Dev Diary 61 - For The Dark Gods

Hi! These two weeks I did a bit of streams where I’m adding some new sacrifice-themed content and some gameplay changes!

I’m continuing the trend of removing complex rules to ease the learning and adding an option to introduce them again as an Understanding (upgrade). For example, creatures standing next to each other would provide bonus defense to each other. This idea is very cool, but it’s almost impossible to learn by noticing, and it would take too much precious attention on tutorial. So the best solution is to give the player an option to choose this mechanic as an upgrade!

The same principle I applied to enchantment via elemental gems. Now they don’t give damage and armor, and serve only their primary purpose. This change also divides elemental damage and physical damage a lot. Before, powerful creatures ended up with a mix of different damages of different elements instead of targeting just a few.

I also found an idea of “mining” sacrifices as a resource that you can “trade” with some supernatural power interesting. So now you can gather skulls or blood of your enemies! But only if you discover a reason to gather them, for example, capturing an altar of skulls.

Clay and pottery has made it into the game too.

Thanks for visiting! Here is the full changelog:

Changelog

• Improved the animation of worker repositioning (dragging with mouse)
• Dragging moving worker over the border and releasing it will move him to the closest available tile
• Better collision for creatures
• Spells that move creatures now can’t be cast by units that are currently working
• New content
  • Skulls resource
  • Blood resource
  • Pottery resource
  • Clay category (procedural ores now can be clay)
  • Clay now spawns next to water more frequently
  • Altar of Skulls structure (with sacrifices)
  • Altar of Fire structure (with sacrifices)
  • Spell damage modifiers for each element
• Procedural ores now can be food and clay
• Effects in creature info are now compiled (entries of the same effect now sum up
• Added inline short explanations for one word terms for when there is enough space.
  • For example, if a weapon adds just +1 Constitution, there will be a description of what the Constitution is: “(health points and mining productions)”
• Production-related fixes
• Pooling for blueprints to ensure that all variants rotate
• Removed building levels, now you can get a building tech just once (it also wasn’t implemented, but you could still roll out the same building blueprint multiple times)
• Crucial buildings (houses and citadels) have higher chance to appear in the beginning
• Enchanting creatures with elemental gems doesn’t give elemental damage and elemental defense anymore
• Dex doesn’t affect elemental damage anymore
• Combinaton of Con and End now affects blunt damage
• Crits for pierce damage are now stronger, and crits for blunt damage are now weaker
• Fighters standing next to each other don’t receive defence bonus anymore. This will be returned as an upgradeable Understanding