Sternly Worded Adventures is a roguelite word puzzle RPG inspired by Bookworm Adventures where you travel through a forested peninsula with Yorkshire-sounding place names fighting monsters with the power of words to uncover whatever dark secrets may be lurking beyond.
I probably wouldn't be doing this release for another week or two when I've made more stuff, but I'm in between big things, and nothing is waiting on anything else, so while we're on the front page of itch I thought I'd take this moment to drop what I've got. The biggest gameplay changes are probably that forests are no longer 90% boss spiders, the arachnophobia settings now have a preview and also apply to the current enemy instead of just future ones, and you can now fill most empty bottles with water. There's also some extra event interactions with some curses, some item reworks, and a lot of small things.
[h3]General:[/h3]
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[*] Fixed a crash if you set the volume before any music has started. (It would crash after saving though, so technically no functionality was lost.)
[*] Clarified the wording on the shrine help screen.
[*] The player avatar on the player screen now blinks and does use animations if available.
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[h3]Class selection:[/h3]
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[*] Reduced the amount of flashing from appearing/disappearing UI elements if you yeet the class selection bar.
[*] Potentially fixed a rare crash in character creation colour customizer. Maybe just fixed a symptom of the issue though.
[*] Fixed item selections on the class selection screen showing the purple 'not normally for this class' glow if you'd previously played the main game that session and that class wouldn't be able to have it.
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[h3]Overworld:[/h3]
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[*] Added a one-time tutorial on opening the player screen explaining drag-drop use.
[*] Fixed the UI never getting unlocked if you quit to the main menu during the anomaly cutscene then immediately start a new game.
[*] Fixed quitting then continuing right at the start of the game causing you to lose curse/boon stuff because it didn't specifically save in between those two events.
[*] Fixed the player direction indicator on the map not scaling with the screen resolution.
[*] Added an option to enabled/disable the player direction indicator.
[*] Added the option to have the camera centre on the player when you arrive at your final destination. It's enabled in the default config, but wont auto-enable for pre-existing configs.
[*] Added an extra line to the travel tutorial, mentioning that you can move/drag the map around.
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[h3]Forests:[/h3]
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[*] Forests are no longer littered with boss spiders.
[*] Combat in forests no longer requires a boss flagged enemy to mark the location as complete.
[*] The number of enemies in forests can now vary by the same margin that crypt enemies can.
[*] Using a smoke bomb to run away from a chest in a forest no longer marks the location as complete, making getting the reward impossible.
[*] Fixed a world generation bug in forests and villages which could result in the entrances/exists leading to two locations, one of which potentially being a dead end.
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[h3]Events:[/h3]
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[*] Event button text can now support an extended glyph set.
[*] The beggar event now has unique outcomes based on if you have the curse of greed and/or explosive temper.
[*] The treant event now has unique outcomes based on if you have the curse of wood and/or pyromancer's curse.
[*] The merchant events now have an additional parting comment if it's happening outside of a static shop.
[*] The thorny lisp now makes the player speak with a lisp in events.
[*] The 'bury them' options in the paladin follow up events now increment time and come with a chance to find something anyway, depending on how long it's been.
[*] The end of the woodsman event now says 'Maybe stay on the path' instead of 'Be careful out there'.
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[h3]Combat:[/h3]
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[*] The 'well rested' statuses are now only consumed when they have a non-0 effect, after rounding, and counting max values.
[*] The arachnophobia option now applies to the current enemy, and has a visualisation.
[*] Fixed the gear UI effectively ignoring the 'touch double tap' option.
[*] Fixed the passives UI using the full list of passives to generate controller hotspots rather than the reduced list of relevant passives.
[*] Fixed the bubble particle effect for the alembic and the retort effectively applying resolution scaling twice.
[*] Fixed being able to press 'Give up' during the clean-up phase after having already pressed 'Finish' when close to death at the end of combat.
[*] The tile board no longer updates while it's completely hidden, so you don't miss important things happening on it. Like explosions.
[*] Added an '[A-Z]' legend on regular wildcards, to hopefully reduce situations where people don't realise what they are and don't check the tooltip.
[*] Fixed the stats display for post-combat not correctly hiding your hair when it should.
[*] Fixed being able to get negative amounts of gold from enemy drops. Only affected the random arcade if it gave you multiple unlucky passives.
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[h3]Enemies:[/h3]
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[*] Fixed enemy adventurers faking their death and running away if they died from being hit rather than from a status effect.
[*] It no longer does the 'boss pan' for spider nests.
[*] Added a separate status layer for explosion effects and bleed drain for sprites with the new style burn layer. Affects: adventurer, alot, fire elementals, slime, spiders, and the spider nest.
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[h3]Items:[/h3]
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[*] Calming potion: Fixed not appearing in drop tables. Changed sprite to use orb potion graphic not tube potion.
[*] Crystal ball: Now refreshes on submitting 71 tiles, refreshing away 142 tiles, drinking an insight potion, or a combination therein, rather than at the end of combat. Added a status icon to track it. Made the description less flowery. Tweaked the base of the icon.
[*] Insight potion: Partially full variants now reduce the crystal ball cooldown by 9*fill. Previously they did nothing except balance out the retort.
[*] Potion of clueless wisdom: No longer triggers the drink animation and a saves if there's no tiles that could be converted.
[*] Endless potion bag: Now an equipment rather than a passive, and gives a potion as an activated ability that recharges from killing 14 enemies, and gives more potions to choose from up to 3 at 18 kills.
[*] Magic alembic: Now does a slightly higher pitched than normal bubbles effect when it's ready to use.
[*] Tweaked the description of the thorny lisp to include and explain the actual thorn glyph.
[*] Fixed not actually being able to take an arbitrary number of arbitrarily hard bricks.
[*] Blood: Now listed as ephemeral rather than consumable.
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[h3]Crafting:[/h3]
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[*] You can now gather water in most empty bottles. Excluded are toxin/bleed related potions, and poison bottles.
[*] Changed the 'Clear' button to say 'Clear grid' instead, so people don't think it means clear the contents of the bottles.
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[h3]Words:[/h3]
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[*] Added hashbrown and hashbrowns.
[*] Added chainmail and chainmails.
[*] Added anise and derived terms to the wood dictionary
[*] Added anix.
[*] Added silvery and zincky and alternate spellings to the metal dictionary.
[*] Added flameout, outblaze, and derived terms to the fire dictionary.
[*] Removed newsbeat and newsbeats from the fire dictionary.
[*] Removed steelhead and steelheads from the metal and iron dictionary.
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[h3]Definitions:[/h3]
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[*] Added parsing for the rfv-sense Wiktionary template.
[*] Updated the definition of roon.
[*] Improved the definition of be.
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