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Update 1.9 Major Talent Rework

May 11

Hello everyone! A pretty major and game changing update this time. You'll have to use your imagination for the click bate thumbnail saying 'BIGGEST UPDATE EVER!!!' with a bunch of random red arrows :P

As was hinted at last update I decided to take the plunge and do the big talent rework that I've been planning. This turned out to be a bit of a nightmare as I had to touch a ton of crusty old lower level code that was written years ago and very poorly. It took the 2 weeks of just hammering on the engine to get it to even support the new features and so I only had the last week to actually implement the new content. So this is going to be one of those 'part 1' updates with the remainder of the work coming with the next update. This is also definitely one of those things (like ranked-mode) that is going to be slowly iterated on across the whole course of development so, though I think the system that is in place now is actually very good, we should expect this to change and morph a lot over time before final release.

TALENT REWORK:
The tldr of the change is that instead of talents simply upgrading to a generic Rank-II the player now gets to choose between (currently 3) different and unique upgrades.

I'm really trying to make each of these upgrades distinct and play very differently. I have included plenty of upgrades that have a large boost but coupled with some kind of penalty which tend to make the upgrades more narrowly powerful. I'd like to eventually have a mix of simply upgrades, bigger upgrade w/ penalty, and then some upgrades that drastically change how the talent functions. Some of the things that I want these changes to do are:

Character development is more varied:
Every class generally takes a lot of their talents from their core set and previously this meant that 2 characters of the same class would heavily overlap. With the new system even characters with the same talents can still differ quite significantly based on which upgrades they choose.

Character development is more complex:
The player can now pick upgrades to make talents fill different gaps or perform different functions as part of their build. Cross-class talents may suddenly become much more attractive to certain builds due to a specific upgrade synergizing much better. For example short range versions of spells might be more tempting to melee characters.

Talents can be more interesting:
Because the player now has choices and we can include penalties to offset extreme bonuses, this opens up a much wider variety of possibilities with how talent upgrades can be designed. With the option to just choose something else its now possible to make upgrades that drastically change the function of a particular talent.

Way more content:
When all the upgrades are eventually added this is essentially the same as having 3 times as many talents/abilities. Again, as per the previous point, there can be a much wider variety of talent content since many of these upgrades can be really 'weird' since were not forcing anyone to take them.

MAX LEVEL CHANGE:
I've changed the max level of both the player and monsters from 16 to 12. This is something that I've also been thinking about for a long time and seemed even more relevant with the talent rework. In RFIV the only thing that levels give is talent points and attribute points as there is no static bonus for gaining levels so this change simply removes 3 talent points and 1 attribute point from the game. I've also changed attributes to be granted on levels 2,5,8,11 which smooths out progression a lot.

Even before the talent rework I was not happy with the number of talent points the player eventually gets as I've always found that the last few were never really strictly necessary. I found that I always had enough talent points to get whatever it was that I wanted with a few more to spare. There were almost never any hard choices and I always ended up putting the last few talent points 'wherever'.

By reducing the number of talent points we, somewhat counter intuitively, actually increase the number of choices available to the player as suddenly he actually needs to 'choose' between different talents rather than just getting them all.

Furthermore I found that with equipment, enchantments, attribute potions and fountains, merchants, librarians, crystal chests, tomes of knowledge etc. There are just way to many times the game stops and expects the player to make a character development choice. With the new talent rework, the complexity of these choices just increased significantly. Given the relatively short game length I think that its better to offer the player less choices over all but to make them more meaningful.

I would like to do for talents what we previously did during Alpha with attributes: less of them but make them more powerful and impactful. So since we are losing about 20% of the total talent points, the goal when balancing the talent upgrades is to get them to be roughly 20% more powerful. As with a lot of balancing, the goal here is neither to make the game harder or easier. The goal is that once the balance gets settled it should be roughly the same as before.

CLASS TALENTS:
As mentioned above I haven't really finished all of this yet and I definitely haven't begun to really balance or fine tune it but these are the current talent upgrades. I'm focusing mainly on the ability talents right now rather than the passive ones. I have also not gotten to Enchanter yet so he's just got the old Rank-II as his only upgrades.

All of the names are just sort of generic place-holders right now and many of the upgrades themselves are essentially just place-holders that I was using while trying to get the actual underlying code working.

POWER STRIKE:

Knock-Back: 1 => 3
Kill Reset: CD: 6=>10 but kill strikes reset the CD
Damage: DMG: +4 => +10 but removes the knock back component

FORTITUDE:
As part of making talents generally stronger: base HP 8 => 16

Upgrade: HP: 16 => 32
Strength: +1STR

SHIELD WALL:
Need something more interesting here.

Damage: DMG: +0 => +4
Buff: a lingering 2T buff that raises Shield-Block

RECOVERY:

Greater Healing: Healing 50% => 100%
Reset: resets cool-downs when used
Speed: restores 2 speed points when used

CHARGE:

Damage: simple damage bonus
Cruncher: more damage for crunching, reset CD on kills, -1 Range
Extended: +1Range but longer cool-down

WEAPON MASTERY:
As part of making talents generally stronger: base DMG 1 => 2

Upgrade: DMG: 2 => 4
Strength: +1STR

CYCLONE STRIKE:
Really just placeholders atm.

Damage: +0 => +4
Knock Back: 1 => 2

BLOOD LUST:
Now the Tier-3 talent replacing Berserk with a standard 10T cool-down.

Long: increases the duration
Reset: resets cool-downs when used

POWER SHOT:

Knock Back: 1 => 3
Short-Damage: DMG 6 => 9, 50% Melee Crit, half max range
Sniper-Shot: DMG 6 => 12, no knockback and cannot shoot at enemies 2 tiles or closer

RANGE MASTERY:

Ranged: 1 => 2
Perfect Aim: allowing you to shoot through enemies

ATHLETICS:
I'm currently unhappy with Sprint (Jump as well to a lesser extent). I find that on paper they are decent abilities but they are just sort of clumsy to use and so I don't end up really using them. I'd like to rework both abilities to work more naturally with just the standard speed point system (hopefully not needing to actually be an ability). Until then I'm replacing Sprint with Athletics which is a simple +2 speed points. A bit boring but is at least very useful and tempting for pretty much every class.

Upgrade: 2SP => 4SP
Dexterity: +1Dex

TUNNEL SHOT:

Fast: CD 8 => 6
Short-Damage: DMG 4 => 6, +50% damage per enemy hit, half normal range
Speed-Restore: +1SP when hitting 3 enemies or more

STORM SHOT:

Knock-Back: adds +2 Knock-Back
Short-Damage: DMG 4 => 8 but half range

PRECISION:

Critical: 20% => 40%
Penetration: allows physical damage to bypass protection

LUNGE:
I think the duelist generally needs a rework. I've increased the lunge CD from 1 => 2. I'd like to generally increase the power or usefulness of Disengage/Lunge while increasing their CDs a bit. The problem right now is that the duelists combat loop is so tight that he really doesn't need (nore can he really use) any other talents.

Kill Reset: no CD and no SP when dealing a kill shot
Damage: 4 => 8

DASH ATTACK:

Speed: restores speed points on kills
Damage: 4 => 8

SLEEP BOMB:
This is one of the places where the upgrade system actually lets us nerf a bit of what was previously a massively powerful upgrade. The change from single target to potentially 5x targets is enough to warrant a penalty imo.

Big: AoE but half duration
Long: 4Dur => 6Dur and 10CD => 6CD

SNEAK ATTACK:
This has been moved to a Tier-II ability (see Shadow-Step below). All characters now innately will crit hit sleeping enemies and this talent will immediately grant physical damage crits to unaware enemies. This gives a bit of a power boost to all characters and makes the rogues early game with sleep bomb much easier while making him feel more like a rogue getting those crit hits.
BEAR TRAP:

Damage: DMG 5 => 10
Double: can place 2 traps and CD 10 => 6

SHADOW STEP:
Shadow-Step and Vanish have been merged together into a single Tier-III ability that both blinks you towards an enemy and causes enemies to forget about you. This has a standard cool down so we're getting rid of more once-per-level abilities.

Fast: CD 20 => 10
Hidden: you remain hidden for 5T

FIRE BALL:
I'm not sure if I want to keep the 'Greater' upgrades that are currently added to all the Tier-I magic spells. I'm sure we can come up with more interesting upgrades in the future.

Greater: MP 4 => 6, DMG 12 => 16
Extended: +1 Range
Short Damage: -1 Range, DMG 12 => 15, 25% more damage at center

MENTAL CLARITY:
As part of making talents generally stronger: base MP 3 => 6

Upgrade: MP 6 => 12
Intelligence: +1INT

SHIELD OF FLAMES:

Resistance: 20% => 30% and immune to flaming clouds
Damage Shield: +6

BURST OF FLAME:
Now innately will preserve the flame source 50% of the time. I'd like to have a Burst-of-Flame that is a little weaker but more generally usable.

Damage: 14 => 18
No-Consume: DMG 14 => 12 but 100% chance to preserve fire.

FLAME PORTAL:
Now has a 10CD for the base version

No-CD: self explanatory
Mana-Restore: restores 5MP when used.

FLAMING BATTLE SPHERE:
I'm planning to eventually move this to a summoner class and give the Fire Mage something more explosive as their Tier-III ability.

Power: raises the level of the battle sphere (more damage, more HP)
Long: duration 5 => 10

LIGHTNING BOLT:

Greater: MP 4 => 6, DMG 10 => 14
Extended: +1 Range
Short-Damage: DMG 10 => 12, 25% more damage at tip, and -1 range

SHROUD OF WIND:
This is another one of those places where I think the old Rank-II was actually too powerful so has been split.

Reflection: 10% => 20%
Levitation: +5 Levitation

BURST OF WIND:
Now has a damage component again as it is the only Tier-II attack spell (see Shock/Infusion below).

Knock-Back: 2 => 3
Point-Blank: the first example of complete change of mechanics. A larger AoE, more knock-back, but the spell is always cast around the player.

INFUSION OF STORMS:
I don't want classes to have 4 attack talents in their starting kit as this makes it highly unlikely that they will ever take a cross-class talent (or else they will simply ignore one of their starting talents). So we're bringing back Infusion as a means for the player to regain mana (it has a standard CD). The player must either have open space all around or else a single water tile in range to use this ability. Nicely adds to the storm mages affinity for water.

Mana: MP 4 => 8
Power: Adds a 1T boost to AP after casting

SHOCK:
Moved to Tier-III and no longer has any limit to number of targets with the base version. Now has a 5T cool-down (most Tier-III abilities should have cool-downs).

Stun: adds a 1T stun
Extended: Range 2 => 4

CONE OF COLD:

Greater: MP 4 => 6, DMG 6 => 8
Extended: Larger AoE but removes the knock-back
Short-Damage: Smaller AoE but more damage and crit hit at melee range

ARMOR OF FROST:
Removed Ice-Lance (same reasoning as Shock/Tornado above). Pretty boring. Probably needs to be replaced with something else.
FREEZING CLOUD:
Freezing cloud has been changed to use the same targeting as Cone-of-Cold i.e. close range. This helps to differentiate it from Poison-Cloud and gives the Ice-Mage a very distinct close range feel with his core talents.

Extended: larger Aoe
Long: duration 4 => 6
Fast-Damage: DMG 4 => 6, DUR 4 => 2

SHIELD OF ICE:
Moved to Tier-II as we have removed Ice-Lance.
FREEZE:
Freeze now has a 5T CD like most Tier-III abilities.

Extended: range 2 => 4
No-CD: removes the cool-down
Long: Duration 4 => 6

LIFE SPIKE:

Greater: MP 4 => 6, DMG 3 => 4
Healing: You get 100% healing from damage dealt but range 6 => 3
Stackable: can be stacked multiple times on same enemy

AURA OF DEATH:

Life Tap: 1 => 4
Resistance: 20% => 40% and immune to poison clouds

POISON CLOUD:

Big: bigger spread
Fast-Damage: DMG 3 => 5, DUR 5 => 2

SUMMON SKELETON:
Now has a 5T CD to prevent the player from simply spamming these in combat. The skeletons are naturally a little stronger since their level is the same while the game has been rebalanced around max level 12.

No-CD: removes the CD
Stronger: XL 4 => 6

STAFF ATTUNEMENT:
As part of making talents generally stronger: base DMG 1 => 2

MISC UPDATES:

Duelist talents are now DEX/STR which opens up his build quite a bit.
Summoned monsters (like skeletons) now have their level adjusted down if the players Ability-Power drops. I'd like to have more abilities that temporarily raise the players AP but this would otherwise open up really tedious gameplay where you use these abilities before summoning each skeleton and fiddle around waiting for cool-downs.
Adjusted the colors on some of the text and buttons to make them more visible.
The Tome-of-Knowledge in the wilderness zone will now appear on levels 1,2,3 instead of 2,3,4.
Dervish-Minstrels now cast single target haste instead of group (same as orc drummers)
Clockwork-Pyro doesn't explode on death. I really don't like these sort of surprise deaths.
Fixed the portal traps in Palace-of-Shadow not actually working.

CONCLUSION:
Whew, that took a long time to type up :P So there's still a ton of work to do here both in the short and long term but I think this is a pretty drastic step forward that will really start to pay off over time as we get more interesting upgrades implemented and get everything balanced up.

I'd love to here suggestions for new upgrades or changes to the existing ones. I have no problem letting the interface get kind of crusty with more than 3 upgrades for awhile if we want to test out some ideas. The whole thing will get redone at some point anyways.

Hope you all enjoy the update!

Hot Fix 1.9.1

Just a bunch of quick buffs to various upgrades. Please let me know what else is still lacking. Some of the upgrades will likely need a complete rework (or just replace with something from the big document full of suggestions I'm accumulating), but I think at least some of them might start to shine if we just keep pumping their stats up.

Charge (Cruncher): no range decrease.
Charge (Damage): 4DMG => 6DMG
Cyclone Strike (Knock Back): 2KB => 3KB
Recovery (Healing): 100% Healing => 125% Healing
Recovery (CD Reset): does not reduce healing from base
Recovery (SP Gain): does not reduce healing from base
Power-Shot (Short Damage): 1/2 Range => -1 Range
Power-Shot (Sniper): 1/2 min range => just can't use in melee (this still needs perfect aim added).
Tunnel-Shot (Short-Damage): 1/2 Range => -1 Range
Tunnel-Shot (SP Recovery): now gives +1SP for every 2 enemies hit
Storm-Shot (Damage) no range reduction
Storm-Shot (Knock-Back) now has the 1/2 range reduction
Sleep-Bomb (Long) gets an additional +1 Range
Sleep-Bomb (Big) 2DUR => 3DUR
Fire-Ball (Short-Damage) 15DMG => 16DMG
Flame-Shield (Damage-Shield): 6DS => 9DS
Flaming-Battle-Sphere (Long) => Fast 10DUR/10CD => 5DUR/5CD
Lightning-Bolt (Short-Damage) 12DMG/25% Crit => 14DMG/50% Crit
Shroud-of-Wind (Reflection) 20% => 30%
Burst-of-Wind (Knock-Back) => Strong 3KB/5DMG => 3KB/8DMG
Cone-of-Cold (Extended) does not remove the KB component
Cone-of-Cold (Short-Damage) 7DMG/1KB => 8DMG/2KB
Freezing Cloud (Fast Damage): 6DMG/2DUR => 5DMG/3DUR
Poison Gas (Fast Damage): 5DMG/2DUR => 5DMG/3DUR

Hot Fix 1.9.2

Some more upgrade tweaking and some general balancing based on feedback and my own playtesting. Big thanks to Random595, Dragon_of_Celts and everyone else giving feedback on talents. I'm not hitting caster talents in this hot-fix, not because I think their in a good place but simply due to time constraints.

TALENT UPGRADES:

POWER-SHOT (Knock-Back => Fast): 6CD = 5CD and 1SP on kill shots
POWER-SHOT (Short-Damage => Damage): No range penalty, 2KB => 1KB, still has 50% Crit at melee range
POWER-SHOT (Sniper): removed the melee range restriction and made CD:6 (the loss of knockback is big enough), added perfect aim.
TUNNEL-SHOT (Short-Damage => Damage): 4DMG => 8DMG and 50% more per enemie hit (no range penalty)
TUNNEL-SHOT (Speed-Restore + Fast => Fast): 8CD => 6CD and 1SP for every 2 enemies hit (this might be too much taken together).
POWER-STRIKE (Kill-Reset): 10CD => 8CD
CHARGE (Extended) => 8CD, 6Range (what happens if we just keep pushing range?)
CHARGE (Cruncher) => 6CD, 3Range, Kill Reset, 300% Crunch (this is potentially a massive damage output ability so should lose the range for initial engagements and repositioning)
CYCLONE-STRIKE (Damage + Knock Back = Heavy) => 8CD, 4DMG, 2KB
CYCLONE-STRIKE (Fast) => 6CD
Life-Spike Healing: Range:3 => Range 4

MISC:

Early game leveling is faster and late game leveling is slower so you get more of your levels quicker.
Reduced the XL of the Upper Dungeon boss 5 => 4 as the player is not quite as capable as before.
Tome-of-Knowledge now spawns in Orc/Elf1-3 instead of 1-4. I'm debating the merits of adding another Tome-of-Knowledge right into the Upper Dungeon to give the player a bit more of an early game boost.

Hot Fix 1.9.3

Another really big change, this time to global balancing. Please refer to https://i.ibb.co/SwTF1Y3/Crms-Pf-Qr-QACS-RQwfm-GUkw.jpg which BRNx93 has kindly provided!

Until now there has been only loose control over what I'm terming Good-Stuff, namely Enchantment-Scrolls and Attribute-Potions. I've also now added Potions-of-Knowledge for talent points to round everything out. Each of these Good-Stuff is practically worth a full experience level.

The current system is mostly random and works out to a range of 2-8+ per run which is a massive spread. The game is essentially randomly choosing the max level to be 2-8+ higher each game. The drops were also only somewhat guaranteed to be spread out across the zones so they could cluster up at the very end which made early game very hard.

The new system now has a strict range of Good-Stuff that is guaranteed to drop. Furthermore, the system now guarantees a more even spread of these drops across the zones. We also guarantee a minimum of each type of Good-Stuff. All of this can be tuned easily since its all now controlled from the same place.

Even more interesting is that I'm going to try tying this to the Rank of the game. So before we had a huge range of 2-8+ across all games. We will now have:
Base: 7-9
Bronze: 6-8
Silver: 5-7
Gold: 4-6
Platinum: 3-5
Master: 2-4

All of these ranges are still within the bounds of what was possible so we're not getting anything drastically different balance wise. What we are getting however is a guaranteed scaling difficulty that gives you way more resources in lower rank games. You have way more resources to spend, more than enough to get whatever you want, and are more free to experiment and mess around. High rank games on the other hand will need to be much more strategic with their limited resources.

All of this will also be much less swingy while still having some decent variety and variation possible.

TALENT CHANGES:
Still just balancing the existing upgrades. Some of this is almost certainly going to be replaced as I have lots of more interesting suggestions to try out. Right now I'd just like to get at least 2 options for each talent that are good solid upgrades and different from each other. Once we have some safe options in place we can spend a lot longer iterating on the more interesting ideas.

LIFE-SPIKE (Healing) +1DUR
LIFE-SPIKE (Stackable) +1DMG
LIFE-SPIKE (Greater) Removed (going to remove all of these I think)
FIRE-BALL (Short-Damage) 25% Crit => 50% Crit
CONE-OF-COLD (Greater) removed
CONE-OF-COLD (Short-Damage) 8DMG => 10DMG
FREEZING-CLOUD (Extended + Long = Extended) Longer Range and 4DUR => 6DUR
FREEZING-CLOUD (Fast-Damage) 5DMG/3DUR => 6DMG/3DUR
LIGHTNING-BOLT (Short-Damage) 14DMG => 15DMG
LIGHTNING-BOLT (Greater) removed
BURST-OF-WIND (Base) DMG 5 => 8 (remember we've increased the MP 4 => 6 here)
BURST-OF-WIND (Strong) DMG 8 => 10

GENERAL BALANCE:
Reduced the highest enemy damage bracket a bit to make it less likely to get one shotted.

Hot Fix 1.9.4

BUGS AND CRASHES:

Fixed level-gen crashes caused by the Good-Stuff messing up with undefined item names
Fixed: Item Gen was using your current rank (not the rank of the game you had started)
Fixed dominate giving you NaN mana
Added a switch to the Orc-Arena in case you fall down

Rogue Fable IV

Update 1.8 The Arena

Apr 19

Hello everyone! Another update, another sub-zone with some additional balancing and tweaking. Was a bit run down and burned out for the first half of this update so didn't get as much done as I'd hoped for (was shooting for two new sub-zones) but I'm feeling much better now and am eager and excited to get onto the next update.

The slow down was definitely totally unrelated to the fact that after 4+ months of working on a tiny laptop after my main PC died I finally finished building a sparkling new gaming rig that's an absolute beast. So I've been catching up on my own gaming a bit :P I'm gonna just assume that any lost time was made up by re-inspiring me in my work and move on...

LINKS:

Twitter
Discord[discord.gg]
Random595 YouTube

DESIGN NOTES:

Balancing:
A quick note on balancing for those who may be unfamiliar with my work process. Balancing for me is an on going progress that tends to be quite experimental and comes more from my 'gut feeling' then any sort of overall plan. I tend to change things around quite a bit as I'm playing and testing, sometimes just to see what happens. Things pretty much always get changed again or else just reverted (sometimes multiple times). So my tweaks and fiddling shouldn't be treated as anything permanent or even part of some grand vision. Its just me poking at the mess of systems and seeing what happens.

Really in my mind, my only goal with balancing throughout development is to keep things basically playable while exploring the interactions of the system. There are so many major changes planned for the game that any attempt to zero in on anything approaching final balance is futile. Final balance is really something to be hammered out in the last few months of development once everything else has settled.

Talent Rework:
More and more I feel that I want to get the Talent Rework implemented soon rather than later. Playing around with the existing talents has become very limiting and I'm really itching to get the new system working. The basic idea will be for each talent to have multiple options for Rank-II only one of which the player can choose.

I'm quite inspired by DRGs overclock system which has stable, balanced and unstable upgrades. Basically a stable upgrade is a small stat boost with no tradeoffs. A balanced upgrade will significantly increase some element but comes with some sort of draw back. An unstable upgrade tends to drastically change the way the ability works. I don't intend to copy the names, or even explicitly identify upgrades as belonging to one of these categories but the general idea I think is solid. I really like the idea that the player can really focus in on what slot a talent is filling in his overall build.

As an example consider a Fire-Ball upgrade that increases the damage, blast radius, or perhaps adds the center damage bonus but decreases the range. Charge could have an upgrade that increases its range but with a longer cool-down making it better for the initial engagement. The opposite could be a shorter range but reduced cool down or more damage or more crunch damage (or some combination), making it more effective as part of your core damage loop. Something like confusion that has a MASSIVE boost when its AoE suddenly lets you target 5x as many enemies could be coupled with a higher mana cost or perhaps a short cool-down.

There are lots of exciting possibilities and honestly I'm getting annoyed at the limitations of the current system. So my current plan is to do one more update focused on sub-zones, hopefully completing the final 2 needed for Palace/Fortress and then take a break from that and do the initial implementation of the new talent system. I'm planning on just adding a ton of upgrades for each talent (will definitely need some suggestions here), and letting us all play with them for awhile. Eventually I will likely narrow it down to something like 2,3 or 4 per talent.

UPDATE 1.8:

Orc Arena
A pretty elaborate, heavily 'scripted' level. I'm not sure yet what the exact ratio will be in the finished game between standard levels and these more 'gimmicky' levels within each run, but I definitely have lots more planned. I think the right balance will come with a large enough number of different gimmick levels and having them not spawn to frequently so that the player does not encounter a specific level type very often. These are intended to be something special, unique and surprising to break up the core gameplay loop rather than replace it.

The player rings a central bell which begins a round of combat. Enemies spawn in around the arena on hatches staggered into 3 waves. So unlike most combat encounters the player is guaranteed to be surrounded, at least initially. After 3 rounds the locked gate will open allowing the player to progress. There are colored flags around the arena that will change color every 10 turns during the fight. Each color provides a different effect to all the enemies.

Red: increased damage
Green: regeneration
Yellow: haste
White: slow and unstable

Based on my testing this might actually be a bit to much complexity for a single level. It might be worth splitting the flag mechanic into its own level type and leaving The Arena to be simple waves.

Orc Gladiators are a new enemy typing appearing in The Arena that attack with a polearm type attack (technically a trident) and throw a net at the player at short range.

The Minotaur Champion
Renamed the minotaur boss to make him the Champion of The Arena. There's a joke somewhere here about him being the 2nd place champion since of course we all know Yendor is the true GOAT. The Arena will currently generate as the level prior to the Minotaur boss level and the boss level is itself an arena type level though it has only a single hard wave. Added a new ability to the Minotaur Champion which is a fast, instant charge along the orthogonal.

Warrior Rework
Played around quite a bit with reworking the warriors talent set and made some similar adjustments to the Barbarian. I have a number of goals with this reworking.

I generally think the Strength classes are a bit overpowered compared to the other classes while also being more straight forward to play. So some of this is just trying to reign them back a little.

As a general rule for the future, I'd like for Strength based talents to be the weakest talent types since Strength based equipment (heavy armor and melee weapons) are the best class of gear. Because heavy equipment requires a significant investment of strength, it should be the best equipment in the game and all characters should want to wear it if possible. Of course the question of how much they are willing to divert into strength is the balancing act. So Strength focused characters should be getting a lot more of their power from their equipment instead of their talents.

A related rule for the future would be to buff up INT based talents to be the strongest with the same idea that all characters should want to get INT based talents with the question being how much they want to divert to build up a reliable mana pool.

I'm also generally trying to stream line the class and have it be much more focused on pure defense in order to encourage the player to branch out into other talents to fill gaps. At the same time I've removed one active ability to again, encourage the player to find and make use of more.

The current talent set is:

Power Strike: is now the starting talent as this is a simpler and more widely applicable talent. Its had a pretty big damage reduction as the combination of a decent melee weapon + a bit of ability power was giving it really crazy damage numbers (remember STR based talents are supposed to be the weakest).
Fortitude (same)
Shield Block (same
Shields Up (same but moved to Tier-2 and given an 8T cool-down)
Shield Wall: now a passive ability that grants 5%,10% Block-Chance for every enemy that is adjacent to the player. This is probably currently overpowered and will need tuning but I think the general idea of encouraging and enabling The Warrior to stand in melee helps to define the class.
Recovery: now the penultimate Tier-3 ability. On a 10T cool-down the player can heal himself for 50% of the HP of a Healing Shroom. This consumes the nearest Healing Shroom and is not usable if there are no shrooms on the level. The details and numbers might need to be tweaked but I'm quite pleased at this implementation as I'm mostly unconvinced now of the 'once per level' type talents and this is a neat way to still restrict healing.

So The Warrior now has cool-downs of 6,8,10 making his general combat loop slower. Barbarian was adjusted so that his Cyclone-Strike is similarly 8CD and will be getting a similar rework to merge Blood-Lust and Berserk as the Tier-3 Talent (removing the once per level version).

Player Balancing:

All characters now have +8 base HP. This is part of the ongoing process of making the non-ranked game easier. This is actually a pretty major buff to all non-strength based classes (who never really lack HP). So this is also helping to close that gap mentioned above.
Mirror-Image Range: 2-3 => 5,7
Crown of Slime now grants +1INT (it was the worst boss drop imo)
Dancing-Slippers: 20% Evasion => 10% Evasion and 1DEX. I'm moving in favor of more attributes on late game items with a future reduction in the number of attribute potions/fountains.
Freeze will no longer make the player unstable as this was making it absurdly overpowered.
Base number of beneficial shrooms per level 10 => 12
Blood Portal now allows the player to teleport adjacent to blood rather than only on it.

Monster Balancing:

Gnoll Warriors now have the NPC-Recovery ability in which they go dormant for 3T and then heal themselves (previously they had no special abilities). Helps to flavor The Ice Caves as the tankier zone.
NPC Lunge has been split into tiers so that instead of 5 range across all levels its now 4,5,6 depending on the monster level.
Orc-Drummers haste is now single target (1 at a time).
Bombombers now ignite from further range and more often.
Recolored Chameleons to help make them stand out a bit more on the green background (ironic I know).
Jellys no longer leave slime on Toxic-Waste.

Level Balancing:
I'm tackling these boss levels bit by bit each week. They were all created for RFIII and so are much larger and have more monsters than the current game design is dictating.

Reduced number of slimes in Slime-Boss levels and tightened them up.
Reduced number of monsters in Vampire-Boss levels and tightened them up.
Reduced number of Ice-Giants in the Yendor final boss room from 16 => 12.

CONCLUSION:

That's it for this update! Looking forward to the next step. There's like a 50/50 chance that I'm gonna have one of those uncontrollable design outbursts and be forced to implement the whole talent rework for the next update. I guess we'll see :P Anyways, thank you everyone for all your support and feedback! Thank you everyone for reviewing the game on Steam! Hope you all enjoy the update!

Rogue Fable IV

Update 1.7 The Arcane Academy

Apr 6

Hello everyone! Bit of a mixed update this time. First week was devoted to cleaning up bugs and the second one was spent adding another sub-zone. I'm planning to just keep chugging ahead on adding subzones with associated content for at least the next couple of updates. Pretty much everything else is basically 'on hold' while I work to get the dungeon rebuilt according to this new scheme.

Links:
Random595s channel full of fantastic tutorials and crazy challenge runs: Random595 Youtube
I post to Twitter semi frequently with stuff I'm working on: Twitter
Our discord: Discord[discord.gg]

DESIGN STUFF:

I've done a fair bit of design work as well during this update and have mostly settled on what I'd like to accomplish for the first year of Early Access development at least as far as dungeon content. This breakdown and layout will be a sort of intermediary phase before work begins on significantly branching out the zones and making the dungeon much less linear. The following are the sub-zones I'd like to get implemented along with the bosses they will contain.

The Under Grove:

Corrupted Grove: Spider Queen and Corrupted Ent
Enchanted Grove: Centaur King and Fairy Queen

The Sunless Desert:

Ruins: Mummy King and Snake Charmer
Oasis: King of Thieves and either a mage or minstrel boss

The Swamp:

Froglok Village: Witchdoctor and Giant Frog Mother
Fungus Grove: Mushroom King and Swamp Siren

The Palace of Shadow:
Renaming this to be more general so that the temple proper can be made a sub-zone.

Spider Temple: Drachnid Queen
Arcane Academy: Warlock
Temple: High Priestess

The Orc Fortress:

Keep: Orc King
Arena: Minotaur King
Ogre Caves: Ogre Shaman

The Sewers:

Troll Caves: Kraken
Slime Pit: Slime King

The Core:

Fire Temple: Efreeti
Caldara: Flame Serpent

The Ice Caves:

Ice Fortress: Frost Giant King
Gnoll Village: Gnoll Shaman

The Crypt:
The Crypt will be altered to start with a an 'outdoor' graveyard area which will lead into the boss sub-zone. The zone might need a name change to be more generically undead/horror themed with Crypt saved for various sub-zones.

Haunted Mansion: Vampire
Crypt: Necromancer

The Arcane Tower:

Storm Tower: Storm Boss
Summoning Tower: Summoner Boss

Click Clock Keep:

Train Station: Train Boss (not quite sure exactly how to theme this one yet)
The Iron Forge: Forge Boss (likely a major overhaul of this boss fight)

Layout:
This is how I'd like the dungeon to look at the end of this first year. Basically every single zone will be split in half. The first half will be generic while the second half will be one of several sub-zones leading into the boss. The content I'm implementing for sub-zones right now is really just the first draft as all of these will need quite a bit more content, generators, enemies etc. in order to be able to properly fill 2 full levels. Most of the bosses are also going to get totally overhauled (as the Warlock did this week).

Class and Races:
I'd like to get all of the existing races fully worked out by the end of year and I'd also like to get at least 2 new classes implemented. Final balance and polish will obviously not come about until the game is complete but I'd like to get what we have at least a bit more solid than it currently is.

I'm starting to shift my thoughts on how many classes I'd like to add. Initially I was thinking 3-4 new ones would be good since most of the older classes are being seriously reworked. Now though, with my own ideas and the heaps of suggestions from you guys here on Steam and in Discord, I'm considering that we might end up with something more like 10 new classes (so double RFIII).

The game mechanics have progresses to the point where I think they can support this sort of variety and there doesn't seem to be any shortage of good ideas for new classes. I'm also willing to sacrifice say 20% in terms of balance and tightness if it gives us twice as much new and interesting content. Time will be the ultimate deciding factor, but I am leaning more in favor of 'more' as opposed to 'less' at the moment.

UPDATE 1.7:

The actual update this week, as mentioned above, is a bit of a mix. Spent a bunch of time trying to clear some of the mountain of bugs. Its still pretty mountainous but I'm trying to keep it somewhat in check while I press forward on content. Content such as The Arcane Academy! The new sub-zone for The Palace of Shadows complete with a totally reworked Warlock boss fight.

The Arcane Academy:
This will be the caster focused sub-zone of The Palace of Shadows and will consist of libraries, classrooms, laboratories etc. I'm planning to differentiate this from The-Arcane-Tower by making this sub-zone more 'people' focused as in its the place where Yendors minions study and practice vs the tower is more of Yendors private dude cave full of all his wacky magical experiments.

Much like the previous sub-zones this should be viewed as just a first draft, a rough sketching in of content. I have tons of stuff still in my notes that still needs to be added into this area. I'm planning to continue this sort of rapid sketching until I get at least the majority of the year 1 sub-zones implemented before going back and fleshing them out.

Spawns whenever Danarr-the-Warlock has been selected.
Dark-Elf-Apprentice: basic mage type with magic projectile and slow moving arcane arrow.
Dark-Elf-Librarian: casts Curse-of-Silence that blocks spell casting and Summon-Spectral-Books from nearby bookshelves.
Dark-Elf-School-Master: Force-Shields his allies and summons a Tome-of-Power that buffs the spell damage of all nearby allies until the tome is destroyed (same mechanic as regen/ice totems).
Using the same walls as Spider-Temple with some new level assets but will likely get its own tileset eventually.
Totems-of-Silence and Totems-of-Discord are placed throughout the levels. Planning to add additional totems (tomes probably) that boost enemy spell casting when in their radius.
Totally reworked Danarr-the-Warlock boss fight so that he now has 8 summoning circles that he can blink to and open hell portals on. Remade all his boss levels to incorporate this.

Dungeon:

Renamed The-Dark-Temple => The-Palace-of-Shadow so that the Temple can be changed into a sub-zone for the High-Priestess.
Smoothed out the danger level in Zone-3 and adjusted all monster levels: 7,8,10,11,12 => 7,8,9,10,11. This removes what was previously a pretty big jump in difficulty in the mid game.

Misc Content:

Added some additional boss vaults to The-Sunless-Desert
Replaced two Pyro-Turrets in Yendor Boss room with Obsidian-Golems as the turrets are now much stronger.
Reworked a bunch of static levels in The-Core, generally tightening them up according to the new level design philosophy.
Tightened up a bunch of The-Arcane-Tower boss levels and reduced the number of monsters a bit.
Added monsters to the Click-Clock-Keep zone line vaults (they were missing).
Bombombers now have an ignite state which makes them move 'fast' for 5T after which they explode.

Player Balance:
Generally just trying to boost any player talents that are not just 'does a bunch of damage'.

Sprint CD: 20,15 => 12,8
Jump CD: 20,15 => 12,8

Graphics

Sunless Desert rocks have better shadow (works on both sand and cave)
Clockwork-Sentry Sprite
Clockwork-Bomber Sprite
Clockwork-Armorer Sprite
Clockwork-Shield Sprite

User Interface

Allow player to still mouse over tiles when dead so you can see stats of enemies.

Bugs and Crashes:

Precision has had its description updated to reflect the armor penetration at Rank-II.
Fixed throwing nets lasting way longer than 8 turns.
The Clockwork-Shredders spawned in the special sentry level will no longer grant exp.
Monsters spawned via portals in one of the Vault-of-Yendor levels will no longer grant exp.
Fixed the rotating sentry clock things sprites getting all messed up when you leave and reenter the level.
Dominated allies will not Force-Shield you every 3 turns unless you are in combat.
Fixed a crash when Spider-Swarm-Eggs hatches on top of Spider-Glyphs (spawns were overlapping).
Fixed a level gen hard crash in The-Crypt.
Fixed the bug where a specific sequence of menu operations would result in continuously losing 100SR in ranked-mode every time you opened/closed the menu.
When the Tough-Bosses modifier is active, Yendor will now correctly start at his max hp.
Fixed the bridges in one of the spider boss levels getting overwritten with walls when leaving/returning.
Out of vision turrets will no longer be able to shoot you without turning. They will continue to turn even when out of LoS.
Killing the last enemy with a speed point strafe attack will no longer result in 1 turn of the 'nearby danger' warning when trying to auto explore.
Speed point strafe attack will now correctly attack with melee when in range.
Fixed Burst-of-Wind not effecting targets that were far away/block by LoS from the player.
Fixed a level in The-Core that had a gate but no switch.
Player will now be able to still mouse over and see the description of tiles/enemies while on the death menu.

That's it for this week! Next update should be another 2 sub-zones, possibly 3 depending on how much detail I want to go into. Thank you everyone for all of your continued support and an extra special thanks to all of you who have positively reviewed the game! The reviews are massively helpful for winning the steam algorithm game! Hope you all enjoy the update!

Rogue Fable IV

Update 1.6 Click Clock Keep

Mar 23

Hello everyone! Hope you're all doing well!

This update ended up getting a little bit out of hand. I started off planning to do two new sub-zones one of which was going to be for The-Iron-Forge but as I started to get into it I realized that this zone was really quite primitive. From what I can remember it had barely been touched since RFIII and so the enemies, the generators and the vaults were all still in the older style.

So what began with me tweaking a few things and adding a bit of extra content ended up evolving into what is essentially a total zone rework of The-Iron-Forge. There are a bunch of new enemies, reworked old enemies, new level objects, a totally different set of generators with new vaults as well as some clean up with the art assets.

Click Clock Keep:
I've decided to rename the zone Click-Clock-Keep as I want to restrict the heavy fire theme to sub-zones. So The-Iron-Forge with its fire focused enemies and terrain will eventually become a sub-zone, possibly on a branching path and only appearing in some versions of Click-Clock-Keep. As a more general theme I'm planning on adding a lot more moving bits and pieces to the levels to make the whole zone feel as if your inside of some kind of giant mechanism.

Rough Draft:
This zone rework should probably be considered an initial rough draft as I didn't have time to really polish everything up. So there are still some placeholder art assets and a ton of stuff that really should be implemented in these basic generators that isn't. There are also a lot of old generators and level types that I still need to convert to the new style and move over.

Monsters:

I've generally removed the fire resistance from all enemies except the explicitly fire themed ones. As mentioned above, at some future point I'll add a number of new fire themed enemies and spin of 'The-Iron-Forge' as a sub-zone. Given the nature of the zone, there is a pretty heavy melee and tank focus to the enemy roster.

Clockwork-Shredder: fast, flying enemies with a simple melee attack and damage shield.
Bombomber: same as before though they are now 'normal' speed. I'm intending to add a new 'ability' in which they ignite when within a certain range which causes them to move 'fast' for 5 turns or so at which point they explode.
Clockwork-Brawler: Basic melee unit with Rocket-Punch a 3 range orthogonal only attack that deals high damage and knockback. Fighting these guys is quite interesting as you really need to keep yourself positioned at an angle.
Clockwork-Pogo-Lancer: Light melee unit that can rapidly jump, lunge and attack with a 2 range spear type attack.
Clockwork-Pogo-Gunner: Basic ranged unit with simple projectile attack, rapid jumps and a slow moving rocket projectile.
Clockwork-Knight: Same as before except his Shields-Up which provides reflection and protection is now triggered even at range. He essentially goes back in forth between a shielded and non-shielded state throughout combat.
Clockwork-Clamper: a slow moving heavy tank that can Clamp (constrict) you and has a hook attack to drag you in.
Clockwork-Rhino: same as before
Clockwork-Bomber: fires lobbing shots that pass over the heads of his allies. Throws a slow burning bomb as before.
Clockwork-Pyro: same as before except he now explodes when killed.
Clockwork-Armorer: First attempt at implemented a class of enemies that TealKnight had suggested on Discord. He 'summons' a shield when agroed which has 100HP and high protection. He then moves with this shield positioned between him and the player. The shield itself can bash you and the Armorer will toss Armor Packs (overheals) on his clockwork allies.
Cannon-Turret: has had its range increased to 9.0 same as ballista.
Pyro-Turret: has had its range increased to 9.0 same as ballista. I'm intending to add a new ability to turrets in which they retract and repair themselves every 5 turns or so. This would force the player to actually burst them down quickly.

Environment:

Planning on a bunch more stuff like this for Click-Clock-Keep in the future but this is a decent start.

Windup-Gizmo: clockwork enemies passing over it will gain 'haste' for 5T.
Repair-Gizmo: clockwork enemies passing over it will be healed.

Level Generators:

Except for the Clockwork-Sentry, I don't consider any of these to be proper sub-zones rather they are just replacing the standard generic generators used by the zone. All of these still need work and have a bunch of planned new features and assets that I just didn't have enough time for. Nonetheless this is where a huge bulk of the work in this update went as these are all generally completely new.

Engine-Room
Production-Line
Warehouse
Conveyor-Belt-Rooms (got totally remade)
Clockwork-Sentry: the original sub-zone that started this whole zone rework. A central sentry marks 1/4 of the main room and will spawn Shredders if the player is in its view. It slowly rotates in different directions as the player fights his way around the level. There is a single tile wide 'safe zone' between the view quadrants. A central clock dial type thing indicates the direction of turning and how long until the view changes. Art assets here are very placeholder (was a pain to just get working correctly).

That's it for this update. I seem to have more stuff on my TODO list now for this zone then when I started but that just means plenty of stuff to keep me busy in the future. I'll probably fix up the obvious missing art assets and maybe update some of the older content in the next update but mostly I'll be moving on to tackle another 2 sub-zones somewhere else in the dungeon.

This big content push is likely going to meander about like this for quite a while, revisiting stuff periodically to polish it up or expand upon it. Right now I generally just want to maintain some forward momentum and keep expanding the game as quickly as possible so I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of polish in the short term in order to achieve this. I'll definitely switch gears at some point and go back and clean everything up.

Thank you everyone for your continued support and feedback! Please let me know what you think about all the changes!

Hot-Fix 1.6.1
Fixed some spawn tags I messed up in Vault-of-Yendor that was causing half the monsters to not spawn.

Rogue Fable IV

Update 1.5 Spiders and Pigapults

Mar 8

Hello everyone! Finally, the first of many sub-zone updates is here! This update contains 2 new sub-zones as well as some more work on toning down the difficulty in the base game (generally by empowering the player). Finally there are some additions to Ranked-Mode that I think should be quite interesting.

The plan for most of this first year of development is to focus heavily on sub-zones which will result in a pretty enormous amount of content being added to the game. I'll be alternating doing 2-3 updates of adding sub-zones with updates focused on other aspects of the game that I feel need attention in between. I've decided to move to a 2 week update schedule as I think it will work better to shoot for 2 sub-zones every 2 weeks as opposed to 1 sub-zone per week as it gives me a bit more time to let things 'simmer'.

What are Sub-Zones?

Extensive sub-zoning is going to be one of the major new features for Rogue Fable IV and is the primary way in which new content will be added to the dungeon. To put it simply, for each zone in the game I'd like to create a bunch of sub-zones, each with some unique theme, challenge or gimmick.

When a zone is selected during dungeon generation, some of the levels will remain generic while others will be randomly chosen to become sub-zones. The exact sub-zones chosen will differ from game to game so that even when getting say The-Sunless-Desert multiple times in a row you will be faced with different sub-zone variants.

Sub-Zones can consist of one or more of the following:

A subset of monsters from the parent zone. Chosen according to the theme of the sub-zone and generally providing a more focused challenge.
Unique new monsters that only appear in the sub-zone. Also new bosses.
Unique tilesets, objects, traps, terrain and other environmental assets.
Some sort of special, level wide, mechanic or gimmick.
Unique level generators, vaults or hand-made levels.
Unique items that only drop in that sub-zone. Could also have a subset of the standard loot table to simply provide more focused drops.

The Plan for Sub-Zones:

Initially I'll just be adding sub-zones and sticking them into the existing dungeon structure where they seem appropriate. I want to build up a decent size pool to draw from so that each run through the dungeon becomes even more varied. I'd like to get at least 2-3 per existing zone.

The eventual goal is to use sub-zones to begin branching out the dungeon. Sub-zones tend to have more focused challenges and so many zones will fork or branch, giving the player a choice of which sub-zone to tackle first. Very challenging and specific sub-zones will often be added as single level branches which gives the player the option of simply ignoring them if they hard counter their build.

The final vision for the dungeon structure is for it to start quite linear in the early levels but then become increasingly branched and open during the mid to late game with lots of extremely challenging special levels out at the edges only some of which will generally get cleared depending on the players build. The Vault of Yendor will likely then remain linear as the final test and challenge.

The idea here isn't to make the dungeon 'open world' but rather to allow for adding a lot more interesting, unique and challenging content and then giving the player the freedom of when and if to tackle it. The way in which character building over the course of the game influences the choice of 'where to next?' should result in a bit of a light meta strategy layer.

Update 1.5:

The Spider Temple:
A spider themed level in The-Dark-Temple that currently will appear before the Drachnid-Queen level (when she spawns). The goal is to make it a really swarm heavy zone in which its easy to get surrounded and overwhelmed.

Updated the existing Drachnid-Warrior and Drachnid-Archer sprites
Added Drachnid-Assassin: Poison-Melee, Jump and a close range Web-Net. Basically the guy you really really don't want anywhere near you.
Added Drachnid-Swarm-Caller: Toxic-Shoot, Slow-Poison-Projectile, Summons Spider-Swarms from webs that are near the player which tend to end up surrounding you.
Added Drachnid-Priestess: Toxic-Shoot, Heal, Lays an egg that will hatch into Spider-Swarms after a few turns which incentivizes charging the backline to destroy it.
Added Spider-Traps: will spawn Spider-Swarms if anyone steps on them.
Drachnids are no longer 'fast' but all spiders will now move 'fast' when on webs.
Remade all the Drachnid-Queen levels

The Orc Gate:
While the previous sub-zone is content heavy, this one instead has a central gimmick. Yendors latest invention: The Pigapult is at the back of the level operated by some orc engineers. As long as they are alive, whenever the player is engaged in combat (has agro) the Pigapult will launch either bombs or boars at the player. This level currently spawns before King Mon'Racars fortress.

Ranked Mode:
Beginning to add some Player-Modifiers. I think one way of increasing challenge without overwhelming the player with tons of enemy modifiers that need to be kept track of is to apply player side modifiers that simply effect character building. These are modifiers that will change the way in which the player builds his character and so not only make the game harder but should result in more varied builds.

Currently I have this set to simply start adding a single Player-Modifier at Gold and above. Like everything with ranked this is guaranteed to change and evolve over time, this is really just a matter of getting the new features 'somewhere' for testing.

Less Starting Talents: -1 (Gold/Plat), -2 (Masters). This was the modifier that really inspired me to add this feature into this update as I think that, depending on which talent(s) are lost, this could pretty drastically change the way each class plays and how you approach character building.
Less Starting Attribute: -1 (Gold/Plat), -2 (Masters). Obviously applies to STR, DEX, INT. I'm not so happy with this as I feel it might mostly just act to bias class selection at the start but I wanted 'something' so that we don't just get Less Talents in every single Ranked-Game. Nonetheless, starting with less HP or no speed points should still have a pretty interesting effect.
Currently its a 50/50 chance to have Less-Talents vs Less-Attributes.

General Balance:

Improved the placement of beneficial mushrooms so that are more likely to spawn in tight levels. Previously there were certain layouts that basically prohibited any mushroom placement making those levels significantly harder.
Added back the choice of +1 talent at Tomes-of-Knowledge. I've gone back and forth on this a few times (and probably will again) but for now I think in the spirit of making the base game easier by giving the player more choices this is a good change since newer players won't get stuck with non-ideal talents they don't want and don't know how to get value out of. Ideally, future sub-zoning will make it more attractive (and necessary), to branch out from your core talents.

Talent Balance:
Still just minor tweaks. I really am itching to do the update that will change the talent system to have multiple choices of Rank-II upgrades per talent as I feel that this will let me provide more significant and game changing upgrades that are balanced by being highly specific.

Increased the base HP of summoned skeletons. Along with the previous buff to HP regen this should help them survive a bit better without hopefully allowing the necro to just coast through the game with a swarm of skeletons on autopilot.
Poison Cloud DMG: 4,6 => 4,4 (the cloud size increase is big enough). This would be a good place that 'choice system' for talents could give good options.
Fire-Ball center damage 50% => 25%. I feel like Fire-Ball is still just way to generally useful for the Fire-Mage, making his other talents less relevant. As an example of a cool Rank-II upgrade in the 'choice system' this could become 50% center damage with a range reduction.
Precision crit bonus 20%,40% => 20%,30% but Rank-II grants armor penetration. This provides an option for characters that don't find a blunt weapon or cross bow.
Shield-of-Ice 5HP,10HP => 4HP,8HP. For a purely passive talent this was just way to strong.
Burst-of-Wind: no damage but +1 knockback at both ranks. I feel like this sort of crystalizes this talent as the ultimate knockback ability that doubles as a movement ability for the player.

Item Balance:
A whole bunch of mostly buffs that are partially just a matter of 'making base game easier' but also are intended to make each item more uniquely powerful and attractive to warrant a 'build change'. The hope is that, especially in the mid to late game, most items that drop are at least viable to be equipped and replace some existing item.

Reduced shield ENC by 1 across the board. Their still really heavy but this at least lowers the barrier for non STR classes.
Tomes now cost 75gp => 50gp. Personally I rarely take these and they may need a rework. With the Less-Talents ranked modifier they may become more attractive.
Orcish-Battle-Armor: +1Melee Damage
Elvish-Chain => Elvish-Silk (no protection but grants evasion)
Cloth-Armor: Ability Power 5% => 10%
+1 Protection on Tier-3 Shields
+1 Protection on Tier-3 Heavy Armor
Duelist-Gloves: +10% evasion
Gauntlets-of-Grasping => Gauntlets-of-War: 1STR, 2Melee (grasp was pretty useless)
Spear: 8DMG => 7DMG (pole-arms should have lower damage in general)
Pike: 10DMG => 9DMG (pole-arms should have lower damage in general)
Pike-of-the-Guard 8DMG => 9DMG (end game items should be good, regardless of above)
Drachnid-Web-Bow: 1SP => 1Dex
Force-Bow, Phantom-Bow and Assassins Bow: 6DMG => 7DMG
Staff-of-Shielding: 6DMG => 7DMG
Staff-of-Force: 5DMG => 6DMG
Resonate-Crystal-Armor: 10ENC => 7ENC
Stone-Tuned-Armor: 8ENC => 7ENC
Robe-of-the-Lich: 80%MP, 1Mana-Tap => 30%rTox, 1Mana-Tap
Ring-of-Gravity: 5ENC => 6ENC
Dancing-Blade and Swift-Blade: 8DMG => 10DMG
All Two-Handed weapons +1DMG
Ring-of-Spirit-Shielding 6MP => 3MP (with faster MP regen this is actually super strong)

Monster Balance:

Death-Watch-Archer: Poison-Projectile 5CD => 3CD (same as other slow projectiles)
All Tentacle and Whip Pulls: 10CD => 5CD (part of overall, game wide, CD reduction)
All spreading clouds 10CD => 5CD but 10 duration => 4 duration (same as above)
Skeleton-Elite-Archer: Chilling-Shot: 10CD => 5CD (same as above)
Ballista now has super long range. I think all turrets are going to get reworked eventually to only spawn in very specific places, have very high range, and essentially 'lock down' parts of the level until dealt with. I'm toying with the idea of, especially with special sub-zones, have them never lose agro, agro at long ranges etc. and place them in some central location.

Final Words

Well that's it for now, hope you all enjoy it! I'm especially curious to see how the new modifiers in Ranked play out. I'll be hanging out for the next few days to do clean-up and bug fixing but then onto the next update which will be another 2 sub-zones.

Thanks as always for all of your support and feedback!

Hot Fixes:

Update 1.5.1

Fixed a level gen crash on the Pigapult level.
Fixed: Pigapult level was always generating (should only be before orc king).
Fixed spelling error in Pigapult dialog.

Rogue Fable IV

Update 1.4 Odds and Ends

Feb 23

Hello everyone. More of a modest update this week, just trying to clear out some of the stuff on my ever growing list of 'odds and ends'. So mostly just bug fixes, a bunch of little tweaks and bits of polish, some balancing and most importantly the first iteration of the levitation rework.

I'm planning on doing updates like this after every 3-4 regular updates just to make sure I'm keeping everything neat and tidy.

Levitation Change: Why?
This has been discussed in Discord quite a bit right back to the start of the project but simply put, levitation was way to powerful. More important then the raw power is the fact that levitation essentially removes a large amount of the games terrain tactics with no draw backs or limitations. Every run you essentially just got to roll a dice of whether or not you'd find a source of levitation and if you did, boom, suddenly a big chunk of tactics just disappeared and the game became substantially easier. There is almost no reason why any character, regardless of build would not immediately take a source of levitation.

So levitation was a massive binary power boost, with no drawbacks that just depended on luck whether you find it or not. It also grants this massive power boost by making large amounts of tactics irrelevant. Finally there was no real interesting decision to make here. Every character would always take levitation if given the option. Based on this I've decided to start tweaking how levitation works to start reigning in some of this excessive power.

Levitation Change: First Implementation
This is really just a first stab and likely doesn't go far enough but levitation will now be a stat that the player can 'accumulate' from various sources rather than a binary flag. Each item, talent or innate racial trait now grants +5 levitation and when the player moves over unstable terrain they automatically start levitating. A timer will then count down each turn, starting at the value of the 'levitation' stat, after which the player will stop levitating and any negative terrain effects will then apply. Moving to solid terrain will reset the timer. This is exactly the same implementation as how pits already work.

Levitation Changes: Possible Tweaks
From testing, obviously its a nerf to levitation but imo it doesn't quite go far enough. Interested to hear how everyone else feels but some possible tweaks I'm considering:

Use smaller values for Levitation stat. For example if everything only gave +3 or even +2 all but the most specialized builds would still generally be looking to avoid unstable terrain as they simply couldn't 'float' for very long.
We could make moving over unstable also tick the timer since currently the player can sprint all over it without ending his turn.

Ranked Mode:

When a modifier like Deadly, Fast, Short-Cool-Down or Perfect-Aim is applied to an enemy, they also gain a 120%,130%,150% HP modifier. This helps raise the overall challenge level a bit without having to pile on additional modifiers that the player needs to keep track of. In fact, the change to HP can help remind more experienced players that the enemy has some sort of modifier applied. Furthermore giving them some extra HP allows them to survive a longer and actually make use of whatever modifier they have.
This HP bonus will not stack so Deadly-Tanks + Fast-Tanks still results in 150%HP (at masters).
We still have the Tough modifier which WILL stack (should this be the case?)
Deadly-Toxic now applies to melee enemies with poison attacks.
Boss-Regen modifier now gives bosses a faster than normal regen rate (otherwise its not noticable).
Consumable-Lock is disabled when the player is on a cleared floor. Its annoying to use enchant scrolls or amnesia potions otherwise.
Modifiers will not apply to dominated allies. From a balance perspective this is a no brainer otherwise every Ranked-Modifier simply becomes a boost to Dominate. From a lore perspective we could simply assume that Yendor is empowering his minions with these modifiers and so doesn't grant it to the players allies.

Player Balance:

Increased rate of food consumption a bit again. Its still not tight at all and I don't necessarily want it to be but it shouldn't be completely irrelevant.
Troll Food Speed 50% => 40% faster. Otherwise its too tight for the Troll. The goal I have is to get it so that a Troll in a non-ranked game, assuming he never rests, and uses shrooms very sparingly should not need to buy merchant food. So basically near perfect play in non-ranked should just barely allow the player to survive with dungeon food. Obviously non-perfect play and ranked modes will have a big effect on this.
Summoned Skeletons have double regen (still isn't a lot), which should help them recover some health between fights without forcing the player to constantly wait.
Added +1 base MP to all characters which should significantly increase their power level in the early game for newer players (they can cast 2 spells) without really changing mid to late game power balance.
Reduced the base max monsters for dominate 2,4 => 1,2. Though dominate is almost always capped based on MP. This is at least still a step in the right direction to toning down what is likely still the strongest single ability in the game.
When pulling an enemy adjacent to you with a whip they will now lose their turn (similar to knockback). This should make whips a lot more usable and I look forward to hearing all the ways this can be abused :P
Centaurs now have an innate +1DEX. This could be +1SP. Really they just need a bit of a boost while I wait to do a proper reworking and starting with 2SP allows their innate SP regen to shine immediately.
Mirror-Image 6MP => 4MP
Re-removed those 6 extra items dropping in the later half of the game and removed another 4.
A pretty big buff on most Tier-3 Equipment. Obviously connected to the previous point. I find that in the late game the player tends to find a bunch of stuff and like 90% of it is either useless or else is barely an upgrade. The vast majority of it just gets sold to the merchant. I'd rather have fewer items dropping in the end game but every piece of equipment that drops should be a serious contender for replacing something. I really want the player to go 'oh shit look at that!' when something drops in the later dungeon. Obviously since the dungeon is planned to eventually expand in size by anywhere from 25%-50% we'll end up with more drops anyway and this whole area will need to be continuously rebalanced.

User Interface:

Ice-Lance: player can target anywhere on screen and it just shows the truncated targeting path (lots of ability targeting should probably be changed to work like this).
Totally rewrote the whole keyBinding back end since it was a mess (everyone will need to rebind keys unfortunately).
You can now rebind the Ability shortcut keys
You can now rebind the Z (unsafe action) key.
I'll tackle the other key rebinds the next time I do an update like this.
The correct (rebinded) shortcut keys are now shown when you mouse over buttons on the HUD or mouse over dangerous terrain/objects.

Graphics:

Added some first attempts at slash and cleave animations for basic attacks. I'll add an option toggle to turn this off for those who find it distracting.
Sped up a lot of casting animations so that they don't pause combat as much.
Redrew tents so that they look a bit better when you only spot the top half.

Bugs and Crashes:

Fixed: Fire-Ball was warping with blinking enemies to their new tile.
Fixed spelling: Reposte => Riposte
A stunned enemy will now stop constricting you.
Reflected Tunnel-Shots will now correctly deal damage to everyone on the rebound.
Spawned enemies that fall into pits will no longer give exp (spanwed enemies are never supposed to give exp).
Fixed that odd space between Encumbrance and :
Fixed level generation crashes in Swamp and Iron-Forge and likely a bunch of other zones.
Fixed: Completing a ranked game with Time-Limit and then starting another one that also had Time-Limit was causing the player to 'lose' while still in the character select menu if the previous clock ran out.
Fixed: the players SP text was showing up in the scrolling backgrounds in the main menu.

Well that's it for this week. The plan for next week and at least the next 3-4 weeks is to start working on sub-zoning. So I'm gonna pick one of the sub-zones in my notes, draw some new tiles, add some new enemies, traps, objects etc. and insert it into the dungeon. So the next month or two should be pretty content heavy.

As always thank you everyone for your feedback and support and thank you everyone who has reviewed the game here on Steam! It helps a lot!

Rogue Fable IV

Update 1.3 Ranked Mode II

Feb 16

Hello everyone! A pretty substantial update this week. While there's still a lot of work to do with Ranked Mode I think this update will really help to show what's going to be possible with this new system.

I ended up focusing almost exclusively on getting new modifiers implemented and the existing ones broken into tiers of increasing difficulty. Didn't get much of a chance to address the interface or some of the ways I want to make the actual progression work. So for now this is still definitely a work in progress and I'd encourage players to make use of the little hack I posted last time to mess around with SR and test things out.

LINKS

Rogue Fable IV Discord[discord.gg]
Random595 Youtube
Random595 Twitch[www.twitch.tv]

DESIGN NOTES:

DIFFICULTY:
As I've mentioned many times before the difficulty of the base game will continue to be toned back to give new players a more gentle introduction to the game. I think it will be important to continue this process over the course of development since, as more content and new mechanics are introduced, the complexity will slowly rise making it more difficult for new players to get up to speed. For veteran players this incremental creep will likely go unnoticed but for a totally fresh player we need to be aware of how much harder the game will become simply due to increasing complexity.

Reducing the difficulty of the base game will also help to 'slide' the difficulty back across all the ranks. I don't want Ranked Mode to be something that only the top 10% of players ever touch. A player that has gotten his first win or two in the base game should feel comfortable starting to try to climb in Ranked and this means that not only must the base game be made easier, but that the first few ranks need to scale in difficulty only gradually.

As a rough overview I could see the base games difficulty dropping by about 20% if we take the Web-Version as baseline. Bronze and Silver would then have roughly the same difficulty as the Web-Version which should allow players to smoothly transition into it. Gold and Platinum will ramp up the difficulty curve quite a bit as its at this point that we're really targeting players who have mastered the games fundamentals. Masters then exists as the final test where we can really try to go overboard on the difficulty. Even with that said, I don't want Masters to be exclusive to a tiny handful of players so the top 0.1% of players will likely still need to turn to mods and custom game modes.

MODIFIERS:
I'm currently debating how much to consolidate modifiers vs how much to split them up. I don't want to end up in a situation where, in order to provide a challenge at higher ranks, we need to have a giant list of modifiers. I think this would just get really hard to keep in mind when playing the game.

An extreme example of merging would be to just have something like Super-Mages in which mages get boosts to damage, range, and cool-downs. This is a bit over the top but the point is that it would make it much more obvious to the player that mages are gonna suck and he needs to be careful when encountering them. Super-Swarms might merge speed with increased damage or health. There is likely some middle ground here that will need to be balanced and tested towards.

I also want modifiers to be quite impactful and change the way the player plays and approaches different situations. Something is going wrong if the player goes through the whole game and doesn't really notice the effects.

I should also say that as much as I want modifiers to change the way the player plays, I don't want them to necessarily drastically alter the core gameplay if that makes sense. I want modifiers to selectively make parts of the game more challenging, or encourage the player to play in some novel way. I don't want them to be like an alternate game mode that is drastically different.

I have a bunch of ideas in my notes and a bunch of modifiers that Rethlit was kind enough to send me the code for that while very interesting and definitely challenging, seem like they might be obnoxious to play with if you had to deal with them over the course of a whole run and in repeated games. I think a lot of these might end up better implemented as mechanics for Special-Levels/Sub-Zones once that system gets implemented as they would be really neat for a level or two.

UPDATE 1.3:

Game Config File:
The first time you launch the game following this update a new file will be created in your game files. From here you can selectively disable any modifiers you don't like playing with. I think especially with some of the time challenges, a lot of players have no interest in this sort of thing and so I want to make it easy to turn them off. You can also turn off the race/class restrictions in ranked. Over time I'll likely add more to this file for players to tune and fiddle with. This is YOUR game, play it however you want! This will likely eventually get an in game interface as some point.

On windows this file (and other data files) are located in %appdata%\local\RogueFableIV\User Data\Default\SaveData

Class and Race Restrictions:
Ranked-Mode now includes class/race restrictions that become increasingly restrictive in the higher ranks. I believe that one of the true tests of mastery of the game is the ability to really play the full scope of the games characters, especially given the changing challenges of Ranked. I've decided to not include Vampire, Gargoyle and Mummy in the ranked list as these races really need some serious work before they are ready for the trials of Ranked-Mode.

Modifier Restrictions:
This is just the beginning of a system that will need to be expanded on a lot in the future. Basically there needs to be at least some level of restriction in how the game selects modifiers to create interesting and balanced games. I'm currently roughly breaking the modifiers into Game-Modifiers and Monster-Modifiers. Game-Modifiers effect the whole game while Monster-Modifiers only effect some subset of monsters. I think in general Game-Modifiers tend to be more impactful and so should be more tightly controlled.

Must have at least 1 and no more than 2 Game-Modifiers at Gold and above.
Must have at most 1 Game-Modifier in Silver and Bronze.
At most 1 Damage Modifier (Don't want to end up with everything 1 shots you)
At most 1 Health Modifier (Don't want to end up really grindy)

New Modifiers:
I still have a massive list of these and as mentioned before Rethlit sent me a bunch as well. Will need to slowly work through it over the course of development but I think we now have a decent set at least for the near future.

Relentless Pursuit: Enemies never lose agro
No Retreat: the Up-Stairs are locked until you clear the level (not counting drop-walls or hidden enemies).
Weak Shrooms: half hp,mp,sp value of mushrooms.
Consumable Lock: player has a cool-down after using potions, scrolls or wands
No Time to Think: when the player has agro a turn timer will count down after which the player automatically waits his turn. I saw this challenge on Randoms channel so I assume it came from him and Rethlits devious minds.
Time Limit: a simple time limit to complete the game after which you automatically lose.
Perfect Aim Mages: increased range on their staff attacks and 'Perfect-Aim' at the top tiers.
Endless Spawners: no limit to the number of spawns and faster spawning.
Vampiric Melee (Rethlit): all enemy melee is vampiric. Original suggestion was for all enemy attacks but I felt that might be to much. Perhaps at a higher tier.
Tough: increased HP. Applies to swarm, tank, archer, mage and bosses
Deadly: increased damage. Applies to melee, fire, ice, toxic and storm attacks. Different from the previous 'Deadly' in that this applies to individual attacks as opposed to all abilities of a given monster type.
Exemplar (Rethlit): all elite enemies gain twice as many stat benefits from being elite.
Super-Speed: all 'FAST' enemies now move 3 tiles instead of 2. Yes its finally happening. This took a rewrite of some super low level, fundamental parts of the turn/timing system that make me very uncomfortable. I haven't noticed anything yet during testing but please be on the lookout for anything odd with how enemies are moving and taking their turns.

Tiered Modifiers:
As mentioned above, I don't want the higher ranks to just have a massive list of modifiers for the player to keep in their head so one solution to ramping up the difficulty is to have Tiered-Modifiers that get more challenging in the higher ranks. You may notice based on the numbers that I'm trying to get a bigger spike for Tier-III at Masters. The breakdown is Bronze/Silver = Tier-I, Gold/Plat = Tier-II and Masters = Tier-III.

Perfect-Aim-Archers: +1,+2,+3 Range with Perfect-Aim at Tier-II+
Perfect-Aim-Mages: +1,+2,+3 Range with Perfect-Aim at Tier-II+
Experience-Rush: 50%,40%,20% base EXP rate.
Rapid-Healing: -1,-2-3 CD on enemy healing.
Regeneration: x4,x6,x8 natural regen.
Consumable-Lock: 10T,20T,40T cooldown after using wands, potions or scrolls
Spawn-Elite-Chance: 150%,200%,300%
Tough: 125%,150%,200% hit points.
Deadly: 150%,200%,300% damage.
Time-Limit: 70mins, 60mins, 45mins (is 45mins always going to be possible given other modifiers?)
No-Time-To-Think: 5s,4s,2s turn timer
Vampiric-Melee: 50%,60%,75% of damage dealt is healed.
Endless-Spawners: 0,1,2 reduction in cool-down. No spawn limit at all tiers.
Super-Summoners: 20%,30%,50% reduction in cool-down and increase in the level of monster summoned. This is an example of merging two previous modifiers into one.

MECHANICS:

Gi of Swiftness and Gi of Flowing thought now also trigger their effect when dodging ranged attacks. This will obviously be applied to any future items with this mechanic.
Strafe-Dodging now also counts as a dodge for all dodge activated abilities (this might be to strong).
Protection now has a base 25% mitigation as in it reduces damage by some guaranteed minimum amount. A continuation of the reworking of defenses. I believe that armor protection in general should be one of the best forms of defense as it comes with the ENC restriction. This is not only a flat buff to survivability but also makes damage taken a bit more consistent (less spikey and surprising).

PLAYER_BALANCE:

Adjusted the EXP rates to roughly maintain the same leveling curve we had before last updates reduction in monster numbers. Basically just speeding it up for the first 7 levels or so.
Very slightly increased food consumption rate. Its never, ever a problem for non-trolls even when resting as much as you want.
Shield-Block: 20%,40% => 15%,30% as suggested by Random/Scar
Lightning-Bolt Damage 12,12 => 10,10 (its just generally way to useful with its penetrating property and long range).
Burst-of-Wind 6MP => 4MP (I'd rather have a slightly weaker Burst-of-Wind that the player uses more often)
Burst-of-Wind Damage: 6DMG => 5DMG (I'm tempted to just make it 0DMG)
Shock range 1.5,1.5 => 1.5,2.0
Dominate 8MP => 9MP (back where it was before)
Blood-Lust-II: resets cool-downs instead of a heal. I don't think the Barbarian really needs or should have an innate heal and the reset really helps to extend his aggression.

ITEM BALANCE:

Orb-of-Flowing-Thought: Instead of reducing turns to regen MP it just increases MP regen per 'tick'. A slight buff overall.
Orb-of-Flowing-Thought: now correctly lists the 50% max MP modifier
Sharp-Shooters-Staff: 4DMG => 5DMG
Staff-of-Force: 4DMG => 5DMG
Scroll-of-Death-Fog: 10DMG => 8DMG (don't want it wiping late game boss rooms)

IMONSTER BALANCE:

Reduced NPC protection by 50%. Compensating for the 25% base reduction. Also want to keep it on the lower side in case a Modifier gets added to boost it back up.
Spider-Nest: 5CD => 4CD (same as all other spawners)
Bee-Hive: 5CD => 4CD (same as all other spawners)
Bee-Hive: spawns 1xWarrior and 1xDrone instead of 1xWarrior and 2xDrone
Blink-Frog: 16HP => 12HP (they were much harder then other equivalent swarm enemies)
Mosquito: 26HP => 20HP (a fast vampiric enemy does not need to have so much HP early on)
Souls and Wraiths are now flagged as flying.

USER INTERFACE:

Player Rank now displayed in the ESC menu
You can now highlight the Ranked modifiers in the ESC menu
Bit more highlight when mousing over all buttons
Highlight on hp,mp,sp,fd and exp bars when mouse over
Slightly longer bars just to fill up that HUD space
Monsters will indicate if they can be killed with Killing-Strikes with a K in their status text.
Healing and Protection shrooms now note that they cure physical ailments.
Power-Maul now has correct two-handed desc
Added a timer bar for the No-Time-to-Think Ranked modifier
Ice-Bombs and Bone-Bombs now show the burst lines extending through characters

GRAPHICS:

Skeletons now show a little slash animation when using their spears. Just using a recolored Ice-Lance animation until I get the time to do a better one but these really needed some kind of visual.
Added a slight bounce to the player when dodging attacks.
The Berserk/Bloodlust animation has been sped up (was always kind of annoying and breaks flow)

BUGS AND CRASHES:

Weapon-Abilities will now count towards charging weapons (a pretty substantial buff for some classes).
Fixed the Corrupted-Ent not having frames on his Vine-Pull ability.
Fixed enemies that were responding to a shout, moving in their first turn. This was most often noticeable when opening a door. Enemies are supposed to miss a turn when they first spot the player and the actual guy doing the spotting was doing this. His friends responding to his shout were not missing turns.

Whew! Yeah so a pretty big update! As always I'll be hanging out tonight and tomorrow to do any hot-fixes on bugs or crashes that slipped in.

Next week I'm planning on making a sort of clean-up week. There are a lot of little bugs, issues, or otherwise misc stuff that I'd like to tackle before moving onto another set of more focused updates. I'll probably try to devote every 4th or 5th update to this sort of clean up. After that I'm intending on leaving Ranked-Mode for awhile and beginning the process of adding some of the Sub-Zones I've got in my notes. So this will include a bunch of new enemy types, tile types and objects, possibly some new mini-bosses and, depending on which sub-zones I decide to do first, possibly some new special mechanics.

As always thank you everyone for your support, feedback and enthusiasm! Hope you all enjoy the update!

HOT FIXES:

Hot-Fix 1.3.2

Fixed: fast enemies were only moving 2 tiles on their second turn. I knew messing with speed was going to break something.
Fixed: crash when mousing over Totem-of-Discord with one of the Perfect-Aim ranked modifiers.
Fixed: a bunch of crashes with Perfect-Aim modifiers when enemies used their abilities. I did a proper code search this time so I believe this will catch all possible versions of this crash.
Fixed: switches spawning in corridors or otherwise blocking stuff.

Hot-Fix 1.3.3

Fixed: Knockback was not causing enemies to skip their turn. Still working out kinks in the new turn/timing system it seems.
Fixed: Inferno-Staff attacking into a trap or shroom was crashing game.
Fixed: when you esc out of the character select menu for a ranked game you would then be unable to start a new game.

Hot-Fix 1.3.4
Some minor balancing after some discussion in Discord around what's giving newer players trouble.

Fixed: Whipping slimes crashes the game when you pull the slime into the new slime.
Whip now triggers Kill-Strikes
Temporarily disabled No-Time-To-Think since it has a lot of bugs
Smoothed out movement when the player is moving at same time as enemies.
Made diagonal moves a bit faster (tried x1.4 which would correctly make all moves take same time but it felt way to fast. Currently x1.2).
We used to have 2 guaranteed enchantment scrolls across the whole dungeon. This is now 2-4 guaranteed enchantment scrolls/attribute potions which sets a nice lower bound on these critical drops. I'm probably going to do some work here in the future and just control both the min and max number of these explicitly since it tends to vary a lot from run to run and ends up acting as a hidden random difficulty slider.
Previously the game would guarantee at least 4 pieces of equipment of different slots/weapon types in the first half of the game and guarantee 4 in the second half. Game now takes the full list of 9 possible equipment types and randomly guarantees half in the early game and the other half in the mid/late game. So you are now guaranteed to at least get one of every equipment type. In the future I'd like to make this take the merchant and crystal chests into account so you may have to buy/choose one of these but at least its available in every run.
Froglok Warrior: 26HP => 24HP and 6DMG => 5DMG (They jump and are fast in water)
Froglok Archer: 16HP => 14HP and 4DMG => 3DMG (They jump and are fast in water)

Rogue Fable IV

Update 1.2 - Ranked Mode

Feb 10

Hello everyone!

Ranked Mode is finally here! Well at least a very rough and early version of it. Getting all the back end stuff working and the basic UI setup ended up taking a lot longer than I had anticipated so I didn't get the chance to do as much with it as I'd have liked. So expect next week to be a sort of 'part 2' of this update.

Why Ranked Mode?
Ranked-Mode is intended to solve a problem that I feel that game has had pretty much from its inception which is that with only a single base game mode, I have to balance the game to be both accessible to new players while still providing a challenging experience for all levels of players. This has led to a game that is somehow both impossibly difficult for first time players while at the same time being increasingly trivial as players gain experience and skill. Ranked-Mode should solve this problem very nicely by allowing me to tone down the challenge in the base game with the expectation that players seeking greater challenges can choose progress through Ranked-Mode.

What is Ranked Mode?
Ranked Mode is an optional game mode in which the players starts with a Skill Rating (SR) of 0 in the Bronze rank and gains/loses SR as they win/lose games. Starting in Bronze rank, when you begin a new game a challenge modifier will be selected from a large pool and applied to the entirety of your next run. These modifiers will make some specific aspect of the game more challenging or restrict the player in some way. At higher ranks, more modifiers will be applied, some modifiers will have their effects increased, and new, more challenging modifiers will be introduced.

This system will raise the stakes of each run since each game your SR is on the line. It will increase the challenge of each run through the modifiers and it will ensure that each run is challenging in a totally new and unpredictable way each time.

What is the Future of Ranked Mode?
Obviously what's launching with this update is just the smallest, most barebones system I could implement given a week of development. A ton of work still needs to be done with this system over the course of development. I'm planning on doing another week focused entirely to hammering out some more of the details and then I'll probably return to it occasionally to tweak, tune or expand. Some of the stuff that needs to be done:

A lot more modifiers. Like 'a lot a lot' more. Rethlit has provided me with the code for a bunch more that look very interesting, many people have made suggestions and I have a pretty big list myself.
More challenging modifiers should only start appearing at higher ranks. I don't think there's anything too crazy in there yet, but in the future the really tough ones should be restricted to the upper ranks. This has the added bonus of giving the player something new to see when he achieves a higher rank.
Many of the modifiers need to scale based on the players rank. I've set many of them to just be extreme for purposes of early testing but in the future they should probably scale across the ranks.
Race/Class restriction modifiers so that players are forced to actually master the entire scope of the game rather than relying on a single strategy.
There likely needs to be a whole bunch of logic and restrictions as to how multiple modifiers are chosen together in order to create interesting and fair games. Right now its just doing the simplest random selection from the list.
Right now I'm using a +100SR for win and -100SR for loss but this could be adjusted in many ways to give increasing bonuses for win streaks, fast win times etc. The SR loss could also be mitigated somewhat based on how far the player got in the run so that dying to Yendor does not result in the full 100SR loss.
Obviously the entire UI and menus are total placeholders and the final version should have a lot more polish, flash and sparkles.
For the higher ranks I'm considering a system in which Yendor himself is more active throughout the actual run. I'm thinking each time you level he could curse one of your items or talents, basically disabling it. The next time you level up he switch this curse. He could inflict other temporary detrimental status effects on you, or summon monsters at inopportune times etc.

So with all that said, here's what the update actually contains.

RANKED MODIFIERS
These are actually pretty easy to add now that I've got everything working so expect to see a lot more fairly quickly. Also I'd love to hear everyone's suggestions for additional modifiers as we're going to need a lot of these.

Double Damage Swarmers
Double Damage Tanks
Double Damage Archers
Double Damage Mages (guys in robes, not counting elementals, imps etc.)
Double Damage Bosses
Fast Tanks (actually normal speed, proper fast could be added for the highest ranks)
Fast Archers
Faster Swarmers
Half Cool-Downs on all enemy heals
Half Cool-downs on all enemy summon abilities
No Cool-Downs on archer arrows
No Cool-downs on mage basic staff attacks
Max range archers
Double chance to spawn Elites
Double chance to spawn pit traps
Enemies have 4 x regen rate
Bosses regenerate
Summoned monsters have are x2 Level
Shrooms decay when the player leaves the level
Experience rush: base exp rate is 50% but when entering a new level you gain the EXP boost effect for 100T (numbers likely need to be adjusted)

Monster Balance:
There's going to be a pretty significant ongoing balancing of the base games difficulty as I work to push more of the challenge into the Ranked-Mode. I'm also trying to reduce the total game length a little bit since I'm planning on expanding the dungeon in the future and want to keep the total play time around one hour.

Slightly reduced the number of monsters on all levels of The-Upper-Dungeon, Wilderness, and Branch-1.
Slightly reduced the damage of all enemy attacks (especially in the early to mid game).
Increased monster base regen rate. I was looking at the numbers while implementing the Ranked regen modifiers and they were absurdly low. 400T to regen to full HP has been dropped to just 200T. This doesn't seem to really effect normal gameplay but it at least helps to discourage really absurd stalling and kiting.
Worker Bees Size Medium => Small (no idea why they weren't)
Scarabs HP 8 => 10 (make them a bit tankier than bees and flys)
Zombie-Bloat Speed: normal => slow (he's supposed to be a tank)

Player Balance:
Mostly just me adjusting things as I playtest. Trying to continue to shift the Fire-Mages power out of Burst-of-Flame and into Flaming-Battle-Sphere to make him more consistent in the absence of sources of fire.

Lightning-Bolt bonus DMG 50% => 25% (Rank-II is probably still way to useful with its massive range and ability to hit the back line. Having multiple Rank-II options would likely fix this)
+1MP For Mana Shrooms (consider that melee characters are getting all their cooldowns reset)
Slightly more non-healing mushrooms per level
Burst-of-Flame Damage: 20,25 => 16,20 (its still pretty crazy strong with its massive range and AoE)
Flaming-Battle-Sphere: Cool-Down: 20,15 => 12,8
Flaming-Battle-Sphere: Range 5 => 7 (the range of the orbs shooting)
Flaming-Battle-Sphere is now fire resistant.

ITEM AND EQUPIMENT BALANCE:

All resistance gear +10% resistance (it should be much easier to get high resistance in a single stat)
Reverted changes that removed some item drops from the game +6 across whole game
Mushroom Cap Shield 12HP => 8HP (want less raw HP items)
Gloves of Vampirism 8HP => 0HP but +1Life Tap (want less raw HP items)
Reduced the damage of higher level staves (casters should be more reliant on abilities + many staves now have abilities)
Enchantment now effects Magic Power stat
Put attributes back on the Branch-II equipment

Note on the Branch-II attribute items: I always liked this last chance to adjust your build a bit in the late game and now with the +1 mod restriction it doesn't feel quite so extreme to have some more items with attributes on them. Also with all the new items being added with all the new effects and stats, I think its fine to slowly start reintroducing attribute items since they won't be quite as prominent as they were before.

RFIII GAME BUILD
Though the game does not officially support Linux I've heard from many players that RFIIIs Windows build was working fine using Proton and now RFIV doesn't. So I've switched back to using the exact same wrapper as RFIII was using and have not being able to notice any differences as a Windows user. If this works fine for everyone on Windows and allows our friends on Linux to enjoy the game then I'll just carry on with it. If we start to get conflicts obviously I'm completely prioritizing Windows players since, as mentioned, the game is not officially supported on Linux. Hope this will work for everyone!

There's an odd thing with nwjs (the wrapper for the game), that causes a popup to appear for a split second when the game launches. I had to literally screen record and do a CSI frame by frame analysis to see what it was even saying. Basically its just complaining that our local save files were made with a different version of nwjs. New players will never see this and I assume if you do a full reinstall it will go away as well but if your like me and these things make you a little crazy you can:

Use your file explorer to open: %LOCALAPPDATA%/
Then go into RogueFableIV\User Data\Default
Delete both Web Data and Web Data-journal.
This fixes the popup.

Anyways that's it for this week. As previously mentioned, I'm planning on getting a lot of actual meaningful stuff done on Ranked-Mode next week now that all the back-end is implemented. Thank you everyone for all your support and feedback! I hope you enjoy the update!

I should also add that if you want to fiddle around with your rank... for testing purposes... open the console and:
gs.globalData.skillRating = 2500;
gs.saveGlobalData();

HOT FIX 1.2.1
There is currently a bug where SR fails to update upon winning the game that I'm still trying to isolate. Random/Scar caught it on his stream and I managed to replicate it once out of about 20 tries. Still not sure what's causing it. For now, if this occurs just use the code above to add 100SR. You may need to reload the game after to get it to display in the menu correctly.

Fixed crashing with Fast-Tanks
Fixed Fast-Swarms not working at all
Fixed crashing with Max-Archer-Range Modifiers and Arrow-Storm and Sniper-Shot

Rogue Fable IV

Update 1.1

Feb 2

Hello everyone!

First proper update here. A bunch of new items, some work on races, and some other odds and ends. Planning on spending tomorrow working on a build that might help our friends in Linux land run the game, but then the rest of next week will be spent on getting the first parts of Ranked Mode implemented. Will probably spend the next few updates after that bouncing back and forth between Ranked Mode, adding some additional new content, and continuing to work on races.

After a month or two the plan is to change gears to begin doing work on getting sub-zones implemented which will come along with a ton of new enemies, environmental tiles/objects, and bosses etc. For now I'd like to stick to a weekly update schedule but this might change when I get to the actual sub-zones which might take more time to design, implement and properly test.

Some Links of Interest:
Random595 Youtube - Great tutorials, guides and unbelievable challenge runs.
RFIV Discord[discord.gg] - come join us :P
Project Docs (somewhat outdated now)[sites.google.com]

WEAPONS

Sharp-Shooters-Staff - a long range staff that has innate Perfect-Aim
Staff-of-Force: low damage force projectiles + summon walls of force
Arcane-Bolt-Staff: Ability: physical version of Ice Lance w/ only 5 Attack cooldown
Berserker Axe: Builds rage damage with each attack until you spend a turn not attacking (should we remove on sprint?)
Spear of Confusion: 25% chance to confuse enemy for 3T
Power Maul: Charges a 2T Power boost
Pike of the Guard: gains an increasing damage bonus as long as you stand still.
Necrotic-Staff: Tier-3 Poison Staff that has a 50% chance to create a maggot when the target is killed.
Inferno Staff: projectile creates 3T single tile Flaming-Clouds (replacing Molten-Forged-Staff)
Staff of Power charges the 2T Power effect

ARMOR:

Festering Cloak: summons maggots when taking damage (would this work better as a charged ability?)
Confusion Mask: briefly confuses enemies when you are hit in melee
Minotaur Hide Armor: heavy with +speed
Minotaur Hide Helm: heavy with +speed (Grants a trample like ability for 1SP)
Minotaur Hide Gloves: heavy with +speed
Minotaur Hide Boots: heavy with +speed
Ice Armor: high prot, high rCold but destroyed when taking fire damage
Ice Helm: high prot, high rCold but destroyed when taking fire damage
Ice Gloves high prot, high rCold but destroyed when taking fire damage
Ice Boots: high prot, high rCold but destroyed when taking fire damage

TROLL:

2 x Hunger
Innate Regen 2HP/6T
Vulnerable to Fire
Loses 1 Hunger per mushroom
Hunger should deal 5% of maxHP damage (everyone)
Hunger damage time 3T => 5T making it less annoying to move (everyone)
Show regen rate for everyone when mousing over the HP Bar

CENTAUR:
As suggested by Djovanir in Discord

Double SP regen rate (could also be some other speed based bonus)
Double crit damage when unstable
Unstable when cardinally adjacent to something solid (not enemies)
Cannot quick move across unstable terrain (includes charge, sprint, dash-attack)

BALANCE:

Warrior Bee Poison: 18DMG => 12DMG
Worker Bee HP: 10HP => 8HP
Cut all reflection values in half (reflection should be really really hard to get above 50%)
MP Regen: 1MP/3T => 2MP/5T (A slight buff)
SP Regen: 1SP/6T => 1SP/5T (A slight buff)

TALENTS:

Remove the orthogonal only requirement on Ice-Lance
Ice-Lance always hits its max range when possible
Ice-Lance is always 2 range

ESCAPE_BLINK:

Yendor escape blink distance 5 => 10 (Same as other bosses)
Boss Escape-Blink has a 50% chance to trigger even if asleep or frozen (still respects cooldowns)
Instead of always going to the furthest tile, choose randomly from a bunch of 'far' tiles

INTERFACE:

Add up and down buttons on Race select
Add Up/down buttons to the records menu
Add left/right buttons to the stat table menu
Count down popups on exploding slow projectiles (just do last 3 turns)
Count down on desc of all slow projectiles
Deafened condition really needs a description. Kind of confusing to just lose spells randomly
Poison bow has no description (this should really be poisons on 25% of hits to not be same as poison staff)

BUGS_AND_CRASHES:

Charge will prefer the safe path as long as it is valid
Get races included in Daily Challenge
Don't include Vampire, Gargoyle, Mummy (all WIP)

Hot Fix: 1.1.1
Linux users please let me know if this worked!

Fixed the Centaur charge crash.
Fixed sprint not working for Centaur
Fixed spelling on Leach => Leech (I swear both of these look wrong to me)
Fixed spelling on Encumberance => Encumbrance
Added new game build using same setup as RFIII that will hopefully work on Linux, Steam Deck and older computers / old versions of windows.

Rogue Fable IV

Project Roadmap

Jan 30

Hello everyone!

Working through some of my old notes alongside the next update (should be done on Friday), and figured I'd give an updated rough roadmap of the sort of stuff I'd like to work on over the course of Early Access.

New Classes
I would like to add at least 2-3 new classes to the core game with likely candidates being: Earth Mage, Summoner, and Spell Sword (some kind of magic melee). I want to keep the core classes quite tight and without much overlap so each new class really needs to justify its existence. Furthermore since the classes will often be force either in the daily challenge or due to some of the Ranked-Mode modifiers, I don't want to include anything really weird in the core set.

With that being said I'd also like to include properly integrated mod support through steam which should make it easy for others to add new classes and get them out their to the community. I'm even planning on using this feature myself to add any classes that seem neat buy might not quite justify being part of the core class set. I regularly get suggestions for classes that are really interesting but might not quite mesh with the whole game. Given that I can often knock these things out in an afternoon I figure I can just upload them as 'mods'.

New Races
Possibly as many as double the current races (so maybe 8 more). Unlike classes, whose talents are then available to everyone else during a dungeon run, races are much more self-contained and are really supposed to be sort of weird. Of course I still want to be conscious of daily challenge and ranked-mode (so don't include anything too crazy), but I think its much more likely that I'll end up adding quite a few more races to the game.

New Zones
At the very least I'd like to add at least these 3 new zones. With sub-zoning (see below) the question will arise of what should be a zone and what should be a sub-zone. Depending on how work goes in the future its possible that certain sub-zones may grow to the point that they get converted to a proper zone.

Wilderness: I'd like to split The Under Grove into a purely traditional fantasy forest zone and a proper jungle zone since currently it includes elements from both. This would give us 4 zones in The Wilderness.
Branch-1: The Undersea - a zone themed around sea life, pirates and storm enemies. We need a storm focused zone to complete Branch-1 and pirates are cool... arrrr.
Branch-2: I have a few different ideas bouncing around for this one but I definitely want to get 4 zones here as well.

Sub-Zones
This is going to be the primary way in which new content is introduced to the game. Basically every zone will eventually have something like 10 or more sub-zones created each based on some highly specific sub-theme, special mechanic or challenge related to the overall zone. When the dungeon is generated some levels in each zone will be generic but others will be generated based on one of many randomly selected sub-zones. So each trip through a zone will have you potentially facing quite drastically distinct levels. Some simple examples could be:

The Crypt: A graveyard level, a level haunted by slow moving, unkillable ghosts that chase you around and phase through walls. Some sort of 'toxic crypt' full of toxic themed undead.
The Sunless Desert: inside a pyramid level, wasteland level (like the boneyard thing in Lion King)
The Iron Forge: lots of possibilities here based around different 'machine' mechanics. Each sub-zone could have some sort of different special environmental mechanic.
Orc Fortress: barracks, ogre caves, arena challenge level, prison etc.

Each sub-zone will include some specifically chosen subset of content from the main zone and will also include its own totally unique monsters, items, environment objects, and in some cases special level wide mechanics. As development progresses and we build up more content, many of these sub-zones will also begin to appear as branches within the zone so the overall dungeon structure will become a bit less linear. This is important as many of these sub-zones will have very specific challenges that certain builds will want to avoid and possibly even skip over in certain runs.

New Bosses
I'd like to bring the numbers up to about 4 major bosses per zone and rework many of the existing boss fights to be more elaborate, challenging, memorable etc. I'm definitely excited to implement multi-tile bosses, for example: just a big dude (say dragon), a long snake like boss, segmented boss like a main body w/ 2 sperate hands, some sort of central core with rotating parts etc. Lots of possibilities here to really make these boss fights shine.

I'd also like to add a lot more mini-bosses. Some zones currently have none, but I'd like to get this up to about 8-10 per zone since they tend to break up the dungeon with nice spikes of challenge and excitement. Many sub-zones may in fact be based around some sort of specific mini-boss so when you see that sub-zone you'll know there's a boss lurking around somewhere. I'd also like to add a bunch more phases to Yendor while reworking the existing ones.

Ranked Mode
Planning on beginning work on this next week. Players can choose to play the game in Ranked-Mode in which case starting in Bronze the player will work their way up to whatever rank they can manage. Win's will progress your rank, losses will reduce it (might be mitigated by how far you got). Will need to tune the numbers somewhat and add some stuff so that a player on a win streak will gain rank faster but basically the players going to have to maintain at least a 50%+ win average to progress.

A whole bunch of game wide modifiers will be added with some of them starting right in bronze and others restricted to only the higher ranks. When the player starts a Ranked-Game a number of modifiers (based on rank) are randomly selected and displayed to the player before he makes his character selection. These modifiers will make some specific aspect of the game significantly harder ex. all archers have max range, all healers have no heal cooldown. High rank modifiers will be more elaborate. Basically each run is going to become more challenging, but in some unique and different way each time. At the highest ranks the ways in which multiple (think 5-6) modifiers all stack up should create some pretty crazy runs.

The player will be able to play a game at any rank lower than his current one though only playing at the current rank will actually progress. You will almost certainly not be able to lose a rank once you've achieved it. Finally, this mode will be completely optional, the base game will remain as the default easy/normal difficulty.

Hero Academy
This is how I'd like to add a bit of a tutorial to the game while also being so much more. The Hero Academy will consist of a whole bunch of little self contained 'challenges' possibly broken into different tracks (the tutorial being just one of the tracks). These challenges will spawn the player in a precisely predefined scenario i.e. a specific room, with specific enemies, with a specific character with set items, talents etc. The player may even start at half HP, or already poisoned etc.

From the tutorial perspective, I can create a whole bunch of these that basically force the player to understand a particular core tactic in the game. Consider a room with a table in the middle and a slow moving ogre you need to kite around it to kill it or a swarm of enemies that will easily kill you but there's a nearby choke point.

What I think is neat is this can be expanded to include all sorts of really tricky problem scenarios for more experienced players. This would be the sort of place that I'd love to get some contributions from the community from people who like to come up with insane and intricate challenges. This is a way of distilling those critical 'oh shit' moments that occur during a regular run in which the next 5 turns or so completely determine success or death.

Talent Trees
I'd like to overhaul the talent system so that each talent has 2 or more possible upgrades to allow for increases customization and build diversity. My current thinking is that the player can only choose 1 of these upgrades so you can't just sink all your points into a single talent. While the current system often has 2 or more stats improving on upgrade, this system would be more specific but with much larger bonuses.

Misc Stuff:

Full keyboard controls that are just as efficient to play with as mouse + keyboard.
Full options menu. Really anything that anyone could conceivably want to adjust, I'd like to include as an option.
A whole bunch more little lore tidbits and in game environmental story telling. Really build up Yendor as a character and make the dungeon feel like a coherent believable place.
Much better mod support that is integrated into Steam.
Steam Achievements.
A 'training room' where players can test stuff out.
New music, sound effects and animations.
Some kind of in game manual/wiki that gives some details on all the core mechanics, stats and controls that are not currently explained.

I'm sure there's more that I'm missing but this should give a decent overview of roughly what I'm planning for the next 3 years.

Rogue Fable IV

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