Hi again, I'm Tony and I'm back to give you another quick update on what we've been working on here in (still) sunny Scotland in the last month. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44938850/bd26962d55dc65600f4440789b01283425e415d2.png[/img] [h2]Meta Progression[/h2] We really enjoy playing Into the Restless Ruins and the random placement and contents of fog rooms, as well as randomisation in the Favour offerings and card drawing, gives it a big chunk of variety on each run. But we wanted to give players even more reasons to keep going, so we added a fairly simple meta progression layer. This uses your score at the end of every run to fill up a progression bar. Once the bar's full you advance to the next "player level", and unlock a bunch of new cards in to the random drops for the Maiden and the Wulver. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44938850/acf4e712933ad780ca1335566dac5f3080ac1914.png[/img] This has a few nice benefits: [list] [*]First off, it means you have something to work towards that's not just "gotta kill the Warden". Even a run where you die will still have the benefit of progressing you a little bit towards new stuff. [*]Second, we get to drop in new cards and give players new toys to play with without the risk of them somehow seeing everything on their very first run. [*]And finally it means we can gate off cards and rooms that require a slightly deeper understanding of the game's mechanics, until a point where we can be more confident players will have that. Previously there was also a slight risk that someone would get something like the Toadstool Patch and the complication of Charms in their first Favour drop. [/list] We're not sure if this is going to be the final form of the metagame, it does have limitations and there are some other things we'd like to be able to do, but it's a nice addition for now. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44938850/c119b6f90829cc4634f21c89ea1d998370a24e14.png[/img] [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44938850/bd26962d55dc65600f4440789b01283425e415d2.png[/img] [h2]Enemy Behaviours[/h2] For a while we've wanted to get enemies doing more interesting things than just endlessly charging directly for you. I mean, that's fun and challenging in itself, but we really wanted to do more to keep players on their toes and form tactics beyond "run backwards". This month we tried three new enemy behaviours... [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44938850/3dbd726a949e09ba7cce5f19f3b2f0a2d9fa3f99.png[/img] First up are enemies that can fire projectiles. These little squid-like guys move in to range, then charge up and spit out a bullet (or is it a fireball? Or a ... ?) Next we've got exploding skeletons! When these little guys get close to you (or drop to zero health) they go out with a bang! You've got a small amount of time to get out of their blast zone, so keep your wits about you! [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44938850/1039b70b8e7527d3aaea445f1999887fdf3491b6.png[/img] The last change was to the Banshees. We made these ladies slower movies, but when they spotted the player they would stop, screech, and then zoom towards you even faster than before! In the end we felt these are just a little too overpowered and unfair feeling without really giving the player enough ability to counteract them, so we took it back out. Who knows, maybe it'll make it back in at some point? [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44938850/bd26962d55dc65600f4440789b01283425e415d2.png[/img] [h2]Boss Fight[/h2] Another area we've long wanted to improve was the Warden fight. Up until now your reward for getting all the way to the end of the ruins was to face off against a big dude who kept tanking towards you, like a standard enemy. No lie - it felt pretty underwhelming as the end of a run. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44938850/70e1ffe290bce267d22ef37ee661115e8ac2f6f9.png[/img] When we looked at redesigning this we had a couple of goals. We wanted the bosses to: [list] [*]Be based off standard enemies. We picked a couple to do larger versions of, including the Banshee (cause she's always a terror). In the end we decided on doing a souped-up version of the demon bat. [*]Have multiple different attack patterns they can use, that they pick from semi-randomly. This is key to a boss fight for us - you need to be able to learn their different moves and figure out what your best action is for each of those. [/list] For this boss we added 3 attack patterns, one where it moves in a figure of 8 pattern around the arena, and two of them re-using the explosion area effect we’d recently created for other enemies. Personally I'm always a big fan of "shooting your feet" attack patterns where you have to keep moving to avoid taking damage! [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44938850/339ed68aac84e0f2fc174ed9a638a727a77772bf.png[/img] To help reinforce that the boss fight is a special occasion we also built a new version of the boss fight room with some ominous details like bones, scratch marks, and a pretty big evil-looking sigil on the floor. Oh and added a custom health bar at the bottom of the screen and set up a pumping new music track, just like all the best boss fights! [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44938850/bd26962d55dc65600f4440789b01283425e415d2.png[/img] [h2]The Demo[/h2] The final big thing we did was work on the demo, which is out now (have you played it?) [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44938850/60159e2cca7fd7b8438d60f9a112c85901155417.png[/img] There's a lot of fairly boring but essential behind-the-scenes work that goes in to making a demo. We had to figure out what to put in it, and what to lock out. We needed to figure out any extra menu buttons or flow changes (like the welcome screen that sets expectations). We had to set up button glyphs so that they would change automatically depending on what kind of controller players are using (up until now the game's only been at shows where we've had it plugged in to an Xbox controller). And finally we needed to set up a whole load of stuff in Steam's back end to create a demo, attach it to the main game, and get Valve to approve the store page and the demo itself so we could release it when we needed to. Phew! The reception to the demo has been pretty great - almost 2,000 of you have given it a play, and we've had a lot of good feedback (through the built-in feedback form, here, and on Discord) with a couple of key things that we now know we really need to fix (yes, I'm talking about how it isn't at all clear how Redraws work! Don't worry, we'll sort it!) [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44938850/ded32b6e027d3d1f6032f5367d7d8b18867d463e.png[/img] If you haven't downloaded the demo yet please do give it a go and let us know what you think, and if you have ... tell your friends? Getting the word out is the hardest part of being a small indie dev (honestly, making games is easy by comparison) so we'd love it if you could help us out. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44938850/bd26962d55dc65600f4440789b01283425e415d2.png[/img] Thanks for reading! We've had another busy month and it's always exciting for us to talk more about what we've been up to and how the game's changing. And that's without digging in to the dozens of little changes to the interface, rooms, balancing tweaks, and all of that kind of stuff. If you'd like to chat more, you can use the Steam forums here, or join us on our [url=https://discord.com/invite/AntWorkshop]Discord![/url] We'll be back next month with another update (probably about Modifiers, as well as other things!) Cheers, James, Rachel & Tony.