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Hotfix 0.9.83

Aug 1, 2025

BALANCE:

Reduced Glimmer drop rates in the end game.

BUG FIXES:

Fixed an issue where a cutscene could cause the battle start event to activate even when the encounter didn't include combat.
Added a failsafe to prevent crashes tied to buff icons on enemies without active health bars.
Fixes to characters' dynamic "maybe" responses.
Corrected Z-ordering on the camp screen.
Fixes + additional encounter compositions in the Claw Marks quest.
Bandaid fix for texture glitches upon loading the main menu.

Dev note: The texture fix is temporary and makes the game load for a bit longer. I'll add a more robust solution in a future update.

Bonfire

Hotfix 0.9.82

Aug 1, 2025

Another quick fix. This time mainly for tooltips that got messed up by the GUI rework.

BUG FIXES:

Fixed positioning of unit tooltips vs the unit's portrait.
Portrait tooltips can no longer end up partially off screen.
Disabled some debug functions that were left on by mistake.
Attempted fix for a rare crash with the Failures encounter.

Dev note: The crash fix was done blind, and I'm pretty sure it's not 100% done. Let me know if it happens again.

Bonfire

Hotfix 0.9.81

Jul 25, 2025

A quick hotfix for some pretty brutal bugs in the new danger system.

BUG FIXES:

Ambush chance now correctly updates on travel.
Prevented ambushes from happening right after reaching a new area.
Potential fix for a bug where ambush would erroneously trigger on quest completion.
Fixed crash caused by incorrect asset references in forest sunny weather.
Corrected some typos.

Dev note: You'll need to move to another location for the changes to the ambush system to kick in.

Bonfire

Whispers Update

Jul 22, 2025

The Whispers Update is out, introducing new danger management mechanic that finalises the game's survival component, as well as a full GUI overhaul!

AMBUSHES & DANGER

The party is now on the run not only story-wise but also mechanically. As you explore an area, Mournfolk zero-in on your location and will eventually ambush the camp. These ambushes are extremely challenging even for endgame parties and their best outcome is still forced move to another location with some resources left behind.

Managing this new danger becomes a game in itself, with constant pressure of having to pick what quests to prioritise, when to take the risk, and when to just leg it. And like with everything in Bonfire, every now and then you just have to take the loss.

MORE USE FOR GLIMMERS

Glimmers are now a truly rare and valuable resource with several new uses. Rune abilities are no longer infinite and require Glimmers to recharge. Several important encounters also use them, such as lighting beacons that keep Mournfolk at bay for just a bit longer.

Since the balance has changed dramatically here, existing save files will have their Glimmers adjusted to more reasonable values upon first launch.

GUI OVERHAUL

Long overdue, this update finalises the game's GUI, including core elements such as loadout selection menu or health bars. The goal was increased usability and consistency, as well as general beautification.

This includes quality-of-life updates such as merging team and item selection menus into one, increased clarity of information

FULL PATCH NOTES:

NEW CONTENT:

Introducing the new danger level and ambush mechanic.
New encounter: Beacon.
New Glimmer-centric variants for existing encounters.
A new miniboss variant: Mournfolk Bishop.
New high-level encounters added to the pool.
3 new challenge-type quests have been added.
3 new bonus-type quests have been added.
4 new errands have been added.
Updated and expanded the game's intro sequence.
New tutorials added.
New story scenes added to introduce some of the new lore and features.

Dev Note: Most of the new quests are related to the ambush mechanic, providing different opportunities to consciously lower the danger level.

GUI OVERHAUL:

New unit portraits and health bars.
New team & loadout selection menu.
New errand menu.
New errand results menu.
New difficulty change menu.
New profile reset menu.
New logo sequence at the start of the game.
New ambush result menu.
Improved quest menu.
Improved rune upgrade panel.
Improved skill point purchase panel.
Map menu now displays current risk of ambush.
Multiple smaller fixes in all menus for clarity and consistency.

Dev Note: We're of course open to feedback on the new menus, but give them a bit to get used to at first, especially if you're a long-term player.

BALANCE:

Endless journey's Glimmer cost changed from 7 to 5.
The quest tied to collecting enough Glimmers has been updated accordingly.
Enemies start up easier on Journey difficulty mode, giving a small grace period to new players.
Trader prices are less likely to be on the lower end in the endgame.
Abandoned Camp errant is now less risky (this was a bug).
Base Glimmer drop rate has been significantly lowered.
However, bosses and similarly tough enemies are now more likely to drop Glimmers.
Challenge quests involving boss enemies are guaranteed to drop Glimmers.
Challenge quests involving bosses provide less XP now.
Enemy reinforcements can now be elites.
Endgame "kill events" have been made harder.
Adjusted the event/encounter pools for default, endless and endgame event sets.
Hexa's Shadowspawn's max HP is now limited to 50. This only comes into play when facing Failures.
Increased XP reward for the Claw Marks quest.
Increased XP reward for the Rune Masters quest.

Dev Note: We're generally happy with hero and enemy balance, but the changes to Glimmer drop rates are very significant, so we're definitely open to your feedback here.

Dev Note #2: Likewise, let us know what you think about the new ambush mechanic and its balance.

GAMEPLAY & QoL:

Trader now sells food!
Rune levels now show consistently with other upgrades, with 1 being the starting level instead of 0.
"Show HP as numbers" option is now on by default for new players.
Quest progress meter clearly shows where the campfire is.
Errand reward sequence can now be skipped just like the end quest tally.
Reinforcement counters now have tooltips.
Added tooltip for the next turn counter on the character portraits.
Rewards and special conditions are now more clearly highlighted in the quest menu.
Clearer notification when there's not enough Glimmers to start a quest.

Dev Note: Trader selling food now is going to make a lot of you happy. Also gives it some endgame role.

Dev Note #2: There are still some areas where we want to add tooltips, but they will come in a smaller update later on.

COSMETICS:

Added voice SFX for all Mournfolk and the Hunter.
Added voice SFX for Undead enemies.
Added voice SFX for the Wandering Master.
Improved font quality and rendering.
Done button animates consistently between all menus.
Necromeister miniboss is now more distinct from the basic Necro enemy.
Updated the look and scale of buff/debuff icons.
Updated the colouring of buff/debuff icons.
Fixed sprite pivot for Unassuming Undead.
Fixed sprite pivot for Blastshower rune.
Added shadow to the Trader's rug.
Added FX for enemy appearance when Failures weather effect is present.
Rune ability items appear sequence has been updated for Endless and Ambush.
Reinforcement counters now correctly disappear on quest end.
Fixed the glitching ink blot below the end quest panel.
Enemy portraits have more offset between them in horde encounters.
Fixed glitches and janky behaviour of XP bars on level ups.
Flames and warm glow added to all menus.
Updated the look of the level up indicator in the camp screen.
Updated the night transition in the camp screen.
New FX for the Heal Scroll item use.
Fixed margins and sizing of the unit tooltips.
Tutorials now fade menu captions for better readability.
Improved fountain animation.
Health bar is no longer hard to see or invisible on very low HP.
Fixed and unified Runesmith's anvil sequence.

BUG FIXES & MISC STUFF:

Changes to handling of textures and their loading.
Using items no longer triggers Ephrem's inspiration healing effect.
The game should no longer be slightly blurry on retina Macs.
Sucker Punch doesn't trigger and waste its use on enemies that die from DoTs.
Corrected max item number in errands.
Resource counter now correctly displays in Gauntlet quest menu.
Improved backend for buff/debuff icon handling.
Fixed bugged sound behaviour when changing sound and music settings.
Fixed a bug where music would not play with sound disabled.
Fixed a crash caused by Hexa being unavailable for her quest.
Game no longer incorrectly saves rune ability items as normal items.
Fixed incorrect quips for miniboss encounters.
Prevented the game from generating garbage maps for Gauntlet and Endless quest.
Fixed incorrect drawing order on some of the ability/spell FXs.
Fixed a crash in quests with enemy reinforcements.
Resource predictions in the quest menu can no longer overflow.
Prevented a crash caused by buying a rune upgrade when another is still in progress.
Ephrem AI fixes.
Oakheart enemy AI fixes.
Fixed erroneous AI checks for average party HP.
Minor improvements to kill event handling.
Potential fix for Z-sorting glitches in some buff/debuff effects.
Prevented food from going into negatives on some rare cases.
Auto-tester now correctly recharges runes.
Debug map regeneration tools now correctly clear quest data.
Fixed boss ability positioning in enemy tooltips.
Fixed texture glitches in the intro.
Fixed timing on the logo sequence for fullscreen Macs.
Fixed items display not fading correctly when the quest is over.
Difficulty-related unit stats handling refactor.
Summons and reinforcements are now correctly adjusted for difficulty.
Corrected food drops in chests on easy quests.
Quest progress meter correctly hides when tutorial is displayed.
Fixed broken tutorial for reaching summon limit.
Fixed rare crash with Erzsie's Sustenance skill caused by reaching the summon limit.
Fixed a crash on speeding up summons.
Fixed glitches with summon HP bar and buffs.
Debug stats display refactor.
Prevented locked quests from appearing regardless under some circumstances.
Fixed rare crash on Countess boss quest.
Correct dialogue now displays when there's not enough heroes for a quest.
Prevented chest covers from suddenly popping instead of fading when chest is the first encounter.

Dev Note: The changes to texture loading are related to change in how they are handled by the engine. We're unsure if we covered all cases, so let us know if you experience hiccups or glitches caused by texture failing to load in time.

WHAT'S NEXT?

With this update, we've closed two huge tasks that were still hanging over our head: the GUI overhaul, and the finished journey/survival system. This means the only thing remaining now is content: the two missing heroes and the ending. Plus all the minor stuff like new enemies and biomes.

We'd like to take this opportunity to change our update strategy and go with more granular patches from now on. The game no longer requires any major reworks that leave it unplayable for months and the big-content-update-every-century approach just didn't work out. For now we're going to focus on bug and balance fixes for Whispers, but expect more mid-size patches with stuff like new enemies or storylines after that, with big releases reserved for the heroes.

As always, thank you for your continued patience and support! If you encounter any issues, would like to check our current development roadmap or make any suggestions, feel free to drop by our community forums. You can also follow me on X or join MoaCube's Discord server[discord.gg] for more frequent updates.
-Tom

Bonfire

Next Patch Coming Soon

Jul 2, 2025

Just a quick update today. The next content patch is almost done and should come out within the next couple weeks.

All the big changes - like the GUI overhaul and the new danger management system - are in and tested, and we're currently closing down some remaining assets, the new intro sequence, and general polish.

I'm also probably gonna change the strategy for future updates from making a huge patch once every century to something more gradual, but more on that in the actual update announcement.

Cheers!
-Tom

Bonfire

Dev Diary: The Game Plays Itself

May 26, 2025

(it literally does play itself here)

Testing is probably the biggest hidden bottleneck for solo devs and small indie teams.

I obviously dry test every new feature and piece of content I add, but there's time where I just have to sit down and play the damn game normally. Especially when I'm almost done with an update and need to check how everything fits together.

I do two complete runs for every major release. A fresh playthrough, and one using my beloved save file that I've kept since the very first release to test compatibility and balance from the perspective of an existing player. It currently takes about 60 hours all in all. Including on the fly fixes.

That wouldn't be an issue in the studio I work for at my day job. We've got several full-time QA folks who do nothing but play the project every day. But for Bonfire, well, it's just me. And I needed a better solution.

I had this particularly difficult moment during Solstice development, when I realised I'll go crazy if I have to read through the same story again for the hundredth time, but I still needed to test every route. So I wrote myself a bot that did it for me.

Automated test are nothing new, especially in the commercial software world. For games it's less prevalent. Part of it is the complexity of "teaching" a bot to believably act as a player in a mess of complex interacting systems. Super easy to do for something like Solstice. It's a visual novel. Just click through the text and make choices. Done. But Bonfire is a tactical RPG with combos, metagame, resource management, etc. It would require a fairly complex AI to make it work.

Except turns out I already wrote that AI. There's this rare encounter where you fight shadows of your previously failed run, which use the exact same party composition and stats that you've had at that point. These shadows mimic the way an actual player plays, including specific cross-class combos and wider strategies. So hey, I just had to repurpose this for the bot and only add the decision-making layer for picking quests, upgrading characters, and managing food and gold. Right?

Well, no. It took a bit more than that, rather unsurprisingly. But having this initial boost was enough to convince me to give it a go and it was very much worth it. I can have the game play itself at ludicrous speed in a tiny window in the corner of my screen pretty much at all times, racking up hundreds of hours of playtime.

This obviously doesn't make human testing obsolete. AI can play the game, look for bugs & crashes, even test long term balance, but it won't tell me I've made a typo or if the pacing is just off. It's also... too good at the game. Not as good as an experienced player, but much better than a new one. It doesn't make mistakes, it doesn't experiment with new items or abilities, and it always knows what to do and where to go.

Still, it's massively helpful. While writing this post, it simulated nearly 6 hours of playtime and discovered two crashes (one of which I already fixed, the other looks like major PITA). So yeah. If you're a small developer, I very much encourage you to give this approach a try. And if you're a player, I hope this was an interesting peek into how games are made.

Cheers!
-Tom

Bonfire

Update Sneak Peek: They're Out to Get You!

Feb 20, 2025

Let me tell you how the next update will make the game easier by making it harder.

One of the upcoming features is the introduction of danger level. As your party explores their current area, Mournfolk will slowly zero in on your location and eventually ambush the camp. This leads to an extremely difficult battle and a forced escape to another place, with some resources inevitably left behind. And that's in the best case scenario!

Managing this danger level becomes a game in itself. The threat of being ambushed means you really have to pick what to focus on in the current map. Sometimes it's okay to explore a bit, sometimes it's best to pursue only the most critical resources, sometimes you just have to run and that's it. There are also other, more intentional ways of lowering the danger level, if you have the time (and heroes) to spare. All in all, it's something that you'll always have to be mindful of, but can overcome through good decision making and resource management.

So, how does adding yet another layer of tension make the game easier? Well, I lied a bit. It's not easier. It's easier to learn.

One of the biggest challenges new players face is the lack of food. Often to the point of frustration. Once you know the game better, you understand that sometimes it's not worth spending your resources to explore every single quest on a map and instead move on earlier, especially as travel means longer quests with more food drops, and you can target specific areas for specific resources. However, newer players feel compelled to do absolutely everything in absolutely every area, and that's often not the best choice. This new feature looks them in the eye and says: "Yeah, don't do that, okay?"

Basically, game design is usually more carrot than stick, but sometimes stick is good. Especially in a game about a collapsed world.

PS. Props to anyone who figures out what was my inspiration for the eyes effect in the gif above (it serves as a transition to the ambush battle).

Cheers!
-Tom

Bonfire

Back to Work!

Jan 6, 2025

Happy New Year!

Sorry for the recent lack of updates. For the past few months I've been focusing on another project (that I hope will go public soon) where I work as design lead to pay the bills. Apparently indie devs moonlight at larger studios and not the other way around these days. Or at least I do.

With that out of the way for the foreseeable future, I'm now back to working on the next Bonfire update full-time. Majority of the back-end work is already done, but we're still largely in the woods re. content and overall polish/integration. Expect more info about what's coming soon.

Cheers!
-Tom

Bonfire

Patch 0.9.74

Mar 8, 2024

Patch 0.9.74 is probably the last larger hotfix for Witching Hour before we move to working on the next major content update. It brings some important balance changes, as well as a few minor bugfixes.

BALANCE:

Zhu's Inspiration ability no longer extends debuffs but instead grants one free use of an item.
Hexa's Inspiration ability no longer grants a Special buff and instead extends debuffs.
All stats now have effective caps of -100 at minimum and 200 at max.
Zivko's Boost duration now increases by 1 per charge instead of 2.
Zivko's Boost power decreased from 50%-200% to 50%-150%.
Witching Hour rune now applies its quickening effect before the Special buff takes place, making it a little less impactful.
Stat boosting items are no longer exempt from free item use effects.
Dark Feast should now always kill its target.

Dev Note: Zhu's and Hexa's Inspirations switcheroo is meant to better fit the characters thematically, but it also nerfs the ability to stack multiple Hexes.

Dev Note #2: As more characters and abilities are introduced, it's easier to stack multiple buffs to reach game-breaking stat values. Introducing caps should target-nerf these specific exploits while keeping normal gameplay unaffected.

Dev Note #3: Boost's nerf is pretty major and we may slightly dial it down in a future hotfix. It should still be a battle-winning ability when used correctly, though.

GAMEPLAY & QOL:

Free item use effects have a clearer indication when they trigger.
Tooltips and quest selection on the map screen behaves more consistently with overlapping pins.

BUG FIXES & MISC STUFF:

Fixed another rare crash caused by Dark Pulse.
Zapper attack now correctly tracks moving targets.
Fixed Inspiration descriptions on the hero screen. Again.
Zhu's Focus Fire no longer triggers Resonance when attacking a different enemy.
Zivko's Failure AI will no longer waste Boosts on weak summons.
Fixed incorrect pronoun usage in The Hiatus errand.
Fixed typos in some of Hexa's quips and dialogue.

We hope you are enjoying the update! If you still encounter any issues or bugs, drop by our community forums or MoaCube's Discord server[discord.gg].

-Tom

Bonfire

Hotfix 0.9.73

Feb 23, 2024

An important hotfix as -- keeping to the best traditions of game development -- last patch fixed some bugs by adding far worse ones.

Gameplay & QoL:

You can now equip Inspirations that are slotted by another hero without having to unequip them first.
Summoning creatures when at minion limit will now destroy the weakest summon to make space.
Added a tutorial message that explains this mechanic.

Bug Fixes:

Fixed a crash on Food and Glimmer tally in quest and errand reward messages.
Abilities that call for enemy reinforcements will now place them correctly in horde events.
Absorbing Shadowspawn should no longer crash the game in rare situations where it causes the Witch to die (such as Booby Trap chain reactions).

Dev note: The tally bug crashed the game at the end of many quests, which could result in them behaving as if only partially completed. This might temporarily affect your save file even after the fix, but will eventually resolve itself.

Bonfire

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