WeeRPG
v1.0.2 hotfix
This update also fixes a problem where players were forced to play the same difficulty level for one extra map before advancing.
Special thanks to player Khryo, whose review helped me identify and fix the problem!
WeeRPG Developer Livestream
WeeRPG alpha demo is available for play right now and private alpha signup for the full game is happening in stages.
Private Alpha v0.12 and Demo Release!
It has been three months since we released v0.11 in early November. We took a short break in December but have made a ton of improvements for version 12. All weapons, armor, and abilities have been overhauled. Gear is now more unique with clear styles of armor you can collect. We have also differentiated abilities so you can create character loadouts that more closely mirror popular RPG classes. Or, you can mix and match however you want! Finally, we fixed a ton of bugs and made major progression improvements. Full details below!
Demo
We have created a special demo build, which will be available on Steam shortly. The demo build is a great way to experience the game if you haven't received a private alpha key. The demo version has all of the features of the main game but is capped at difficulty level 3.
The demo save can be upgraded into a full-version save so you can continue beyond the level cap in the full version of the game. However, once upgraded you will not be able to downgrade a save file.
Armor & Weapons Overhaul
The armor and weapons have been overhauled to tie into the lore and flavor of the game. Armor and weapons now fall into several styles.
- Trowein Gear: The Trowein Legion favored bronze blades with curving edges and practical leather armor.
- Somwein Gear: The Somwein Empire preferred straight or slightly-curved iron blades with razor edges and squared ends. Their armor is lacquered wood and cloth with decorative metal accents.
- Honwern Gear: The Honwern Kingdoms crafted steel weapons in classic designs that favor practicality over style or sophistication. Their armor is similar - usually heavy metal without much flair.
- Gathian Gear: The Unead Gathian Hoard swept across the ancient world with weapons and armor crafted from the bones of their enemies, and embued with dark magic.
All of these flavors of gear can be found on Ventures through the magic dungeons beneath the Wee village.
Existing saves SHOULD be credited for the value of any weapons or armor that were removed from the game. These will be stripped from the save file and exchanged for cash.
Abilities Overhaul
All abilities have been overhauled to offer players more differentiation between classes. Heavy metal armor is more likely to have spells that protect or enhance players so they can wade into the middle of combat and wreak havok. Leather armor is more likely to have abilities that increase damage or enhance movement speed. Cloth armor is more likely to have abilities that allow the wearer to fire magic spells and deal damage to whole groups of enemies.
Progression Overhaul
The game now offers 10 difficulty levels with unique weapons, armor, and enemies appearing at various difficulties. During a Venture, players must complete several dungeon rooms before they reach a new difficulty. Some rooms will offer an exit to the surface so the party can return to the village. Once players reach a new difficulty, they can start the next Venture at or below that difficulty.
Players can call for rescue at any time but they will lose a percentage of the gold earned during the Venture. Players will also be returned home, at a gold penalty, if they fall in battle during a dungeon Venture.
In the released game, players will face a final dungeon boss once they reach the highest difficulty level. This is not implemented yet in v0.12!
Additional Features & Fixes
- 22 unique abilities
- 11 unique creature types
- 123 unique weapon types
- 62 pieces of armor
- 7 unique dungeon maps with randomized components and properties
- Fixed issue where armor was not actually providing protection.
- Abilities that pass through creatures no longer get stuck on walls and repeatedly collide.
- Ventures no longer charge players for deaths multiple times.
- Fixed many collision problems with statues in dungeons.
- Creatures no longer emote every time they die (this was annoying in large mobs!).
- Arrows now splash the right material type when hitting a wall.
- Fixed various problems with menu animations.
- Current difficulty is now shown during Ventures.
- Item titles no longer overflow list box.
- Wee creatures can no longer accidentally spawn as enemies.
- Improved menu readability problems from transparency
- Game now has a hard level cap, which will eventually trigger a special boss battle
- Game no longer says "New Level Unlocked" on Venture complete menu when a new level was not unlocked.
- Game now re-rolls item abilities if original ability was removed from the game.
- Game now pays out cash for items that have been removed from the game, and removes them from inventory.
- Game now has a versioned save system which should allow smart upgrading of saves in future versions.
- Game now differentiates demo characters from full characters and demo can't load full characters (to prevent accidental downgrade).
- Progression curve is now smoother
- Multiple improvements to mouse and keyboard controls
- Fixed issue where footprints may not appear on map
- Fixed some issues with particle blend modes
- Improved ability particle effects
- Improved ability icons
This will probably be the last Alpha release of the game. We have two major work items before v1.0 is ready for release: final boss and intro cutscene. This will be our priority focus as we work to bring this game to all of its fans.
If you want to help us finish and release this game, wishlisting, sharing on social media, starting a discussion in the Community Hub, and playing the demo are all ways you can help us keep our energy through the final sprint to Version 1.0.
Thanks for playing,
Narfox Studios
Private Alpha November Release
Our recent effort has focused on playtesting feedback. We made a lot of quality-of-life improvements to UI to make it easier and more convenient to manage your cash and loot. We made some huge improvements to our core UI management tech that fixed a lot of general bugs and issues with menu management. Longtime players will see tons of improvements to all UI over earlier versions of the game!
We also invested a lot of time into improving our map tech. We added some tools to help us generate and decorate a level layout more quickly and then used the new tech to create all new dungeon maps. The result is more playable Venture maps and fewer map bugs. We will continue to add map variety and unique features to Venture maps in future updates!
New Features
- Joining a game on the title screen is clearer and now has buttons that work for mouse or controller
- Listviews now show item level next to the title
- Overhaul to menu style to make them cleaner with more consistent color palette
- Merchant menu now compares selected item to current-equipped item
- Removed button hints from abilities in HUD as they weren't accurate for keyboard play
- Delete menu now sorts characters alphabetically
- Removed alpha notice and ability to create uber character - was causing perf problems
- Overhauled menu system to have a central managing service. This eliminated a ton of bugs and made adding new UI much easier in the future!
- Redesigned inventory to be much more clear and improved item info cards
- Redesigned all vendor menus, which now have personality and dialogs
- Armor movement speed effect is now clearer
- Chests now have collision so you can't walk through them
- Improved Venture rewards and cost communication, shows after finishing a dungeon run
- Merchant menu now shows how much gold you have
- It's now more obvious when you don't have the funds for a merchant product/service
- Pressing Esc now closes most UI when playing with mouse/keyboard
- Completing a Venture now shows more stats
- Players can now exit a Venture (at a penalty) from the pause menu
- Created tech to create new maps and created 8 totally new dungeon maps
- Merchant shop now has an inventory chest so you can quick-swap gear after purchase
Bugfixes
- Occsionally game crashes on merchant menu SHOULD be fixed (fingers crossed)
- Fixed some armor types that had no sprite
- Can no longer set desired dungeon level to 0
- Same dungeon map can no longer occur twice in a row
- Fixed minibosses not animating properly in some cases
- Fixed issue with not being able to unequip starting shirt
- Fixed unwalkable tile in town graveyard
- Fixed some maps with bad exit messages
- Fixed characters having the same highlight circle color in coop
- Users can no longer accidentally move during screen transition
- Fixed game crashing when exiting to menu and then starting a new game
- Fixed exiting to title causing no selectable characters
- Fixed Venture NPC click radius being too small
Known Issues
- It's possible to dash through corners and end up outside level geometry in rare circumstances
- Spear and staff combos have awkward animation transitions
As always, thanks for playing. If you encounter bugs, please report them on the Discussion board!
Justin, Narfox Studios
Private Alpha September Release
Version 0.9 focuses on major improvements to map content. Previous versions had a "home" map where all vendors were crammed into a tiny space for testing. This update adds an overworld village with individual homes for each vendor and the player party. But there's a LOT more than that in this update! Read on to find out all we've added for this build.
With all of these big updates, the game UI is a bit clunky now. Our next milestone will focus on updating and improving the UI based on alpha player feedback!
New Features
- Game now has an overworld village map with new art and entities like lamps, fireflies, and more
- Vendors now have their own houses
- Player now has their own house
- Dungeon entrance is a real dungeon entrance now
- Dungeon maps are smaller and more linear
- Dungeon maps have been overhauled, game currently has 5 dungeon maps that are served randomly and scale to the players' level but many more are planned
- A play through of multiple dungeon rooms is now called a Venture
- New Dungeon Master NPC allows players to choose dungeon depth up to the maximum level they have reached.
- The same dungeon map should no longer load twice in a row
- Game now has half-height stairs so dungeons can have more layered levels.
- Chest location can be randomized
- New art added and color variations for existing assets
- No more loading screen - loading times have been improved and game does a quick fade to black between areas
- Mouse control has been changed - Mouse control was originally classic ARPG style similar to games like Diablo. This did not translate well to WeeRPG's more skill-based and active combat. Mouse controls are now more similar to RTS games. See the Controls button on the title screen for details.
- Added a Controls diagram to the title screen
- Vendors now properly face the player (not tested in coop)
Bug Fixes
- Interaction prompt is no longer obscured by level geometry
- Interaction prompts and areas have been improved
- Mouse control has been improved but still needs work, see details in the New Features section above.
- Major improvements to loading speed and map loading efficiency
- Fixed some rare game crashes
- Fixed some minor art issues
Known Issues
- Game can sometimes crash when buying/selling items from vendor
- Creating characters and joining the game is not intuitive
- Lots of UI improvement is needed - we're working on this next
- Cheater character performance is bad due to the number of items
Thanks for testing, we'd love your feedback in the Steam community hub!
Private Alpha July Release
Version 0.8 focuses on better differentiation of combat classes and the addition of mouse and keyboard control (which is still pretty rough around the edges). We've added a lot of new abilities, new weapon types, and magic armors. If you find bugs, please post them in the community hub. This is an alpha so expect unbalanced gameplay, unfinished features, and occasional crashes.
New Features
- The game now supports keyboard and mouse play. Press Enter on the title screen and use the arrow keys to select a character.
- Loading screen shows both keyboard and controller controls.
- Added mage staffs as a weapon type. These attack like a spear but always grant a magic missile ability.
- Non-magic weapons and armor can now have some utility abilities.
- Game now supports specific abilities for weapons instead of always random-roll.
- Added 20 staffs to the game.
- Mage enemies now prefer staffs.
- Enemies will now use abilities.
- Enemies now attack faster after spawning, harder to spawn-cheese.
- Ability icons now indicate spell type and magic type.
- Item cards now show ability description and are colorized by magic type.
- Added magic armor to the game. It's now possible to have four abilities - one for each item slot (3 armor, 1 weapon).
- Improved vendor hit boxes, no longer accidentally visit vendors from too far away.
- New home/menu song.
- Game now has 181 weapons!
- Game now has 23 creatures!
- Game now has 20 abilities!
- Game now has 104 pieces of armor!
Bug Fixes
- Game no longer drops newbie items at higher levels
- Fixed collision issues with dungeon pits
- Abilities now respect their defined range (no longer have infinite range)
- AoE abilities are not destroyed when cast near a wall
- Game no longer crashes when loading old saves, unsupported/deprecated weapons or abilities will be converted to cash and removed from the save.
- Magic armor no longer has missing sprites
- Double-destroying a particle effect no longer causes the game to crash
Known Issues
- Game sometimes crashes when selling items to vendor
- Character sometimes gets stuck when using mouse movement
- Creating characters and joining game is not intuitive
- UI is slow and buggy with cheater test character due to number of items
Thanks for testing!