Content Update 12: Time to Get Active!
Author: indiefoldcreator
Date:
Mon, 15 Apr 2024
Game: Monsters and Monocles
Genre:
Action, Indie, Early Access
Developer: Retro Dreamer
Release Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2016
Developer: Retro Dreamer
Release Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2016
Hi everyone!
This update ended up being one of our largest to date, as we added new things, polished some old things, and generally made some big core changes.
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The primary focus on this update was to improve all of the elements relating to items & relics, as well as finally adding active items! Players now have a single active item slot that can be triggered during key moments using ‘F’ on the keyboard, or the ‘X’ button on XBox controllers. We felt that providing players with powerful one-off, or limited use abilities was a good way to compliment their weapon and passive item selections.
Right now, there currently 2 active items for testing - The holy hand grenade (applies set damage to all enemies on screen with 3 minute cooldown), and the coolant flush (resets cooldown on carried weapons with 3 uses). As this is just the initial pass, they both lack clear HUD indicators, final effects, and general balancing, but those are all things we’ll be addressing in future updates as we roll more active items into the mix. The holy hand grenade does have a red overlay as it recharges, to at least show when it’s usable/unusable in the short term.
Alongside the active items, we also added animations, and general visual polish to all of the existing items, relics, and treasure chests. Our goal was to make collectible items both more satisfying to collect, and to improve their readability during gameplay. The last big addition on this front, are the new soul gems, which act as second, relic-specific currency. These gems are used to purchase and upgrade relics, and are persistent across runs, meaning that you can gradually work towards upgrading specific relics, without the fear of losing a large amount of regular coins upon death before reaching the airship. Right now they’re only a guaranteed drop from bosses, and upgrade amounts aren’t tuned, but we’ll be working into things in subsequent updates.
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Aside from items, we also felt like it was a good time to make a couple of more fundamental changes to the core gameplay. The two largest being the removal of both lives and objectives. As we tuned enemy behaviors, damage, and overall challenge, we began to feel like the concept of lives was diminishing the sense of tension/reward, as all lives prior to the final one felt somewhat inconsequential. Having just one life in single player now means that health is much more precious and rewarding when found, and items like the ankh (which offers a single-use revive upon death), and relics relating to HP feel much more important. We also carried this concept over to multiplayer, with players able to revive one another indefinitely, as long as at least one player is alive. Although the shared pool of lives was interesting, we felt it was much too unforgiving at times, as it often forced players to sit-out and be unable to play for long stretches. As this is such a large change, we would love to hear your feedback on this front across both single player and multiplayer. The tuning and balancing of health drops etc is still ongoing, and your input on this front would be a massive help :)
Similarly to lives, we also took a good look at the current objective system, and asked ourselves whether or not they truly benefited the core gameplay. Although we’re happy with the fundamental ideas behind some of the objectives, we felt like having them be a mandatory requirement to complete the floor, often meant backtracking, and aimless searching for specific things that didn’t add to the core gameplay in a meaningful way. With that said, we hope to experiment with reincorporating certain aspects like the key gun and minibosses back into the new map generation system as optional elements in future updates.
The final major addition for this update, is the inclusion of the new room-based tomb zone! Although it’s a very rough pass as we still develop room shapes, enemy art/behaviors, and overall variety, it represents a nice step towards expanding out and applying all of the work we’ve done in the mansion, to the remaining zones. The ‘new’ tomb should start to take shape and begin moving closer to completion in future updates as we work towards bringing all of the existing zones up to the same level of polish as the mansion.
Thank you for reading, and as always, please leave any feedback you may have in the forums :)
Cheers,
Craig & Ryan
This update ended up being one of our largest to date, as we added new things, polished some old things, and generally made some big core changes.
The primary focus on this update was to improve all of the elements relating to items & relics, as well as finally adding active items! Players now have a single active item slot that can be triggered during key moments using ‘F’ on the keyboard, or the ‘X’ button on XBox controllers. We felt that providing players with powerful one-off, or limited use abilities was a good way to compliment their weapon and passive item selections.
Right now, there currently 2 active items for testing - The holy hand grenade (applies set damage to all enemies on screen with 3 minute cooldown), and the coolant flush (resets cooldown on carried weapons with 3 uses). As this is just the initial pass, they both lack clear HUD indicators, final effects, and general balancing, but those are all things we’ll be addressing in future updates as we roll more active items into the mix. The holy hand grenade does have a red overlay as it recharges, to at least show when it’s usable/unusable in the short term.
Alongside the active items, we also added animations, and general visual polish to all of the existing items, relics, and treasure chests. Our goal was to make collectible items both more satisfying to collect, and to improve their readability during gameplay. The last big addition on this front, are the new soul gems, which act as second, relic-specific currency. These gems are used to purchase and upgrade relics, and are persistent across runs, meaning that you can gradually work towards upgrading specific relics, without the fear of losing a large amount of regular coins upon death before reaching the airship. Right now they’re only a guaranteed drop from bosses, and upgrade amounts aren’t tuned, but we’ll be working into things in subsequent updates.
Aside from items, we also felt like it was a good time to make a couple of more fundamental changes to the core gameplay. The two largest being the removal of both lives and objectives. As we tuned enemy behaviors, damage, and overall challenge, we began to feel like the concept of lives was diminishing the sense of tension/reward, as all lives prior to the final one felt somewhat inconsequential. Having just one life in single player now means that health is much more precious and rewarding when found, and items like the ankh (which offers a single-use revive upon death), and relics relating to HP feel much more important. We also carried this concept over to multiplayer, with players able to revive one another indefinitely, as long as at least one player is alive. Although the shared pool of lives was interesting, we felt it was much too unforgiving at times, as it often forced players to sit-out and be unable to play for long stretches. As this is such a large change, we would love to hear your feedback on this front across both single player and multiplayer. The tuning and balancing of health drops etc is still ongoing, and your input on this front would be a massive help :)
Similarly to lives, we also took a good look at the current objective system, and asked ourselves whether or not they truly benefited the core gameplay. Although we’re happy with the fundamental ideas behind some of the objectives, we felt like having them be a mandatory requirement to complete the floor, often meant backtracking, and aimless searching for specific things that didn’t add to the core gameplay in a meaningful way. With that said, we hope to experiment with reincorporating certain aspects like the key gun and minibosses back into the new map generation system as optional elements in future updates.
The final major addition for this update, is the inclusion of the new room-based tomb zone! Although it’s a very rough pass as we still develop room shapes, enemy art/behaviors, and overall variety, it represents a nice step towards expanding out and applying all of the work we’ve done in the mansion, to the remaining zones. The ‘new’ tomb should start to take shape and begin moving closer to completion in future updates as we work towards bringing all of the existing zones up to the same level of polish as the mansion.
Thank you for reading, and as always, please leave any feedback you may have in the forums :)
Cheers,
Craig & Ryan
2018/05/10 - 1.14.6704 (Content Update 12)
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What's New:
* The digsite has been reworked with the lessons learned from the mansion changes over the past several updates.
* Added an initial set of 10 digsite room configurations (6 combat, 3 trap, 1 treasure)
* Added initial digsite enemy waves and challenge waves
* Reworked digsite props to have rounded corner colliders for better pathing around them
* Fully reworked tile art for digsite levels
* Lives have been removed as a resource. In single player you now have a single life. In multiplayer revives are now free and the game ends when no one is left to revive downed players.
* Added 'active' items - they are items that you trigger with a button press and either have limited uses or a cooldown.
* Active item: holy hand grenade (explosion damage to all enemies in room, 3min cooldown)
* Active item: coolant (instantly resets gun heat state, 3 charges before item is consumed)
* Small red treasure chests now only contain coins and health
* Added 'soul gems' a currency for relic purchases and upgrades
* All bosses now drop a soul gem on death
* All items and relic art was reworked and given idle animations
* Coin sprites and animations have been reworked
* Reworked selection of 'special' rooms to be per-zone instead of per floor, increases variance between runs
* Damage flash has been switched from red to white to improve overall visibility/readability
* Active items can now be rewards from a challenge room
* Active items can now be a rare drop from item chests
* Added ability to require certain rooms to appear on a floor in the map generator. Each floor in mansion and digsite will always have at least one treasure room
* Updated to Unity 2017.4.2f2LTS
* Removed per-floor objectives from game, investigating reworking some of the elements for optional/secondary zone content
* Fixed several map generator bugs that could cause hangs on loading
* Fixed several map generator bugs that could cause invalid rooms to be selected for combat arenas
* Reworked all of the pickup/collection effects for items
* Added upgrade code to input bindings to auto-assign new functionality (e.g. active items) to default keybindings
* Reworked fragments and soul gems so a single pickup will add to all players in a network game (instead of only the player who picks it up)
* Reduced room count of mansion levels to improve overall flow
* Reworked plaement phase of 'special' rooms to try and improve chances of them being scattered throughout the map more
* Items that can be picked up now have a bounce tween to help with visiblity on busy maps
* Updated art and animations for all treasure chests
* Treasure chests now leave a debris remain after opening
* Fixed issue with colliders in challenge rooms where sometimes you could not pick up the item from one side of the podium
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