Greetings Gladiators!

Two weeks ago, the team completed all the tasks, features and requirements we planned out for ourselves for version 7 of the game. With the completion of this milestone, we decided to reflect upon the state of the game and ask ourselves “Where is the fun, and where are the pain points? What parts of the game feel great, and what needs work? What are players saying positively or negatively with consistency?” . We spent the last 2 weeks methodically reviewing every aspect, feature, ability, character and enemy in the game, then removing and/or adjusting everything, and also adding a lot of new content. We’re happy to announce a swathe of new enemies have come to the arena!

The Undead
Introducing the Shambler, Armoured Shambler, Mind Flayer and Necromancer: the first enemies of a new type of foe, The Undead. Despite their clumsiness, poor reflexes and stupidity, the undead are a terrifying force that assaults the morale of your characters, making them more likely to flee and suffer heart attacks. They are immune to bleeding, injuries and fear effects, and gain cumulative accuracy bonuses as they surround and gang up on you. Fear not, for the undead are especially vulnerable to fire and burning effects!

The Adventurers
Skillful and diverse characters with a passion for questing, tomb raiding and righting wrongs. There are 5 different types of adventurers, each with their own fighting style and tactics: The Berserker, Protector, Tomb Raider, Mage and Cleric.

The Swamp Hag
The Swamp Hag is the arena’s second boss enemy. An elf with a dark heart and grudge against the empire, the Swamp Hag has emerged from her solitude within the swamps of Breedmarsh to unleash hordes of undead and poisonous rainfall upon you and your gladiators!

Items, Rewards and Economy
During this sprint’s design process, we felt strongly that the game’s economy, items system, rewards system, and armoury spawn parameters needed some love. The economy of the game was poorly balanced, heady and body items were too powerful and accessible, and combat rewards didn’t feel appealing and exciting. To remedy this, we’ve made broad changes to all these features (see the changes list below for full details). The most consequential change is that only trinket items will be offered as item rewards for combats, not weapons or armour pieces. Trinkets cannot be bought from town or looted from corpses, so contracts are now the only way to acquire trinkets (excluding some special story events that reward legendary trinkets).

Changes List

1. Ten New Enemies: Shambler, Armoured Shambler, Mind flayer, Necromancer, Adventurous Berserker, Adventurous Protector, Adventurous Tomb Raider, Adventurous Mage, Adventurous Cleric.
   
2. New boss enemy: The Swamp Hag
   
3. Improved the speed and flow of combat by reducing delays and speeding up certain animations.
   
4. Auto end turn feature. If your character has no possible actions left to make, their turn will end automatically to speed up the flow of the game.
   
5. Implemented ‘Fast combat’ mode, which doubles the animation/visual speed of combat for those of you who’d like a faster play experience. This setting can be enabled/disabled from the options menu from the main menu or in game menu.
   
6. Completely overhauled all the different possible combat contracts, enemy combinations and fights you can be offered. Instead of only being able to fight with 3 or 5 of your characters, you can now engage in 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 character fights.
   
7. Changed the reward systems for combat contracts. Gold reward for all contracts has been increased, and combats will only ever offer trinkets as the item reward.
   
8. Removed and/or redesigned every trinket item in the game. Many new trinket items have been added, with a focus on granting an effect that will counter specific enemies and their effects/tactics.
   
9. Changed the rules and parameters that determine what items spawn in the armoury each day: more items, and greater spread of diversity. The armoury will no longer spawn trinket items.
   
10. Acts now last 7 days instead of 5.
    
11. Reviewed and overhauled the armour value and gold cost of all head and body items. Head/body items are now more expensive and provide less armour.
    
12. Better decapitation animation and visuals. Much more gore and drama!
    
13. Improved and polished the shakes, lerping and movement of the camera.

Bug Fixes

1. Fixed a bug with movement abilities (Charge, Sprint, etc) that allowed you to move through allies and crash the game.
   
2. Fixed a bug that incorrectly prevented certain Skill abilities from being used while a character had the ‘Reload’ status on their crossbow.
   
3. Fixed broken text, missing characters and grammatical errors in some story events and passive descriptions.

Humble Us With Your Feedback!
A friendly reminder that your feedback and criticisms of the game are incredibly important and valuable to us. As we continue improving the game and adding new content, your feedback gives us great inspiration and helps us better understand which direction the game should move in. As the developers, we obviously have our own preferences and ideas on what we’d like to make, but at the end of the day it’s YOU guys who are playing it! We’d love to hear your thoughts on the new enemies, new reward system, trinket items and features we’ve added recently, so don’t be shy! Come on over to our Discord Channel[discord.gg] and make your voice heard.

Good fortune in the arena!
The Viking Roo Team