the rhythm of obtaining Workers, because it was a bit too easy (once accustomed to the game, of course) to trick the system and have an explosive yield within the first couple of days. It’s not problematic to be able to do so, but it should have a strategical cost. Houses now cost a little bit less but come with a single worker, and have an additional upgrade to still be able to reach 3 Workers per house.
Scavenging Ruins Scavenging Ruins yields have been increased a bit overall to help the early run, and newcomers that don’t have as much meta-upgrades unlocked to boost their economy. The bigger the Ruin, the better the increase, to account for the cost of opportunity of spending more Workers at once.
Mana The whole Mana scale of the game has been tweaked, to improve the balance of spending vs regenerating. The gist of it is that we started by doubling EVERY mana value (starting mana, caps, costs, etc.), which enabled us to perform some more fine-tuning: since we don’t deal with “0.5 Mana points”, something that deserved to be more than 1 and less than 2 was problematic (that’s often a problem with smaller scales!) whereas now it can be 3 (between 2 and 4 post doubling).
Taking advantage of this new granularity, we were then able to individually tweak many components. For instance, melee weapons have received an indirect buff because their mana cost have not been doubled entirely, so they will be less reliant on Mana and Daily Mana Regen than the other items/skills. Also, Mana will probably be a little scarcer overall and players may need to be more cautious on their spending depending on their playstyle, since Daily Mana Regen has been increased as well but not doubled (will Potions and Mana Well shine again?).
Items & Skills Many weapons and skills have seen some of their number fudged, and I won’t list them here. Overall, Melee damage weapons received some buffs here and there: reduced mana cost, higher damage scaling and less/no native attribute malus (bye-bye reduced Accuracy). Ranged damage weapons generally have had their damage scaling nerfed A LITTLE BIT, but nothing that can’t be overcome since it’s mostly a slight decrease in their minimum damage, and thus require more Reliability.
Regarding defensive gear, Block and Res attributes scaling has been decreased a bit. On the other end, the active skills provided by armors and the like now scale with Item Level, just like other skills!
Perks The perks still weren't the focus of this update, so there isn’t a big overhaul and many disliked perks at their core will remain that way (basically we only changed some stuff that didn’t require any programming change, only stuff we could already do by ourselves).
That being said, a significant amount of changes have still been made, ranging from number tweaking to bigger modifications (hello “Leapfrog”). These alterations added to all the rest of the gameplay changes will have an interesting impact on how things go during upcoming runs. Please check the patch note for a comprehensive list.
QoL
What would be a [major] patch without its share of quality-of-life improvements?!
When building Ballistae/Catapults, their range and line of sight are displayed.
Skills patterns displayed within the skill tooltip, making it easier to understand how they will behave (even before buying/picking the item).
Attributes boundaries are displayed in their tooltip. For those who didn’t notice it yet, each attribute has some cap (min; max); they used to be hidden and will now be common knowledge so that it’s easier to plan accordingly.
Apocalypse and Easy Mode shown in-run: we noticed some streamers displaying their own overlay on top of them game to do so, hence the addition. Plus, one can hover those for a reminder of the currently active effects.
And more!
Localization Mods
We know a lot of you wanted to help us translate the game in more languages, so we worked on implementing the steam workshop for TLS. For now only localization mods are supported. However, there is a big disclaimer on this feature: custom fonts are not supported yet. Currently we have two fonts integrated in the games, one for the latin languages (English, French) and one for Chinese, but may be these fonts supports more characters that we know, so you can do some tests with your alphabet and see if it’s working, don’t hesitate to talk to us on discord! For example, we tested some Japanese characters and it was working but we don’t know if all Japanese characters are supported. To conclude we are working right now on a solution allowing you to import your custom font into the game and it is promising, so stay tuned. If you’re interesting in this we wrote some guide to help you start modding and translate: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2607723968 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2607152208
Our plans from today
And this is it! Now, the first major update is done, it was quite complicated with the summer and we want to make the best experience possible so we are working hard to achieve that! Right now, we’re already working on the next major update still planned for the end of the year.
Until then, you can expect from us some hotfixes as usual and some minor patches to polish some parts of the game, and also some balancing on the gameplay side.
I can’t tell you all the details of the next update, because even us don’t know yet (as I said earlier we were really focused on delivering this one properly) but we want to focus more on broader balancing issues the game is facing, like maybe reworking/tweaking some core systems, reworking the perks and more… But we also want to wait a bit after all the changes we’ve done for this update and see how it impacts the current game experience. And of course, we will add some new content as promised in the roadmap.
That’s all for today, warriors! Once again, as you saw, your feedback is more than precious for us! So please keep sending them to us!
Finally, feel free to come to our Discord server! We have the best community, and they’re always more than happy to welcome new players! 😊
Glenwald Calling Update OUT NOW!
Hello survivors!
We're very happy to announce the official release of the very first Major Update for The Last Spell, called "Glenwald Calling"! Here's the full changelog!
Disclaimer: there will be spoilers about the update in the changelog!
Changelog 0.93.0.4 "Glenwald Calling" Update
TLDR
<*> New map “Glenwald”: unlocked when completing a run in lakeburg.
<*> New enemy exclusive to Glenwald: “Guardian”
<*> New apocalypses levels and rework of the existing ones.
<*> Rework of consumables: now consumables have uses per night.
Balancing:
Rework on the economy of the “Workers” resources.
Rework of the mana scale
Buff on melee weapons
Rework on some perks
Rework on some skills
And more…
Lots of QoL and polish.
[H2]Save Warning! The update will “break” your current run. If you want to finish your current run safely, we have another branch on Steam with the previous version of the game. When your run is finished, you’ll be able to update your game without being scared of losing your current run.
So, if you fear for your run when the game gets updated, you can choose to opt-in for the previous branch. To do that, you need to right-click on the game in Steam, "Properties", "Betas" and then click on "v0.92.2.3 - "We can be heroes" update".
That way, you'll still be able to finish your current run. You can opt-in for this previous branch NOW, so don't hesitate to do it! :) Just know that if you wish to update your game, you'll need to go back to the normal branch.
New Features
New map: Glenwald
New enemy: Guardian
New destructible elements of scenery:
All obstacles can now be selected by clicking on them
Some obstacles blocking the LOS can be destroyed and are then replaced with indestructible obstacles that don’t block the LOS
Rework of the existing Apocalypses and their order (more details below in the “Balancing” section), and addition of new ones:
Full rework of Apocalypse 3: The map now includes several Mist Censers, an element of scenery which locally generates Thin Mist for the enemies to hide in
Apocalypse 5: All enemies now have +2 Movement Points
Apocalypse 6: All items except for the ones generated with the heroes now have an additional negative affix whose level of malus depends on the item’s level
Consumables now have a number of uses per night, instead of a number of uses in total
Consumables don’t get destroyed anymore when their number of available uses reaches 0
At the beginning of the production phase, the number of available uses of every consumable item is recharged
Alterations affecting heroes are cured every morning at the beginning of the production phase
Heroes can’t use skills during the production phase anymore
When Accursed and Bulky monsters leave the Mist, they don’t attack right away anymore
Improvement of the line of sight algorithm to avoid solitary tiles and be more lenient to the player.
Addition of a preview of the AOE skills in their tooltips
When previewing a non-symmetrical AOE skill (“Intimidating Scream”, “Tight Volley”, “Rain of Arrows”, “Suppressive Fire” and “Scorching Wave”), it is now easier for the player to visualize the skill’s orientation. Additionally, the player is now offered the choice to rotate the AOE skill when their cursor is over a tile oriented in the direction of a cardinal point.
An attack no longer applies buff/debuff/status if the target dodges it
Display of the tooltips now include stats caps
The Construction mode input has been split into Construction mode (Buildings) for buildings costing Gold (W) and Construction mode (Defenses) for buildings costing Materials (X)
Addition of an icon in the Easy mode menu and when the game is played in Easy mode, with information about the modifiers when hovering over it
Addition of an icon when the game is played in Apocalypse mode, with information about the modifiers when hovering over it
New option: Framerate limiter
When opening the game, the player will now see a note if some keybinds have changed since the last time they played due to a game update
Localization mods are now supported through the Steam Workshop (for more information: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2607152208)
Community Suggestion: Improvement of the ballista’s targeting, so that several of them won’t target the same enemy if only one attack is enough to kill it
Community Suggestion: Display of the ballistae, catapults and traps’ range in construction mode
Community Suggestion: Players can now customize the warnings they see at the end of each turn in the option panel
Community Suggestion: Players can now hard reset their save from the main menu
Polish
The selected hero’s orientation now follows the player’s cursor when previewing a skill
Similar alterations will be merged to appear on one single line, rather than on several ones
Similar perks bonuses will be merged to appear on one single line, rather than on several ones
Visual rework of the health bar of indestructible elements of scenery and traps
Visual rework of the world map
The color atmosphere will change during the night and day of the boss in Lakeburg
Overhaul optimisation on the game
Community Suggestion: Addition of a custom cursor
Community Suggestion: Similar bonuses on rare and epic pieces of equipment will be merged to appear on one single line, rather than on several ones
Bug fixes
Fixed impact SFX when hitting an enemy (NEW)
Fix of a softlock that happened when players pressed the Esc key after opening a dropdown menu
Fix of the hotkeys that were not properly saved and loaded
Fix of the Esc/Enter hotkeys that didn’t work in the hero customization popup
Fix of the heroes customization feature that applied a color scheme to other heroes as well as the selected one
Fix of the “Shopkeeper’s Friend” upgrade that allowed players to get an unlimited amount of Gold when destroying the shop and buying it repeatedly
Fix of a bug which made it possible to unlock new weapons during the very first run
Fix of the boomer that still exploded while being stunned by a stun trap
The save file has been optimized to be lighter in order to minimize the amount of crashes
Fix of ballistae, catapults and traps not considering the resistance of targets.
The skill Transfer, Mark and Cheer cannot be used on empty tiles anymore.
Balancing
Apocalypses: Reordered apocalypse levels
Apocalypse 1: Enemies get + 15% HP --> Enemies get + 20% HP
Apocalypse 2: Waves include +20% enemies --> Waves include +30% enemies but the overall XP remains unchanged
Apocalypse 3: The map now includes several Mist Censers locally generating Thin Mist for the enemies to hide in (NEW)
Apocalypse 4: All items cost +20% Gold and can be resold for more Gold --> All items cost +20% Gold but the resale costs remain unchanged
Apocalypse 5: All enemies now have +2 Movement Points (NEW)
Apocalypse 6: All items except for the ones generated with the heroes now have an additional negative affix whose level of malus depends on the item’s level (NEW)
Consumable items:
Each consumable item is now available in six levels
Shop:
Addition of a new upgrade unlocking level 5 items
Reduced the price of the shop’s upgrades
Reworked the price of the items
The shop is now guaranteed to sell at least one weapon of each category (melee, ranged, magic)
Increase of the number of consumable items for sale
6 levels of consumable items are now available, depending on the shop’s level
Houses:
Price: 55 Gold → now 45 Gold
Max buildings: 6 houses → now 5 houses
Workers given per construction: 2 workers → now 1 worker
Upgrade House Expansion: 55 Gold → now 30 Gold and added a second level House Expansion + for 60 Gold
Scavenge: For 1 Worker:
Gold Focus: now gives 10 Gold and 7 Materials
Materials Focus: now gives 4 Gold and 18 Materials
For 2 Workers:
Gold Focus: now gives 22 Gold and 14 Materials
Materials Focus: now gives 9 Gold and 35 Materials
For 3 Workers:
Gold Focus: now gives 36 Gold and 23 Materials
Materials Focus: now gives 14 Gold and 58 Materials
For 4 Workers:
Gold Focus: now gives 52 Gold and 34 Materials
Materials Focus: now gives 21 Gold and 85 Materials
Material reward given by the panic gauge:
D, C and B grades gain more material at the beginning of the run
All grades gain less material at the end of the run
The distribution of this resource is better divided between the nights
Defenses:
Watchtower: 40 Gold → now 70 Gold
Slow traps: 5 uses → now 3 uses
Warp Gate: 100 Materials → 80 Materials
Ballista doesn’t block line of sight anymore
Repair costs are now 50% cheaper
Meta:
Wealthy Haven 1: 50 materials and 50 gold at the start of a new Haven → now 25 materials and 25 gold
Wealthy Haven 2: 100 materials and 100 gold at the start of a new Haven → now 50 materials and 50 gold
« Epic Items Production »: the chance to get Epic Items increase slightly less per upgrade
« Rare Items Production »: the chance to get Rare Items increase slightly less per upgrade
Enemies:
Splitter: reduced the damage progression over time
Mana: Rework of the Mana scale: x2 everywhere but for a few exceptions
Mana costs for weapon skills: x2, except for a few melee skill x1,5
Meta upgrades now give +8 and +6 Mana
Items: x1,5 Mana
Affixes: x1,5 Mana
Daily Mana Regen: x1,5 Mana
Mana Well: regenerates x2,5 Mana
Items:
The resistance scaling on items has been reduced
The block scaling on items has been reduced
All defensive skills (Brace, Evasion…) provided by items have now an evolution in their buffs depending on the item level.
Weapons: General
Some melee weapons (Axe, Great Axe, Sledgehammer) don’t have native Accuracy malus anymore
The base damage scaling for all melee weapons has been increased a bit
Some weapons (Shortbow, Longbow, Axe, Great Axe) have had their base damage range widened.
Skills:
The Jump Over Wall skill, renamed “Jump Over”, can now be used on buildings and obstacles as well as walls
Hammer:
Bash has now the skill effect “No block”
Crush: Range 1-1 → Range 1-2, Cardinal, not modifiable
Axe:
Shred has now the skill effect “Opportunistic (25%)”
Major update coming SOON! + New "old branch" opening
Summer is over :’(
Hello everyone! We hope you’re okay! It’s September already, and we’re seeing Autumn in the air! (Not that it was a very hot summer anyway, but we had some days of sun. I think...) As we told you in the last blogpost, we’ve been working hard on the next update! It will be the biggest update yet for the game, so we’re a bit nervous.^^ This is why the update took us a little more time than we anticipated. At first, the new map was not supposed to be so different from the previous one. But we kinda went all out with it. It’s quite different from the first map, but we hope you’ll like it. Today, the update is pretty much “finished”. All the features are implemented and working, and we’re putting the last touches on the balancing.
We'll kick off the tests by next week and if everything goes well (fingers crossed!) we should be able to launch the update right after that. It's just a matter of week and we'll give a release date very soon.
We are currently working on optimizing our internal process to deliver the upcoming updates faster but without neglecting their quality.
But let’s move to the exciting topic of the day: new features that will be available in the next update!
A new Haven?
The new map is THE biggest new thing in this update. It was quite a challenge for us, because all the work that we made for the past 3 years was from the level design of Lakeburg. So, when we decided to create a new map, we had to go back to the start and ask ourselves one question: how ambitious do we want to be for this new map? Spoiler: more ambitious than we anticipated ^^
Since you’re all so awesome <3 Here is the very first screenshot of the new map! We hope you’ll enjoy it, because we poured a lot of love into it! 😊
As you can see, the main theme around this new map is the forest. And in a forest, there are trees… And trees often block the view… Which may be an issue for the line of sight!
By the way, the new map will be accessible for the players who already beat Lakeburg once.
And now you may wonder: what the enemy waves will look like? I can tell you that they will be quite different from what they are in Lakeburg. We wanted the map to be harder than Lakeburg, and we did something a little "crazy" to give players a harder challenge...
Other exciting new stuff for our players!
Of course there are many surprises coming in this update! Here are a few examples:
New Apocalypses: We know there are some very dedicated players who already beat the Apocalypse 4! This is why, as promised, we’ve been working on new apocalypses! We thought of something “pretty cool” for the most hardcore players 😉 (Hint: it has something to do with the mist)
We also designed a new enemy for the new map! It won’t be a boss, but we’re pretty sure that it will give you a hard time!
We’ve reworked how the consumables work in the game.
We also took into account the players feedback that you’ve been giving us, as we've been adding some requested quality of life features! Thank you again for that, and keep sending us your feedback, we read them all! 😊
Our programmers have been working on the Performance optimization for the game. This is an issue that we're aware of, and we'll keep working on it.
Here's one of the "Community Requests" QoL we've added in the next update!
Apocalypse Progression Reset
Alright, now on to the most important announcement of this update. For this update, we're going to do an "Apocalypse Progression Reset". Since we fiddled with the apocalypse values, order and behaviour, it was a bit somewhat needed to reset the progression" Don't worry, ONLY the APOCALYPSES COMPLETION will be reset. For the next update, your apocalypses progressions will be partly reset.
The “meta unlock” will NOT be reset for this update!
What will be reset will be the fact that you COMPLETED the apocalypses. However, you will still have access to the other apocalypses.
One example: you completed apocalypses 1, 2 and 3. After the update, the fact that you completed them will be reset. However, you will still be able to do the Apocalypse 4, without completing 1/2/3 again 😊
New branch Opening
For players who are in the middle of a run, we thought of something! Basically, the update will “break” your current run. If you want to finish your current run safely, we’re going to create a new branch on Steam with the current version of the game. When your run is finished, you’ll be able to update your game without being scared of losing your current run.
So, if you fear for your run when the game gets updated, you can choose to opt-in for the previous branch. To do that, you need to right-clic on the game in Steam, "Properties", "Betas" and then clic on "v0.92.2.3 - "We can be heroes" update".
That way, when the game gets updated, you'll still be able to finish your current run. You can opt-in for this previous branch NOW, so don't hesitate to do it! :) Just know that if you wish to update your game, you'll need to go back to the normal branch.
Last but not least, it’s our studio anniversary!
One other exiting thing that I should mention is that next week, we'll be celebrating our "sort of" 15th anniversary! For those of you who knew us before The Last Spell, you may know that we used to be called “CCCP”, and that it was created in 2005, so…16 years ago! Actually, we wanted to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the company last year, but then 2020 happened...
So yeah, we wanted to do something to celebrate that, and we’re happy to announce an anniversary giveaway on Twitter and Discord! Since the creation of our indie games branch, we released 3 games… so what about winning a pack with all of them?! 😊 The pack includes steam keys for Dead in Bermuda + Dead in Vinland + The Last Spell!
How to enter?
On Twitter - All you need to do is RT the contest tweet here and follow us!
On Discord – Join our community if you haven’t done so already and react to the giveaway message in General #announcements
You can participate until September 17th at 2PM GMT+2. Winners will be picked randomly on the same day at 4PM GMT+2. Good luck!!
Aaand that's all for today! We can't wait for you all to enjoy the latest update that we've been working on! Thank you all for the love and support you've been giving us <3 We’ll be back soon with more news!
Community Interviews - Let's talk with our players!
Hello everyone!
Wow, is it already mid August? This means that today is time for a new blogpost! <3
We'll have some news about the next big patch in September! But to keep you up to date:
We're VERY excited by the new map! It's a LOT of work, but we think it will be worth the wait!
As usual, we kinda went all out with this new map, so we needed a bit more time than anticipated to be completely happy with it. This means that at this moment, the "End of Summer" deadline may be very slightly delayed by a few days.
In a few weeks, we'll have a blogpost with more info about the new map and the new features!
Today, we wanted to highlight our amazing community! Since the release, we saw how passionate about the game each and everyone of you are! Not only do you create amazing guides and strategies for the game, but everytime there's a new player who asks for help, you all try to help them the best you can with great tips and advice!
As a Community Manager, it's always a pleasure to see such a positive and wholesome community <3
This is why today, we asked some of you on Discord some questions about the game!
Dran Kuo
Where are you from?
I am from Wisconsin, US!
What’s your favourite build?
My favorite build is a bruiser melee, preferably with a 2H axe for packs and any other weapon to clean up stragglers. It may not be a popular pick, but a quick armory means I've got plenty of gear that everyone can use no matter what stats are on it -- whatever's not getting sold for more cash, anyway -- and more than enough defense (block and resistance specifically!) to not worry about getting hit.
Do you have any advice to give to players who discover The Last Spell for the first time?
If they're just discovering it for the first time, just have fun. There's a lot of discussion on "optimal" or "best" ways to play that are totally overkill and shouldn't dissuade people from playing their own way. Even if the run doesn't go so well, you can go into the next one with new ideas and a few extra unlocks to ensure steady progress. If they're struggling to get further -- pay close attention to the wound system. In a lot of games, a nearly dead unit is still as dangerous as a full health one, but in this game, a nearly dead enemy can barely move, deals about half damage, and most importantly, can get in the way of other enemies. If you're holding a gap in the wall, you can let the weak one hit you instead of letting a fresh one take its place..
Which night is the hardest for new players?
The nights have shifted around recently, with Bulkies showing up earlier than before, but I think the difficult nights are always going to be the one they aren't prepared for. Whether its suddenly dealing with an additional side coming under attack, or a larger wave hitting a weaker side, or a new enemy they haven't seen before, it can usually set them back enough to make the next night unrecoverable.
To anyone going into something unknown -- line of sight can work for and against you, but even a single tile of stone wall can let you assess the situation without getting pinned down by archers or other ranged attacks. If you start behind that for the first turn of the night, you can decide whether its safe to run out in the open or if you need to retreat back to it at the end of each turn.
What’s your favourite thing in TLS?
My favorite thing from a design point of view has to be the art and sound direction. The skills look great, feel great, and taking out a large pack of enemies is incredibly satisfying. From a gameplay point of view, I've been having fun testing the limits. The experiment to see how much damage I could deal in a single hit was hilarious, and there's other challenges to try beyond just surviving once you've got the game "figured out". Try new weapons you ignored or different city development plans -- it might prepare you for new stuff that comes out in the future. and if anyone doubts me on the 2H axe, I even have this!
Eevlupix
Where are you from?
New Jersey, USA
What's your favourite build?
Critical builds, definitely Infinite mana and big yellow numbers are very fun, especially when combined with multi-hit, aoe, and propogation abilities
Do you have any advice to give to players who discover The Last Spell for the first time?
Besides focusing on getting a resource income early, I think new players should just experiment with all the build options this game has to offer. This game gives you a lot of freedom when crafting a team for fending off an apocalypse and it's great. Finding what you like to do can often be a lot more fun than just skipping everything in favor of the "best" options, and that's what games are all about.
What's THE weapon that can get you out of dangerous situations?
I think the hand crossbow is probably my favorite weapon, since it can do a little bit of everything, and really well. Being able to burn down a horde in a few actions is really satisfying and if everything is dead, then there are less dangerous situations to get out of.
Do you think TLS is challenging? Why?
While I haven't yet played on the highest difficulty, I feel that the difficulty is pretty well managed, requiring you to plan ahead if you want to survive as long as possible. There's some room for mistakes but not so much that you don't have to think, and I think that's very good for a strategy game, and it's really fun to me.
Firens
Where are you from? I'm from north of France. A few km away from Ishtar Games studio actually!
What's your favourite build? Tough one! Even if I abuse 1h-crossbow (most powerful weapon right now), the build I actually prefer playing is what I call "Propagator", which is a mage with Druid Staff and Tome of Secrets. I optimize it around propagation bounce/dmg, poison, opportunistic, and obviously critical hits. It can debuff armies of monster, deals insane poison dmg over a few turns, and burst a few dozens monsters if needed. I find it the most fun, because you have to think about how your spells will actually bounce from one enemy to another to maximise your dmg.
Do you have any advice to give to players who discover The Last Spell for the first time? Don't be afraid to die! Be bold with placement, and try every type of weapon. Also, don't neglect accuracy! This stat is much more important than it seems!
THE perk that helped you the most? During prologue, I would have said Mana Collector, which gives you mana every time you get a critical hit. But it comes a bit late in the game, and you need a lot of Crit% to actually use it. So in the current state of the game, I would say First Blood is the most helpful (+15% critical hit against enemies with full health). Partly because it helps you doing a lot of dmg (and killing most enemies in one spell), but also because it allows you to trigger Mana Collector consistently, even if you don't have much Crit%.
What’s the biggest mistake you made in TLS? I make a lot of mistakes around base building. But if I stay around battles, my biggest mistake was to use a propagation spell while having a hero in melee range of a monster... Which ended in my hero being poisoned and killed... I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one to have done it!
Topgun
Where are you from? I’m from the province of Quebec in Canada.
What’s your favourite build? Anything with mass crowd control and poison, debuff the horde and watch it slowly die by itself. Combine with automated defenses and a big wall to really get that tower defense kinda feel.
Do you have any advice to give to players who discover The Last Spell for the first time? Progress might seem slow, but really it’s just to the pace of the game, since combat is turn based, there’s no rush, take your time, both in combat and just while playing in general. I know the music really makes the adrenaline flow,
What’s your personal accomplishment in the game? I like doing challenge runs, of those, beating the game without dealing damage was the most interesting and fun.
Tell us about traps! How useful are they? Traps are... in a weird place in the game currently, and they will probably always be a bit weird by the simple nature that they need to be used up to provide value, walls block pathing even when not targeted, catapults and ballistas can provide value at no cost after the purchase as long as they are kept alive, traps need to loose durability to do anything. Basically, traps are the material equivalent to choosing between buying equipment in the shop or building a mine with gold. Catapults are expensive but can reasonably be expected to provide long term value, traps help just now... unless they aren’t activated (with semi-random spawn locations, that just sometimes happens). Anyways, so the 2 situations were short term benefits should be considered is when long term isn’t a concern, this is mostly the case when you aren’t sure to survive the next night, or for the last few nights in general. Already this kinda eliminates traps before night 6 ish. Now all you need to do is pick the right trap for the job, damage traps are best for desperate situations with unreliable but potentially massive group damage, slow traps are a cost effective way to give you more time great for late game, and stun traps can effectively grant you one free turn if placed right beside your wall if your going for a more defensive playstyle. One last tip, remember that traps activate after monsters move, but before they act, this means that stun traps effectively stun for 2 turns, and that any traps placed next to a wall has higher chance of getting activated since they’ll move bunched up ready to attack but will get shutdown before the wall get pummeled. That was a much longer response then the others, but don’t you try and pretend you didn’t know what would happen by asking that, devs.
Def_Metal
Where are you from? I am from West Sussex, England UK.
What’s your favourite build? Tough question, i want to provide my optimal build and secondly my 'favourite' build that is more focused on fun.
Build One: 1H Xbow (preferably with multi hit, crit or propagation bounces) Teleport Crystal offhand All armor and trinkets geared towards: Multi-Hit, Crit, Propagation Bounces, Propagation Damage, Ranged Damage or Damage increases.
Perks:
Specialist, unless i find another 1H Xbow with important stats to hold as i want two charges of the Blaze attack at all times.
Mana collector and first blood, to complement the crit chance increases I will take on levels. This ensures I effectively have 'free' mana.
Energized, as with Blaze there will be so many kills that I can generate additional AP.
Swift as the wind, for movement points to offset the low range on the weapon.
Initiator - for the additional multi-hit
Avid Learner - for the XP boost
Steady Aim
Cherry Picking + Confident - Increase reliability to 100% against isolated enemies when at full health, an important early game DPS increase.
Build Two: (Fun Build) Druidic Staff (with damage, poison damage, propagation bounces or magic damage increase or isolation) All armor and trinkets geared towards: Poison, Propagation, Magic Damage or Damage increases
Perks:
Mana Collector and First Blood
Potent Toxins
Swift as the wind
Initiator
Avid Learner
Magic Fuel (as this is a big DPS increase, and gives incentive to collect armor with +Mana as this gives additional damage and can make some unusable armors usable)
Steady Aim
Energized
Cherry Picking + Confident
Mark (as a free debuff to proc opportunistic against key targets)
Levelling upgrades focus on magic, propagation, poison and opportunistic. This build can output huge
This build is fun because you can entrap enemies with vines, poison them with bees and with enough Opportunistic bonus you can one shot almost every enemy in the game. A very powerful but fun build.
Do I have any advice for new players?
Yes - you must treat your AP like the ultimate resource. Do not waste it on enemies that are (a) out of range from causing city panic or damage to heroes unless no other choice and (b) focus your AP on priority targets. Learning what is a priority will come with successive playthroughs.
Drakenkin's Steam guide on the game is superb and remains relevant, I used this a lot.
Otherwise, my guide series on my Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/c/defmetal1/videos) has a beginner's guide video that gives some focus on how to progress. In honesty though, i would recommend a few blind runs before turning to a guide as you want to experience every aspect of this brilliant game yourselves!
What buildings do you make first?
This is highly debated in the endgame community right now. However, I am very firmly of the view that the first two buildings should be gold mines, upgraded to Production 3 and Mine 2 before moving onto anything else. This can be achieved quite quickly, and produces a very strong foundation for an economy that will generate enough gold to see you through to Night 12. There is no need for 3 gold mines. This remains true until potentially you have full meta unlocks through repeated playthroughs, and at that point it may be better to go straight for production buildings but this remains RNG dependent. Consequently, even in my Apoc 4 runs, I still run two gold mines as the output is steady and dependable.
How many runs did it take you to make through the end of TLS?
I can't quite remember now! I ended up doing multiple runs that I quit half way through because I was filming content etc so wasn't focused on completions. However, I think if i started a clean save right now, I'd like to think I could complete standard difficult on possibly Lakeburg 1 and certainly at Lakeburg 2. Apoc 4 I'm less certain on, but I'd hope for a completion on Lakeburg 7. Watch this space soon!
Thank you very much for answering our questions! We feel very lucky to have such great players <3
We hope you’re okay and that you’re staying safe! Here, summer is… kinda cold! It never stops raining, but at least we don’t need to turn on the AC. (Yes, we try to see the good side of things!)
It’s been one month since the “We can be heroes” update. We hope you’re liking the character customization feature! If you have cool characters to share, please feel free to do so in the comments or in our Discord server!
Since it’s summer, several people in the team are taking a well deserved vacation after the craziness of the launch 😉 Rumor has it that some of them got to see this strange thing called the “sun”! Weird, huh?
On the dev side, we’ve been mostly focused on the next big update! In this update, we’ll have the new map, which is taking more time than we anticipated. One of the reasons is that there are lot of game designs questions that come up with this new map.
We also have some new features for this update that we’ll tell you more about in another blogpost 😉 In the meantime, we thought some of you all might like to see some skecthes and concept arts for The Last Spell 😉 We started to work on these in… 2017! So yes, that goes way back (we were young back then!).
The VERY FIRST sketch!
This one is VERY old! Last weekend, Jacques, our Art Director, found the VERY FIRST skecth that he ever did for The Last Spell! Long story short, Matthieu, our creative director, started to talk about the first ideas for The Last Spell and Jacques did this “very first rough sketch” thinking “ah yes that could be fun to work on a game like that”.
Then, when we started to talk about the game internally and with external partners, Jacques did those to give a more precise idea of the general atmosphere of the game.
As for the inspirations, we could mention 3 main ones for the pixel art of the game:
Into The Breach for the readability aspect
Stoneshard for the very nice high res sprites!
Obviously, Final Fantasy Tactics!
In terms of “mood/atmosphere”, Darkest Dungeon definitely comes to mind! However, Jacques was also influenced by the many movies/comics/games where you have hundreds of “things” trying to eat you!
Implementation of gameplay ideas
As you probably know, at first, The Last Spell was not supposed to be a pixel-art game! If you didn’t already, I invite you all to read this fascinating piece that Jacques wrote last year! https://steamcommunity.com/games/1105670/announcements/detail/3334295484309121885
Very early in the production, we had this idea of “a town being attacked by hordes of enemies”! It’s in French, so I’ll make the translation:
“Murs en piteux état” = “Walls in a pitiful state »
« Magiciens tentant de sauver l’humanité » = « Mages trying to save humankind »
« Autre glorieux héros défendant la porte » = « Other glorious hero defending the door »
« Tour de guet » = « Watchtower »
« Glorieux héros faisant barrage de son corps » = « Glorious hero using his body standing in the way with its body”
“Brèche” = “Breach”
“Mur” = “Wall”
“Brume” = “Mist”
As you can see, there already were quite a lot of things that are still present to this day. One of the big concept that were there from the start was this asymmetric battle between a handful of strong heroes and countless hordes of enemies, in a city you needed to defend.
Here’s one thing that you haven’t seen yet 😉 (Unless you’re in our Discord server!). This was one of the very first concepts of the game (this is all “fake” by the way, this was made by our artists ^^). I’m sure you can find a lot of elements that are still present in the current version of the game 😊
Maybe I should let you know about the upper right side of the screen. That’s right, in one of the very first game design documents for The Last Spell (that was actually called “The Last Stand” back then!), there was a “survival” component. There was a food safe, and one character had to “scavenge” for resources! Sounds familiar with another one of our games, right? 😉
Also, the concept of ammunition stayed a very long time in the game! We actually removed it just before our first public demo in june 2020.
The boss (SPOILERS IF YOU HAVEN’T FINISHED A RUN YET!)
This part is a bit of a spoiler, since it shows the boss of the game. So, if you haven’t met it just yet, you can skip to the next part!
Here, you can check out the research board for the boss! As you can see, Jacques first works in “classic” digital paining before making the pixel art version of his asset.
At first, the game designers and the creative director had in mind a sort of "artillery" that would fire cocoons. However, as Jacques was reading the Game Design Documents, he thought about the boss being still + would make some still elements randomly appear on the map. This is why he started to explore a totally new idea: the idea of a "plant".
The two beings of Light/Darkness
This is BIG spoiler territory again! Only look at this if you have completed the shops !
We did a LOT of research for the goddesses. As a matter of fact, their concept was present very early in the production of the game.
However, Jacques only worked on their actual design a few months before we entered early-access!
Since it’s linked to the story, we wanted them to be one of the surprises that players would discover! We hope you liked them!
(CW: Nudity)
Alright, time for a fun fact: during the release period (around early June!), one dove made her nest right at one of the windows in the office. She had two babies, and guess how we called them? 😉
Aaaand that’s all for today, warriors! Please let us know in the comments if you have questions! Or feel free to join our Discord server!
Take care!
Hotfix 0.92.2.3
Hello warriors!
There's a new hotfix online! :)
Hotfix 0.92.2.3
Fix softlock on night 12: If two boss parts die at the same time due to poison the game sotflocked.
Heroes can now exit watchtower on walkable buildings such as traps or warp gates.
Bug fix of the seasoned operators upgrade which could make the ballista shoot 3/4 shots at the same time.
When hiring a new hero, you can now place them on top of a trap/warp gate, or gate.
Bug fix on some audio in the character customization window.
Bug fix on some controls in the character customization window.
The reset button now resets the name in the character customization window.
Bug Fix for the tab for the City stash that was locked when leaving character customization.
Improvement on the save file backup system to prevent save loss in case of crash. Now, when the Appsave.bin doesn’t exist, the game tries to retrieve a Backup file in the Backup folder. Before the fix, it only did it when there was an existing AND corrupted Appsave.bin file.
Bug fix on the size of the goddess, especially in resolution higher than 1080p.
Important note about resetting your progression: A lot of players told us they liked resetting their progression, so here’s the new procedure: If you want to fully reset your progression, you need to go to the folder %Appdata%/../LocalLow/Ishtar Games/The Last Spell/Save (you can copy/paste this in your explorer) and delete AppSave.bin, GameSave.bin, and the Backups folder, if it exists. Make sure to do it while the game is not launched. Also, you'll have to delete the steam_autocloud.vdf file and choose your local files when Steam Cloud will ask you whether you want to use local files or Cloud files (only if it is enabled). Also, Make sure to store those files somewhere in case you want to go back to your current save !
Don't forget to update your game!
Reddit AMA with our Game Designers on July 27th at 4PM UTC+2
Hello warriors!
Summer is here! (Not so much here, it's always raining) We're working hard on the next big update planned for the end of summer!
As you all wait for this update, we've decided to host an AMA session on Reddit, which will happen... TOMORROW!
Chloé and Thomas, game designers on The Last Spell, will answer all your questions about the game tomorrow (July 27th) on Reddit at 4PM UTC+2!
🗓️ July 27th, from 4pm to 5.30pm (GMT +2) 👉 https://www.reddit.com/r/thelastspell/comments/osn7vw/ama_thomas_and_chlo%C3%A9_game_designers_on_the_last/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Don't forget to join us!
See you tomorrow, warriors!
Changelog 0.92.2.1
Hello warriors! Here's a new hotfix for The Last Spell, with minor improvements for the Characters Customization feature!
New Features 0.92.2.1
Improvements on the portraits customization
Implementation of the « any » appearance option that allows the characters to have every available parts of portraits
The shareable codes now include color palettes
The old codes still work with the new system
Diverse minor improvements
Bug fix 0.92.2.1
The perk “Back protection” works with the “wooden gate”
Fix of a visual bug on the number of required perks to unlock the next tier
Fix of a visual bug on the bought perks following the rearrangement of the tree in the previous update
Don't forget to update your game!
"We can be heroes!" Patch out NOW!
Hello warriors! Today, we have a BRAND NEW update for The Last Spell, and it’s available NOW! This will be our biggest update to date since the release, so we have a LOT to say today! Please note that most of those features were highly requested by the players, on Feature Upvote, our Discord Server, Steam forums and Reddit! We have the best community in the world, and keep sending us your feedback and suggestions! <3
Character customization – Be whoever you want to be.
Being able to rename your Heroes was probably one of the MOST requested features sent to us. And, as some of you already knew from Discord/Reddit, it was also a request we had foreseen (I guess we have a Seer in our game dev Haven!) and thus already planned for “soon enough after the release”.
However, only being able to personalize a Hero’s name is nowhere near the amount of customization frenzy we envisioned for TLS, so we geared up and prepared a full-fledged character customization system! Now, at any moment during your run, you will be able to modify everything and anything about your Heroes: name, appearance, color palettes, individual facial features… You can hand-pick everything manually or use one of the several Randomization options offered (be it per feature or more global ones).
And we even devised an additional VERY nice feature. Thanks to our devs' magic, you will be able to share your favorite portraits with the use of an in-game Code. Basically, if you have a character that is SO cool you want to share it with the whole world, it will be VERY simple to do it!
Please keep in mind that, for now, this feature is limited to the Portraits Parts (the various facial features), and does NOT include the color palettes... We're currently investigating a potential remedy to overcome that limitation, so hopefully it may come a bit later! We’ll probably organize some things related to that feature in the future, so stay tuned…
Last but not least, we also took that opportunity to add a few additional, more "funky" color palettes to our database. These palettes can be chosen by the standard procedural generation (please keep in mind these are random, not tied to any gameplay aspect!), albeit with a lower chance, and can also be picked freely within the Hero Customization interface.
Keyboard remapping Here's another feature we've had in our backlog for a long time and actually taken into consideration at all time as an upcoming addition, but never found the time to implement into the game. As the public release was rushing towards us like a crawler towards the Magic Circle, we had to prioritize tying everything together.
We definitely want people to be able to setup their hotkeys however they want, as this is an incredible tool regarding accessibility – be it for preference/muscle memory purposes, or because some setup that seems perfectly coherent to us may fall completely flat for people with different needs, abilities, hardware, culture... you name it. And noticing that it was quite highly requested by players bumped this feature back into the top of our TODO-list. Please note that only keyboard keys are remappable.
Screenshake + UI scale settings
One other requested feature is more options, especially regarding screenshakes and the size of the UI. Many players stated that they wanted to be able to the screenshakes. That’s now possible! What's more, you can actually tweak the strength of the screenshakes, so if you like them but they were a little too intense for your liking, just tone them down a little bit.
Now, regarding the size of the UI, we were actually aware that depending on your resolution, the UI size/ratio could end up being quite unpleasant. Truth is, despite many internal discussions during the development, we had been reluctant to add means to resize it at will because of artistic considerations: without going into details, the pixel art technique is beautiful but comes at the cost of a lot of constraints/limitations, especially when it comes to scaling (upscaling is painful, downscaling is outright hell...). But hey, that's why your feedback is valuable, right? We admitted that the elephant was still in the room even though we wouldn't look at it (how comes?!), so we swallowed our pride and embraced the custom UI scaling. We still want to state that any value other than integer multipliers (x1-2-3) of the original UI size may end up with some UI elements losing quality, depending on your resolution. On the other hand, most of the time it actually doesn't look as ugly as we were afraid it would, so... better for everyone, right? Also, please note that the UI Scale slider adapts to your current resolution, meaning that the min/max values available will change if you change your resolution, to try and avoid really absurd values.
First run Tainted Essence
We listened, and heard your frustration regarding the feeling of not being rewarded properly during the first run. I'm going to be honest here: we tried to do a little something to alleviate the issue a bit and show you that we are indeed listening, but we know this most likely won't be The Perfect Solution™. Doing so will take much more time as it will require more analysis, design, development and fine-tuning.
The main issue is that TLS is a complex game, with a lot of mechanics, and we really wanted new players not to be too overwhelmed ; and as many of you guessed, this first run takes the role of the acting tutorial, and we need to control as accurately as possible both the amount of content already available to the player and how it will evolve at the end of this very first run. The only way this would change drastically is by completely revamping the early campaign and how this tutorial run is handled, which is definitely not impossible but a consequent enough challenge that will not be undertaken right now (at least not in a way that will leave it finished and available in a close future).
Anyways, without further ado, here's what we could change: from now on, the Essence reward for the first run isn't fixed to 500 no matter what, but instead is a portion of the Essences granted usually by the enemies killed. It will still be less impactful than a subsequent run, because we still need to control the player's progression a bit over this first run (acting tutorial, once again), but the rewards can still greatly vary depending on how long they managed to survive – we estimate that surviving the 2nd night will already net you a total a little bit over the previous 500, and surviving until the 5th night can grant a total of 2-2,500 Essences (so more than 4 times the current one!).
Keep the horde out!
We felt that the stone variant of the walls was a bit underwhelming: the enemies damage during the last few days (even Clawers start hitting quite hard!) combined with the loss of Vision when upgrading from Wooden to Stone didn't feel like it was viable to do so. We decided to bump their Health quite a bit as a compensation.
In addition, we also added a new, stronger Gate for the same reason! We did split the current, only Gate into a Wooden Gate and a Stone Gate: the Wooden Gate has a brand new visual, but otherwise retains all of the characteristics the old Gate had ; the Stone Gate keeps the old visual but gets to match its Stone counterparts' characteristics.
For technical reasons, any ongoing run loaded after this patch goes live will see their Gates replaced with Stone Gates directly.
Show the move range of all the enemies
Another one of the highly requested features: there's now a hotkey (default to [LeftAlt], but hey, one can remap their hotkeys now anyways!) that, while pressed, displays the aggregated move range of the entire horde. It can become quite hectic with all those enemies at once and their big move range, but knowledge is power. Also, if you start using this regularly, this devious Runner/Crawler that made a habit of hiding behind a building to then the Magic Circle rush unhindered should be waaaaaay easier to spot!
Concluding note: Balancing We wanted to add a small statement regarding the overall balancing and what’s been/being changed since the release. Having so many players helps tremendously in discovers the strengths and flaws of the game, which is really nice! We can’t react to everything, but we try to follow/read the plethora of feedback and discussions appearing on so many channels (Discord, Steam, Feature UpVote, Reddit, etc.). As one can guess, this is really time consuming, though. What’s more, we obviously can’t just « follow », we have to analyze, debate, and devise solutions (lots and lots of “solutions” are often proposed, but not everything is feasible or interesting or even accounting for the whole picture).
We also have to accommodate our own planning, available resources, etc. We definitely notice some trends, and the fact that they have not been addressed (or not “properly”) doesn’t necessarily mean we disagree or won’t do anything more about them. For the time being we were more focused on improving the overall User Experience of the game, fixing bugs, and adding accessibility-oriented features. We don’t want to rush some deep, heavy, modifications so we preferred keeping the balancing on the lighter side, while still keeping them consistent with the bigger goals.
A few examples:
Perks: they need some deeper changes (some reworked, some removed/added, etc.) but we can’t do this at the moment; in the meantime, we tweak a few numbers and reorder some of them in the “tree” (not a tree!) to smooth things and make the best of what we have. (spoiler alert: changing/adding completely a perk is definitely a lot of work)
In this patch we did nerf a bit the Momentum because it was definitely very exploitable. Those are simple, small changes because we don’t want to destroy Momentum completely either, and doing heavier changes without taking the time to do so would be very risky. All of this probably won’t prevent dedicated players to “momentum goes brrrrr!”, but this is a first, quick step towards balancing this mechanic as a whole in a way that will keep it fun but not OP.
Changelog 0.92.1.0
New features
Addition of the heroes customization popup :
Addition of an option to change the intensity of the screen shake
Addition of an option to change the size of the UI with a slider
Addition of a tab to remap the keys
Visual rework of the options pop-up
Display of the enemies range by using the Alt key
Rework of the first run: The amount of earned Tainted Souls depends on the number of survived days.
New defense: Wooden Gate
When a unit is stunned, their dodge is reduced to 0.
Wording change for the new game/continue button
Acceleration of the animation for the souls gain in the night report
Change in the numbering of the numbers of runs, you now start at 1 instead of 0 (visible on the name of the city: Lakeburg #XX)
Bug fixes:
Fix of the Apocalypse 3 that didn’t increase the cost of the buildings and items upgrades
Fix of the perk “Potion Thrower” that didn’t work on the potions skills with a level superior to 4
Fix of a bug that could trigger save corruptions
Fix of a softlock that happened when players made too many buildings on the first line of Mist
The stats bonus related to the perks now respect the stats caps
The doors stay open if a hero is on the door when the save loads.
BALANCING
Item Affixes
Reduced drop rate for big rolls.
Reduced drop rate of the multi hit attribute.
Momentum
Attribute is now hard-capped at +100%.
Reduced momentum values on items, affixes and level ups.
Defenses
Stone Wall : 165 Health > 215 Health (30% increase)
Stone Wall Reinforced : 220 Health > 330 Health (50% increase)
Lancer
Block : 50 from night 11 -> 20 from night 10 (the 50 definitely was an integration mishap, and we understand why many felt like night 11 introduced a huge difficulty gap)
Perks Reordered some of the existing perks:
Vampire: Tier 5 > Tier 3
Poisonous: Tier 4 > Tier 2
Initiator: Tier 2 > Tier 4
Thrifty: Tier 3 > Tier 4
Mana Collector: Tier 4 > Tier 5
"We can be heroes!" update livestream!
Hello warriors!
As you know, this Monday July 5th, we will release the next patch of "The Last Spell" called "We can be heroes!".
To celebrate, we're going to host a livestream with two members of the team: Bruno (Community Manager) and Matthieu (Developer). During the stream, they will showcase the new content, including the much-anticipated "Character Customization" feature!
And to spice things up, they will create characters that YOU will choose!
Tomorrow, on Discord and Twitter, we will tell you more about it, so don't forget to follow us!
