Update v0.6: Greater Spikewurm

[76561198146633180]

Here we are with another new update and another new Update Animation![imgur.com]

Aside from a brief hiatus where we put out the very silly and completely free "Regular Human Basketball"(http://powerhoof.itch.io/regular-human-basketball) we've been hard at work on Crawl updates!

Fans of the Minotaur or the burrowing worms will be pleased to see two of our favouritehorrors now have new ultimate forms. Greater Spikewurms gore with a bony tongue before tunnelling to safety, and our Horned Beast wields two immense cleavers or grinds flesh under cloven hoof with a powered-up Minotaur-style charge.

We've spent a bunch of time streamlining the basic gameplay too- balancing, simplifying currency systems, improving the store, not to mention injecting an insane amount of juiciness into the monster upgrading!

Features:

• New "Greater Spikewurm" monster for a more deadly twist on the burrowing worms
  
• New "Horned Beast" monster adds another top-tier option to the Minotaur/Satyr evolution chain
  
• New monster upgrade menu
  
• New music for the mines
  
• Hero Info GUI- Your Stats and equipment are now displayed when you're in the store. No more trying to remember what you have!
  
• Weapon trade in - Your current weapon gives you a discount on a new one, so you can upgrade your weapons more.
  
• Added option to disable easter eggs if you like to maintain the serious tone.
  
• Boss kills tally- For every boss you've killed you get a skull on name select menu, and a different title on win screen.

Tweaks/Balance:

• Hero stats overhaul - Vitality, Strength and Agility all handled properly now, affected by potions
  
• If ghosts take too long to spawn, they'll now be sucked in and spawned forcibly by pentagrams
  
• Devil juice is now an artefact instead of a potion. Doubled in effectiveness since it's rarer
  
• Monsters now spawn with their special attack ready
  
• Added a delay after encounter ends before hero can interact with props. Shouldn't be as easy to accidentally activate them now
  
• Vitae renamed to Wrath to go with new menus
  
• Wrath shown on in-game hud, and on ghosts when the hero levels up
  
• Hero blood intermediary currency removed. You now get rewarded with gold instantly when you damage the hero
  
• Statues that took "hero blood" before, now take some health from the hero instead
  
• The store teleporter fountain now takes 5 gold instead of hero blood
  
• Can now buy multiple haunted axes
  
• Can now only buy one bleeder shield. (There was no advantage to having more than one)
  
• Some coffins and cabinets now randomly spawn items when opened
  
• Cracked bow does a bit less damage
  
• Lowered bots aiming accuracy
  
• Spider attack hitbox tweaked to line up better
  
• Multiplier increased for one-room temporary strength modifiers (for hero and ghosts) from actionable props
  
• Tweaked back walls in dungeon environment to have more random variety
  
• Wishing well rewards improved
  
• Hooded Haunt monster attack improved: Less anticipate time and more free movement while strafing
  
• Prices reduced for some spears

Bugs:

• Fixes for a number of controller issues - Now supporting more types of controllers.
  
• Fixed ghosts not fading out over the hero
  
• Powerups effects are no longer lost after long games
  
• Store gui no longer displays over pause menu
  
• Scorpion unlock now working properly
  
• Mouse cursor no longer sorts behind pause menu tips
  
• Intro scenes now fade in and out again
  
• Hero no longer pauses at start of attract mode
  
• Fixed Frog Necklace turning you into a frog way too often

Let us know what you think of the changes :D

-Barney

[A.W.S.H.]

Awesome <3 . Can't wait to get back into the fray.

[GreenOne]

Great stuff!

And speacial thanks for "Added option to disable easter eggs if you like to maintain the serious tone". Not that I want to use it at all(atm), but pretty much every other developer just wouldn't care for that detail, even that it's rather easy to do. Smart move, keep it up.

Just big dual thumbs up!!

[kriptosporidium]

Nice on the cracked bow nerf, I felt it WAS a bit too effective early on. Can't wait to see the new monsters!

[76561198173952711]

DUZ

[WhiteZero]

PIN this post, please

[A.W.S.H.]

After playing a round, I have to say I'm a bit disappointed. The changes to the upgrade screen were a step backwards in my opinion; as nice as the whole animated kaboodle looks, it now feels just unnecessarily busy and cramped. Some tweaks to the colour grading are definitely necessary to put more emphasis on the icons and less on the flashy stuff, but even then everything still looks too crowded for my perception. I'm probably a little old-school in that regard, but this goes very much against every rule of intuitive UI design I was taught.

As for the changed gold mechanics, they came off better than I expected; changing the sacrifice shrines from blood currency to health was a good idea. That said, I think the blood fountain teleporter should cost health, too, rather than gold (and maybe even a percentile amount instead of a fixed value). Likewise I would like to see the gold idol repurposed to let players trade health for small coin.

[GreenOne]

I actually expected to dislike menu change(it's hard for me to accept changes to anything, usually), but it's rather good, though I miss the old jelly boxes for evolution and the word Vitae.
Also the "Ready"-stone-plate could be made looking more like some Scandinavian runes or something more obscure, or maybe all 4 vertical plates could form some picture, maybe some random picture made of random parts each time. Anyway the plate is enough to identify person is ready =)

One flaw though, the human level progression menu part skips too quickly. What if each player had to press a button to confirm they are ready to move to evolve screen? You could make their Human hero to make some fancy move or stance to reflect that. Or maybe not, but there needs to be a pause.
Also, there is a limit to how many skulls there can be below the pillar. I know you can't draw infinite animation, but maybe when you reached the last one then it loops, showing skulls falling on the pile and rolling away. Maybe you could even display the number.

My main complaint would be that Human Heroes still seem a lot more powerful than the monsters. It all started with you lowering the monster health, maybe you need to consider rising it again.

That's it for complaints, awesome update and congratulations, Father! =D

[Pepnips]

Yaaaay!
Glad to see another update! :D

[76561198146633180]

cheers guys :)

@TAPERATIVE sorry to hear that dude, but I guess that's just how it goes making a game for a lot of people, I try to keep all types of players in mind, but I'm always gonna displease a bunch of people who's tastes don't line up close with my own on specific details, I just have to trust my own taste and hope the whole package works for most people :)

It's a pretty standard (and pretty annoying) situation to lose that absolute clarity once I switch in the art over the debug text, or put in the character sprite over the debug collision rectangle etc, but for me this was a pretty important change, not just arbitrary visual flare.

Having the godly figure weighing up the monsters and bestowing them with power is important to me for the world and implied narrative, but I understand what you're saying. I have a few minor tweaks in my mind to retain a little more clarity, but essentially if it's not to your taste it probably won't be even with the tweaks!

As for the blood fountain costing health, our core purpose for the fountain is to help a new underpowered hero get his upgrades straight away if he becomes the hero for the first time late into a game, when the monsters are already very strong. For this end, we're already worried these heroes don't have enough health (having not had a chance to level up yet) so that's why we went with gold, even though bleeding him into the fountain for health would be thematically cooler, and might be a more interesting tradeoff for other heroes considering using the fountain as a simple shortcut.

@GreenFlame thanks for the ideas! Will have a think about that stuff for the ready plates when we do a tweak pass on the menu :)

I need to do more testing, but I'll have a look at putting more wait time on the Results screen if it seems too quick for people, and yeah I should pretty easily be able to draw a whole bunch more skulls to increase the maximum count beyond what you'd max out in a game :)

I have a tweak I've been playing with for the health balance, but haven't had a chance to explore it this update with the menu taking so long! This is something on our list to look into and do some testing with tho!



THANKS for the feedback and encouragement guys :) and don't ever stress about saying where you're not digging something- we might not always change it to suit your tastes, but we always listen and learn and that information is very useful for us, so keep the critique coming! (also the compliments because they make me feel good haha)

[xSkeletalx]

How close is online multiplayer on your Dev roadmap? The only people I know who are interested in Crawl are online friends.

[Surlo]

Very excited to play some more now!

[Manwithgun]

I love the new spikewurm, and all my friends now hate me. ;) By the way have you considered lowering the pitch of the large wurms noises? I don't really know how sound design works, but the chirp-trill sound seems mismatched to the large wurm's appearence and feel. Thanks for all your hard work!

[Unicorn]

So glad y'all implemented a system for the name system. Love to see that getting fleshed out from removal of utter failure to beat bosses. I can't wait to play and see this new functionality

[A.W.S.H.]

As for the blood fountain costing health, our core purpose for the fountain is to help a new underpowered hero get his upgrades straight away if he becomes the hero for the first time late into a game, when the monsters are already very strong. For this end, we're already worried these heroes don't have enough health (having not had a chance to level up yet) so that's why we went with gold, even though bleeding him into the fountain for health would be thematically cooler, and might be a more interesting tradeoff for other heroes considering using the fountain as a simple shortcut.

That's why I was suggesting a percentile health cost, maybe tied to player level, so it gets more expensive the further a player gets in the game; maybe with a free ride the first time you use a fountain. Obviously it can't be too obtuse a system, otherwise you might as well just have kept the hero blood mechanics in, but I feel like the game has already been simplified more than enough for beginners; sacrificing long-term challenge potential just to appeal to novices at every corner isn't gonna help the game's longevity.

[GreenOne]

You guys are very nice people, thanks for actually reading all that, open minded development rocks! =)