Promises are meant to be kept, be it on the battlefield or on a devblog. So here we are, with a first weekly blogpost regarding new features. :) For this series of blogposts we've decided to go by theme, starting with the rework of the game phases and everything that's related to heroes!
Phases
So first, we reworked a bit the flow of the different phases of the game: Production, Deployment and Night phases.
Now you can see the direction of the incoming hordes directly during the Production phase, which enables you to strategize your building plan.
This is reinforced by the fact that we also moved the construction of the defences (walls, watchtowers...) from the Deployment phase to the Production phase! Initially, we wanted to split the amount of tasks between the phases but it didn’t turn out very well.
We think it’s better to have all information and tools to counter the next wave of enemies gathered in one single step
So now the Production phase is a bit meatier, but with the use of the Commander's Journal it should be ok. The Deployment phase now serves as a final check to place your heroes where you want to resist the incoming wave, as its name implies.
Weapons
We reworked A LOT of things when it comes to the weapons.
First, each damage type (Physical, Ranged and Magical) has some special modifiers which changes how you will use them in-game:
Melee Damage deals 200% Damage to Armor.
Ranged Damage is inaccurate (more on this later).
Magic Damage ignores 50% of the target's Resistance.
We reworked inaccuracy for ranged weapons: now inaccuracy increases the target's Dodge the further they are away from the caster. It's more interesting because now you can mitigate this negative effect by increasing your Accuracy, a new Secondary Stat.
Secondary Stats
Speaking of the Devil! A lot has been done regarding the secondary stats. We now make use of all of them in the item's bonuses, we tweaked some which seemed underwhelming, removed some, added others...
For example, we added a neat Multi Hit bonus stat which increases the number of hits for your multi hitting skills. (Try to say that sentence out loud ;))
Now these secondary stats are a real part of the experience, and you'll need to build your characters around them to counter the different enemy types. Of course it meant a lot of changes, but it's really looking good for replayability and builds diversity.
One example of the big change it implies: now enemies all have some Dodge %.
At first it's really minimal, but as the horde grows stronger their stats too, and you'll have to increase your Accuracy a bit if you don't want them to regularly evade your attacks.
Secondary stats like Accuracy can also become negative (as a trade-off to another powerful bonus), and so giving a boost to enemies' stats.
Level Ups boosted
To make sure that players have control over these mechanics, we revamped the Level Up so now you can spend:
1 point in Primary Attributes
1 point in Secondary Attributes (same as before, 5 stats randomly chosen, and you can reroll).
We also finished implementing the 35 Perks for you to choose from!
Now you'll only have to spend points in any Tier of the perk tree to unlock superior levels, you're not obliged to take perks on a Tier which doesn't appeal to you and your build to unlock the next Tier.
We believe these small changes give a lot more interest to the Level Ups.
Items
ALL items stats have been revamped. Now you can get items up to level 5, with increasing bonuses. Different types of weapon variants also have new sets of attributes to diversify the builds types.
We reworked ALL the skills of the weapons too, taking into account the feedbacks about which ones didn't get enough love. So when you'll try the new version of the game, don't hesitate to try things which weren't very cool at the time of the prologue... you may surprised! (for example, Poison damages now scale with the weapon level, so Poison builds have become veeeery interesting ^^)
Some quality of life and eye candy too: now rare items have a nice glow on them, making them pop out of the crowd. And when dragging an item, we highlight the slot where it can be dropped in the UI. Very useful.
Character Generation
Speaking of little cosmetic changes, we reworked the way the portraits of the heroes where procedurally generated, hopefully making them a bit more heroic. We also added a clothing layer to them with random armors, making seem less naked and a little more adventurous... They overall should look more baddass, with some of them still quite funny/weird thanks to the RNG gods.
As a side note... we worked on something pretty cool to customize your characters more, but... it's too soon to talk about it... ;)
We hope you're as excited as we are with this first batch of changes. Of course, this is only the top of the iceberg and we've reworked / added tons of very cool stuff to make every TLS run memorable.
See you all next monday for another blog post, that might - or might not? - feed your thirst for city related changes... ;) -The Last Team
Some news from the frontline!
Hello survivors!
We’re not dead… It’s been a while since we gave some meaty news about the game, sorry about that, but we had a lot on our plate since the release of the Prologue. Of course there was the Covid situation, but we also had to grow the team to be able to achieve the level of content and quality we want for The Last Spell. We took all the feedbacks we could find from the players of the Prologue, shook them up with our own ideas and worked like crazies to make it all happen.
We added the last core features which were still missing, plus added something rather “big” that was not planned but which should add a lot of quality to the game. It all takes time, but we are seeing the end of it! We’re really happy about the state of the game as it is now, there are still a shit ton of things to do but… those of you who played the prologue/demo should be pleasantly surprised about all the changes and new stuff, to say the least.
We've implemented the first batch of Meta features, that include some surprises for you so we won’t say much about it. We wouldn’t want to spoil any of the fun! 😉 What you can also expect is a lot of new content, including new enemies and more tools to fight the hordes with. During the prologue/demo, we received lots of feedback regarding the quality of life, and we took them into account. Basically, we reworked many new elements, including the skills, weapons, but also the weapon type mechanics and the level up. And we've rebalanced the game like a million times since the prologue, so the game will feel very different, even for the big fans of the prologue! Stay put! More details are headed your way and you’ll know more about this very soon…
The next announcement is coming in a matter of weeks… and it should give you what you want 😉
New blogposts!
As of today, for the next 3 Mondays, we will post detailed infos about new features and systems here and on our dev blog, so keep tuned!
Wishlist the game!
So don’t hesitate to wishlist + follow the game to be notified. It really helps us indies to get some visibility on Steam. We want to thank you again for your love and support. Seeing the hype grow among the community over the game development has been a real engine for our team. It’s also thanks to your tests and feedback that we were able to make it happen. We can’t wait to show you what we’ve created and hear your thoughts!
Talk to you again real soon, Your TLS team
Steam Game Festival AMA on Discord
Survivors!
We're sure many of you have questions about The Last Spell, its development, its gameplay and many others!
So, this friday at 5PM (GMT+1), we'll be hosting an AMA session on our Discord Server!
Benjamin and Chloé, two of our Game Designers, will answer your questions!
Watch Chloé and Thomas play the prologue of The Last Spell!
Hello survivors,
we're very happy to be taking part in the Steam Festival this month, taking place from February 3rd to the 9th.
To celebrate that, two of our game designers, Chloé and Benjamin, will be playing the prologue on Wednesday 3rd at 7PM (GMT+1)!
This year, we've been writing "We hope you're okay" a lot, but you know, 2020 and all that. But we hope you're okay!
It's our last post of the year, so we thought it would be a good time to reflect on this year, and what our plans are for next year.
What happened in 2020 for The Last Spell?
In 2020, we progressed a lot in the development of the game! We also released the very first playable demo of the game, and in Autumn, we released the official prologue.
Although the Prologue doesn't have all the features of the final game (for example, the meta progression) and will have a lot of balancing and new content, it gave the players an idea of what the gameplay will look like when the game gets released.
Thanks to your feedback, we were able to improve the game even more, but we still have some work to do to be able to release the game :)
The team also grew here at CCCP! We were very happy to welcome Adrien, Anthony, Eloïse, Chloé, Robin!
We also want to thank Mathieu, Chiara and Rack who helped us a lot for the development of the game this year!
And finally, we want to thank each and everyone of you who keep supporting us in this adventure!
Our plans for 2021
As you might suspect, we can't tell you much info about the release of the game! What we can tell you is that we still need some time to work on the game so we can release it in a state we can be proud of :)
Other than that, as a studio, 2021 will be an important year, and there are some exciting news from us that we can't wait to share with you!
The Last Haven 2.0
For those who missed it, we have a Discord minigame on our Discord server! Here's the official synopsis:
The Last Haven is a small discord game we made just for fun, to pass time until The Last Spell is released.
This is the end of the world. After decades of war and confusion, the Mages pushed the limits of their magical knowledge just a bit too far. They discovered a new magical energy and unleashed it upon their rivals, obliterating 95% of humankind in the process.
A strange purple Mist is now aggregating everywhere, from which hordes of mutated beings come at night to devour any remaining living thing.
A few Havens are still standing against total eradication, shelters for hardened heroes and lucky sods, fighting every night to protect the last Mages alive. Not out of pity, of course, Mages are now but mere slaves who try to make amends for their sins.
You play the surviving heroes: your mission is to protect the mages until they cast a massive protection spell around the Haven to keep the Mist at bay. This could buy them some time to find a way to save the world. Maybe.
Slay all the monsters attacking the Haven every night before they kill every living thing on Earth.
As you may remember, we released a first version during this summer which our players liked a lot. However, after a few months, some players managed to "finish" the game, and our poor bot couldn't keep up with it anymore.
That's why before going on holidays, Matt reworked it and added a LOT of new features, which led to the release of The Last Haven 2.0!
Hello survivors! The prologue has been out for a month now already! You folks seem to like it a lot, and you sent us quite a TON of feedback and questions for us! And we’re super happy about it 😊 Now that there are nearly 2,000 people on our Discord server, it’s getting harder for us to answer EVERY question about the game, especially when it comes to game design! This is why we decided to organize a Q&A session on our discord server this Friday! So, this Friday at 5PM UTC+1, come to our Discord Server in the #tlsevent room 😊 Thomas and Benjamin, our game designers, will discuss with you and answer all your burning questions about The Last Spell 😊 (spoiler alert: no, we won’t reveal the release date - yet). See you on Friday, survivors! 😊
FAQ about The Last Spell and The Last Spell - Prologue!
Hello survivors! We hope you’re okay. Today is a special blogpost, because we’ve received a lot of question from you folks, so we decided to put them all here! This FAQ will also be available from the Steam Forums. And if you have any question that is not answered here, feel free to ask them in the comments! We’ll be happy to answer them.
General Questions
Q: Who is working in The Last Spell? The developers: CCCP is an independent game development studio from north of France with more than fifteen years of experience, and we are a team of nearly 20 developers.
Previously, we released Dead in Bermuda and Dead in Vinland.
Publisher: The game is published by The Arcade Crew. The Arcade Crew is based in Paris as a separate division of Dotemu. The boutique publisher is dedicated to producing and publishing awesome original games with a retro feel from small creative teams. The Crew is thrilled to discover and support new talents and create a real community around classic inspired titles
Q: How many people are working on the game? Now, more than a dozen people are working on the development of The Last Spell!
ABOUT THE LAST SPELL
Q: What is The Last Spell? The Last Spell is a turn-based tactical RPG immersed in roguelite mechanics in which you lead a team of hardened heroes to defend the last bastion of humanity against hordes of monsters.
Q: When is The Last Spell releasing? A: We still have long months of development ahead of us, so we need a little more time before talking about a release date. Don’t worry, as soon as we have a release date, we’ll announce it EVERYWHERE 😉
Q: What platforms will it be releasing on? A: The Last Spell will first be released on PC. We also want to make consoles versions, but it will be at a later date.
Q: Will The Last Spell release on GOG (or other PC platforms)? We want to bring the game to as many platforms as possible. However, we’re focused on the Steam version right now.
Q: Who is making the music? A: We are very happy to have Rémi Gallego, aka The Algorithm, on board to compose the OST for The Last Spell. You can check out his music here:
Q: How much will it cost? We have nothing to announce regarding the price of the game at this point.
Q: What format can I buy The Last Spell? You will be able to buy The Last Spell digitally on Steam. Q: Are there any other languages that English and French will be supported? The final game will be translated in more languages, but we have yet to announce them.
Q: Is there a co-op mode on The Last Spell? No, there is no co-op mode on The Last Spell.
Q: Will The Last Spell OST be available digitally anytime soon? We will share more infos regarding the OST of The Last Spell later, so stay tuned.
Q: Where can I find The Last Spell assets? We put a lot of assets in our presskit http://lastspell.com/presskit/ However, if you need any other asset, feel free to ask us in this thread! Q: I’m a streamer/content creator/editor, who can I talk to? You can send us a DM on TwitterDiscord or via mail: press [a] le-cccp[dot]com
Q: Where can I download the demo? You can download the demo on the Steam page of The Last Spell https://store.steampowered.com/app/1105670/The_Last_Spell/ and also on the page of the prologue https://store.steampowered.com/app/1437010/The_Last_Spell_Prologue/
Q: What is included in the demo/prologue? The Last Spell Prologue lets you experience the first five days of the final game. You start with only 3 heroes at your disposal, and their weapons are... not the best ones. But they can still make use of cool skills to get rid of those damned monsters! Build up your defenses, protect your city, and slay the very first hordes of enemies you will encounter in The Last Spell. Be prepared, because there will be many more nights in the final game.
We are still fiddling with a lot of features, so don't be scared if some may seem unbalanced or temporary.
The difficulty of the prologue was specially balanced so that it provides a challenge on a 5 ingame days time frame, so don't be surprised if you finish the 5 days in a pretty bad shape The difficulty in the final game will of course be different.
Q: Is there a difference between the demo and the prologue? No, the content is exactly the same.
Q: How long does the demo last? If you manage to survive the 5 nights, we estimate the demo to have about 3 hours of gameplay! Q: How many playable character are playable in the demo? At the start of the demo, there are 3 procedurally generated characters in your team, but you will be able to recruit a fourth one during the demo if you meet certains conditions.
Q: Can I play with a controller in the demo? The demo is only playable with mouse and keyboard.
Q: Can I remap my keyboard in the demo? You can change the keyboard layout: AZERTY, QWERTY or QWERTZ. Q: Where can I report bugs and other issues? You can report bugs and other issues on our Discord server or in the Steam forum. When you report a bug on Discord https://discord.gg/cccp, we will DM you to have more info on the bug so we can pass it onto the developers.
Q: Where can I share feedback with the development team? You can share feedback with the development team on our Discord server. Specific questions about the demo/prologue:
Will you update the demo/prologue? We won’t be updating the demo/prologue, unless there’s a giant game-breaking bug found. (please don’t find a giant game-breaking bug)
The future of the game
How will the prologue and the final game be different? The prologue is basically the first 5 nights of the final game. That means that the final game will have more nights. Also, there will be some balancing, and quite a lot of new things will be integrated that are not visible in the demo/prologue. But we can’t say more for now 😉
How can I use the souls? The souls will be used to unlock some meta game, permanent upgrades. However, the prologue version is too early in development, so the feature is unavailable for now. What will I be able to buy as permanent upgrades? Right now, we don’t have more info to share about it, since this feature is currently in development.
How many nights will be in the final game? We don’t have the final number of the nights to announce right now, except that there will be more than the demo/prologue.
Will I be able to have more than 4 characters in my team? Yes!
Will there be bosses in the final game? Yes!
Will there be difficulty features? Yes, but we can’t say more for now. 😉
Will there be mod support? Yes, modding is something we want to do in the future!
Will I be able to transfer my save to the final game? Since many changes will be made between the demo/prologue and the final game, that won’t be possible.
As we said, there might be questions that we haven't answered yet, so please feel free to ask them in the comments and we'll update this post! :)
Your best strategies to survive in the Prologue!
Hello survivors!
Is it november already? We hope you're all staying safe! Since the release of the prologue, we got quite a lot of new players in our Discord server.
And we realized that many of the players had found very good strategies, even better than our own!
This is why we decided to ask on social media (Discord and Twitter) YOUR best strategies!
Note: Those strategies are valable for the prologue as it is now! The final game will have a different balancing, and new features, so those strategies might not be valable anymore when the game releases.
Torantolis said: My best strat is to hope and pray that you get enough red-items to bash your way to victory and that the enemy runners don't dodge 7 consecutive attacks each turn. Wear heavy armor, bring a shield if you can, have weapons that can easily cleave or propagate, and save up building resources for the final waves for extra walls.
We definitely agree that resource management is crucial in The Last Spell!
Rock the Shoulder has quite the interesting strategy! It's a complex one, so you want to pay attention to that one!
Who needs pants, anyway?
Mine all buildings on day 2, sell all houses, sell all pants. Build a tavern and get a fourth hero. Build 2 houses and upgrade them on day 3, build third house, mine all you can. Buy shop upgrade 1. Buy shop upgrade 2 on day 4, mine but build nothing else, save rest of gold. Mine then sell all houses on day 5. Buy all the equipment from the shop. You can also build a mana well and recover if you need to. Just sell it after.
Try not to go to crazy on using mana, since you won't be getting any wells, but with four heroes it should be fine.
Our opinion on that one: this strategy has the advantage of not relying on RNG, so that can apply to every player! We hope you don't like pants and like mining!
The Knight Commissar had another strategy that relied on mining and selling as well:
Rush that 4th heroes and multi-weapons set on characters!
1st wave, 2 mines (1 upgraded 1st day, the other the second), gotta get at least 200 gold after 2nd wave. Then get that inn and 4th hero out.
Then, focus on mining out materials, surround the base in walls, priority to the waves.
Other than that? Stack 2 sets of weapons on every character, one with strong 1 cost 1 target attacks, other with aoes!
Allows for a lot of attacks without mana cost and versatility.
Buy some armors too.
My winning combo:
Sword and Spear! (GET THAT SPEAR BRO!)
Crossbow and Mini-Crossbow (to finish the low level enemies)!
2x Staffs and wands.
They will never made inside the city if you play your cards right and are not afraid to take a bit of heat.
We like that one too, especially because you're advised to use the 2 sets of weapons for each of your characters!
Firens started with take a sword. Go in. Come back. Rest. GO IN!!!!
Which is honestly, a good strategy. Dangerous though!
But then... but the serious one. Be sure to start with a good mobile melee (ideally 1h-sword), either a strong melee magic (scepter or staff) and a range that can deal with armor. Start every night very deep near the edge to kille the first monsters with melee, keep magic/ranged to deal with isolate, or slow/stun. Deal with the armored one with poison ideally. Stuff my main melee with a strong dmg secondary (spear if possible), make him get 9 move points at least so he can rush in, and come back while killings dozens every turn. Stuff the mage with druid staff. Get a 4th hero (2nd melee is great) before 3rd night. Build the workshop I need the most before night 4, and upgrade items to tier 3. Never let monsters in!
Optimizing your characters is very important as well in The Last Spell Prologue! Making sure you have the best weapons and knowing how to use them right will be crucial for your games!
When the game gets released, we're sure you folks will have even more original strategies to make it to the end of the game! Do you have your own strategies that you found while playing the prologue? Tell us in the comments! :)
So, it’s been a while since we last wrote a blog post… We’ve been quite busy with other things. (yes, looking at you 2020)
Despite the mega-mess we are in with the covid situation, we are glad to say that it didn’t impact the game development too much. The team adapted well to remote work and last minute changes, it’s not ideal but overall we can’t complain. We hope that everything is fine on your side. Wear a mask and stay safe!
We also had to expand the team to reach all of our objectives, so it took a little bit of time for everything to run smoothly. The good news is that we now have some real firepower in terms of production, we can implement new features a lot quicker while preserving a stable state of the game.
So big cheers to Adrien who joined the art team, Robin, Rack and Anthony who joined the dev team and Eloïse who joined the communication team!
So yeah, back on track! A few months ago we participated in the Steam Festival with a nice little demo. It was very important for us to gather some early feedbacks on the game, so we could make some adjustments before any kind of release. So a huge thank you to anyone who reported anything about the demo… it’s a tremendous help for us!
We identified some areas where the game was lacking. The two main ones were:
Melee weapons seemed underwhelming compared to ranged ones, for a lot of reasons.
The production phase was kind of messy, it inherited from old design choices that were not consistent anymore, so the learning curve was too high for our own taste (and the flow was very bad).
Another big weakness that we observed ourselves and which didn’t please us from a design standpoint was that despite having multiple skills for each weapon, it was often more simple and even more optimized to use only one basic skill and spam it 5 or 6 times during a character’s turn. That was not satisfying.
So with that in mind, we made some last changes on the main features of the game which would hopefully correct these flaws – and I think we reached this objective.
We also continued to implement items from our (big) feature list which still wasn’t present into the game, despite belonging to the core game experience.
We worked hard, and are now proud to present the latest, fresh from the oven, build of the game in the form of a free Prologue!
Why a Prologue?
With that, we are able to show you a new version of the game and get some more feedbacks!
For now, it’s the best way on Steam to get some attention from players before release… that’s not ideal, but it’s the only way to get some real exposure and hopefully give us the most chances to make our real launch a success.
A successful launch for us is mandatory, because it will give us the strength to update, update, update the game in the long run. That’s something we want to do, but if the game sales don’t look promising, it could jeopardize everything :/
So if you want to help us: download the Prologue, and if you like what you see, Wishlist and Follow The Last Spell on Steam! That’s the best way to help us. You can also leave a review on the Prologue which will help us gain traction, and spread the word on social networks!
https://youtu.be/2lf2RMxv5Vo
New features
Workers system
One of the biggest change in the Prologue was reworking the way the production phase was working. We had this legacy system where the heroes could help during the day with production of building by using their Action Points. There were a lot of flaws in this system: it was counter-intuitive, not self-explanatory, and we commited the most terrible sin a game designer could ever make: 1 feature had 2 functions and 2 ways of working (during nighttime, AP regenerates at each turn and is used to launch attacks; during daylight they would serve as a one time boost to help produce things)
On top of that, we faced hard balancing issues because gaining new AP for your heroe – or worse – recruiting a new hero would dramatically enhance your “help production” capacity, so well… it was a nightmare. The UX was also very bad (select a hero, then choose the skill in the action bar, then select a building…)
So now we have a new “resource”: workers. You use them to help during production phase and you can get more by building new houses. It’s a self-contained system that works really well and corrects all the flaws of the older system. You still have to carefully think about how to use these workers efficiently, there is a little board-game feel about it, AND it makes so much more sense from a lore standpoint (not that we cared that much ;)), during day the people of the city that you protect every night get to work and your mighty heroes get some hard earned rest.
Buildings selection + upgrades
We expanded on our base building gameplay: you can now click on buildings and select them. They have their own action bar: you can destroy, repair, use workers, use their special ability when there is one… and now you can even upgrade them!
We have the basics of the system implemented: each building has 2 upgrade paths for now, with varying effects. In our minds, the upgrades should take an important role during mid-late game when your city is fully built.
Skills limit system
To correct a lot of things we didn’t like regarding how the skills were used in battle for now, we added this system: each skill now has a limited number of use each turn. It’s not as hard as a consumable skill, but with that you naturally have to make use of at least 2 or 3 different skills each turn, which is more interesting for us in a design standpoint: we can now design very strong skills, but with only 1 use per turn for example. Or we can make low cost skills but with limited uses, etc… Before that we only had the AP and Mana costs to balance the power of the skill, and it was just not enough…
Moreover, this system enabled us to give a little edge for Melee weapons: they tend to naturally have more uses than their ranged counterparts. It helps giving them a bit more love. Ranged weapons have this really strong advantage of enabling you to kill from afar, so we had to balance them down since we removed the need of having ammunitions for them (best decision ever… it was really annoying).
This skill limit works a bit like ammunitions in the end, but in a really less irritating way.
1 additionnal skill on every weapon
This being said, we deeply felt the need to expand the arsenal of skills available to the heroes since you have to play a lot more with different skills.
We had in mind from the start to add new skills for high level weapons, but we felt that they were lacking depth from the beginning, so we just added 1 new skill for EVERY weapon in the game!
We also tweaked a bit every older skill to adapt to the changes.
The idea was to add another low level / low cost skill that would easily be usable like the first skill of each weapon. These 2 skills should be in general the less situationnal ones.
New special skill effects
We already felt that we were kind of limited by the possibilities of doing different unique skills, but adding a new skill for every weapon made it clear for us that we needed new toys to play with. So we added a bunch of new effects which can be used by skills:
Isolated: bonus damage to enemies who don’t have any other enemy standing next to them. Backstab ’em all!
Momentum: bonus damage scaling with moves you made before launching the attack (think of a Charge!)
Follow: if you kill the enemy, you take its place. Ninja!
Opportunistic: gives bonus damage to targets already inflicted with a debuff or bad status effect like poison or stun. You sneaky bastard!
Inaccurate: makes the weapon deal less damage after a certain range. Useful effect we use on ranged weapons, to tune them down a little bit more.
RegenStats: just a basic effect to make AP, Move, Mana or HP regenerating skills.
Effect example – Inaccurate
New level ups UI
A “simple” quality of life change: now the level ups are managed directly in the character sheet, so you have access to all the information about your character while making your bonus attribute choice. It’s less beautiful that way, but it’s 100x more usable, so we had to do it.
Secondary Attributes
We also added some space for the player to track the modifiers he/she has on a secondary set of attributes. For now, only perks, items and traits can change these secondary attributes, but we are thinking about expanding on it in the future.
New enemies
A lot of changes here!
We added a lot of variety in the basic “clawer” enemies. Now some have little modifiers on them: some move a bit quicker, some have a bit of armor, etc…
We also added new special enemies which always have a little something peculiar. We’ll let you discover their behavior ingame, but here is the list of what monstruosities you may encounter:
The Splitter (Tier 2)
The Winged (Tier 2)
The Archer (Tier 2)
The Ripper (Tier 3)
Winged
Wounds system
Another thing we didn’t like, is that we felt that special effects such as Stun or Poison were… not that useful… because there was no difference between a full health enemy and one who had only 1 HP left. So your priority as a player was to kill the weakened ones as soon as possible.
To correct this, we added the baseground of a new feature: a wounds system. Reaching certain HP treshold, enemies and heroes alike will get some big maluses. With that, you can totally just weaken some enemies and leave them be while you concentrate your fire on other foes.
We may expand on this feature later, but it’s already giving great effects to the flow of battle.
Battle UI revamp
We changed a lot of small things in the UI, such as the way the enemies gauges work and displays, and most importantly we added a lot of feedback on the targeting system: you’ll now clearly see if you have a chance to hit one of your comrades, etc…
Traits system v2
We reworked how the Traits are generated for heroes. The goal was to make them more impactful on the characteristics of your team.
Now each hero has a first Trait which will define what occupation he/she had before the end of the world, and the 2 other Traits are more “genetic” ones.
We also added some hidden system which enable us to balance the generation of Traits between the starting team, so that if you get very lucky on one hero, you’ll get worse Traits on the others. You may end up with funky teams with one “chosen” hero and two useless ones, but overall the system balances the team so that you won’t feel the urge to re-roll every game 😉
Miscellaneaous
Save system: you can now quit and reload your game. Sweet!
Lifetime stats: a shit-ton of stats for your little heroes. Just for fun for now, but we may expand on the feature at some point…
Starting heroes: to make the game a bit more accessible, we now generate 1 melee hero, 1 ranged hero and 1 magic user. For now it does the job, later we will expand on the idea.
Heroes generation v2: now there is less randomness in the primary attributes at generation, the real differences between heroes come from the Traits they come with. I won’t go into too much details, but we changed how the starting crew is generated for a more balanced experience.
Animations & small fx: we added a lot of eye candy, like small animations when the buildings are constructed, blood and damage fx, etc…
AI: we completely reworked how the AI works, to let our designers create more interesting behaviors in the future. (we already have implemented new behaviors like archers shooting from range or winged enemies trying to circle the city)
New portraits: a batch of new portraits for your heroes. We are working on a cool new feature for the portraits, we’ll talk about it in an upcoming dev blog entry 😉
New perks: we reworked the perks to work with the new systems we have. It’s still heavily work in progress, but it does the job for now.
Main attributes rework: we reworked some attributes. We changed the old accuracy into a secondary attribute and replaced with damage bonus for the 3 types of weapons we have: melee, magic and range.
Have fun!
Sheesh! Yes, that’s… a lot…
We hope you will enjoy the Prologue as much as we had fun developing and playing it! And stay tuned for the next releases, there are still A LOT of new toys incoming for you to happily slay monsters all night long.
We hope you're okay! There are many games to try during PAX/EGX Online, so feel free to play them all!
Since Steam is partnering with PAX/EGX during this event, we decided to do a little streaming session with our two community managers, Eloïse and Bruno!
(They're not the best at the game though, so they will probably lose miserably before Night 5)
