Sorry for the constant delay, finally the chapter map got in shape enough for a screenshot. Even though everything was already changed several times back and forth, nothing is final.
The map will consist of 26 diamond tiles labeled Z to A (there were a bunch of different layout plans, but the winner was a nice solid shape using all the letters of the English alphabet). Your journey will start at the frozen ends at the Northern end of the map, from where you can hopefully return to the Spiritforge with a revenge best served frozen, hence the reverse letter labeling order.
There will be different looking field tokens for each field types, similarly to how it worked in Chasing Shadows, but the light sockets will show the completion of 3 battle modes, instead of 3 difficulties.
Endurance mode won’t be an extension of a normal battle anymore, you can start an endurance run from wave 1, and it will have its own XP and completing an endurance will light up the second socket on the field token. (More on changes to endurance later.)
Each field will have a Trial mode, which will be very similar to vision fields from GCCS, meaning, available skills and mana will be set for each trial, regardless of how far you have advanced in the game, putting you to challenges you can’t hack by getting to wizard level 1000. Precious loot such as skills and unique talisman fragments will be obtainable by winning trails.
Next time (in a month or so?) I’ll tell more about the changes to the skill tab. Thank you for staying tuned!
Today I’ll talk about a new creature you might meet in the game, as well as changes to the strike spells.
Monsters are evolving and finding new ways to put you to a challenge. A new kind of flying creature, called wraith, will appear from time to time through battles, similarly to apparitions and specters, but instead of just flying through or trying to steam a gem, wraiths will provide damage being reduced by 15% for all the monsters, and they will fly around and keep supporting monsters until shot down. More wraiths mean more trouble, their effect can stack up to 90% damage discarded at 6 wraiths, making monsters much more fierce.
Strike spells have been fit for the game’s chilling theme. In addition to freeze, you can cast whiteout on monsters to make them weak and confused, and you can tear through them with ice shards for a huge instant damage.
Each strike spell works in synergy with 2-2-2 gem types (to hopefully bring all gem types more into the game), so for example freezing monsters will make armor tearing more effective as well as critical hits dealing even more damage. The gem type buttons have been rearranged so that each of them are visually in the same column as their corresponding strike spell.
Quite a short post again, but at least we’re getting closer… See you in February with the new GCFW chapter map (not hexagons this time)!
I’ve come today with three kinds of buildings to show, as well as to sum up this year and look at the next one with great hopes.
The last buildable building type I haven’t talked about yet is the pylon. Pylons can be charged by tower shots, and they release their armor ignoring, long range shots when the monsters arrive. Their damage depends on the highest damage tower shots they get, with each incoming shot adding some charge depending on its relative damage. For example, firing at a pylon with a high grade and a low grade gem makes the pylon store high damage shots, with the lower grade gem’s shots adding less charge than the high grade ones.
Walls got a visual upgrade, there are three different types for more battlefield variety, and they can be built by you too, clicking the wall spell button repeatedly changes the wall type to build. In addition to the regular wall from GCCS, there is a “megalithic” wall resembling GCL’s wall style, and shrubs can be built too. Functionally they all work the same way. Shrub colors will be set for each field, e.g. a red leafy forest will have accompanying shrubs, snowy locations might have white ones.
Newly added barricades are road-blocking destructible piles of stone and debris, they can be demolished with lots of shots to open new path segments, with the opportunity to set longer maze paths for the monsters to walk.
It’s the end of the year again, a year has passed since the screenshot with the christmas tree shaped level last December, let’s have a look at it again with the latest game build.
Many tasks have been done since then, but there’s still quite a few months’ work to be done before releasing the game, I’d rather not narrow down the release date, but I’m pretty sure the game will be out in the first half of 2019. I hoped to make it by now (or even much earlier), but at least we are getting closer.
We have just finished the developer validation process on Steam, so our company can put games up on Steam from now on. 🙂 I’ll be on making a Steam home page for us, and a “Coming soon” page for GCFW is coming soon too.
Looking back at this year I see there should have been much more progress made; it must be frustrating waiting for the next GemCraft as I’m keeping you waiting one month after another, always lagging behind my ever sliding schedule, I’m sorry for the slow progress, I hope you’ll enjoy the game so much that it can make up for all the delay in the end.
Everyone have a great new year, see you in January!
Let’s talk about lanterns in today’s post. Lanterns will be a new type of building you can place and put a gem into. Lanterns will periodically damage all monsters in their range.
Gem enhancements will work in lanterns too, making lantern zaps ignore armor, have a greater range, or higher firing speed. As with everything, the actual numbers will have to be tuned to make lanterns a useful, but not overly powerful addition to the wizard’s arsenal.
Even though with reduced damage and firing speed, lanterns can really be useful against dense crowds crawling around in tight mazes and traps, as well as slowed down with a freezing spell or slowing gems. Calling in early waves and lighting them up with lanterns can make a massacre.
More bits of news coming in a hopefully longer post next time, until then, have a great pumpkin carving, enjoying the tons of new game releases, and preparing for the winter holiday season!
Good news for Linux players, lots of Steam games officially released on Windows are now Playable on Linux via the new Steam Player. Not all games are supported (DRM, heavy anti-cheat or server connection can be a problem), but GC Chasing Shadows doesn’t have any of those and seems to work fine.
I don’t have Linux so can’t give any help personally, but I hope everything is covered in the linked Steam post.
(Thanks for the info to Olli, a fellow GC player!) https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail/1696055855739350561
After months of working in silence finally there is enough stuff to show and tell about, so from now on there are new posts planned every few weeks until release. I’m really sorry for the long time gap since the last post and thank you if you’re still here!
The name of the next GC will be “GemCraft lost chapter: Frostborn Wrath”.
It won’t be the last one in the series, it will tell a story branching in to the main storyline, starting in time just when GCCS ends with the walls of the Spiritforge trembling. There is a world map in the journey notes in GCCS, where you can see a territory not so far involved in the game’s events, named “Frozen forever”, Frostborn Wrath will start there. But more on the story for those who are interested on GCFW’s journey note pages, let’s see the actual game features, starting in this post with gem creating and shrines.
Creating gems has changed a lot not only since GCCS, but since the last screenshot too. The original plan was to reduce the gem creating process to one click and thus make it more straightforward for new players. If you look at the first GCFW screenshot from last December, there was a gem grade selector, which disappeared in the latter post’s screenshot. Playing around with gems showed that it was weird always ending up with grade one gems, so now gem grade can be adjusted for all gems to be created. Setting it to its maximum will make it automatically adjust as you gain or lose mana, so you can always create the best possible gem.
Once created, gems can simply upgraded with the mouse wheel (only upwards of course), while for gems on the battlefield, the mouse wheel fine-tunes the firing range, just as in GCCS.
Shrines had quite an odd role in the last game, they were supposed to be epic, stopping time and unleashing a wave of destruction, but since they were dropped by sparks by the dozen in weird places, many times far from the main path, and they demanded a gem for which they didn’t really give a reasonable return, they were mostly only useful during early game or for getting some achievements.
Sparks don’t arrive anymore stuffed between waves, so shrines won’t be appearing in the middle of the battle, they will be placed carefully to have the real power to make a difference in the battle’s standing.
Shrines won’t need a gem to be sacrificed anymore, instead, after clicking them to activate, they will gather the damage potential of all the gems placed in buildings, and launch those already familiar ghostly waves, dealing both a fixed damage and taking a ratio of all the hit points of the foes caught in the line of fire. Also, the more gems in play, the higher the damage bonus.
That would be for now, sorry and thanks again for still keeping waiting if you read this! Next time I’ll cover the new enraging system and linked waves.
This post was planned to tell about the changes to the shrine system, but the latest changes didn’t feel right so new ideas are being worked on and tested.
In this mini-blogpost I share a few thoughts about the latest gui / “battle frame” changes.
After playing along with the one click gem creation for some time, it now seems there’s no need for gem grade adjustment, clicking on a gem type button now simply creates a grade 1 gem, while holding shift when clicking will result in a gem with a grade one less the maximum affordable (one less, to save the mana pool from getting empty). The new Upgrade gem button (as well as the good old U hotkey) can be used to get any gem grade after making the initial grade 1 gem.
The tedious task of enraging all the waves, especially during endurance runs, will be no more: There’s a new gem slot at the top left corner, inserting a gem will enrage all the upcoming waves (at no extra mana cost). If you change your mind, you can remove the gem from the slot to revert the waves to their baseline difficulty and reward levels. Socketing higher grade gems here and spending into the related skill will give more extreme enragement results. The whole thing will be tuned and will surely feel different from the GCCS style enragement, but the function is the same, players can decide if they risk facing brutally difficult waves for great rewards.
Hotkeys are shown on spell buttons for novice players (it can be disabled in the options screen).
The inventory got shrunk to 3×3, as it was seen in the December post. Since the very first GC, cloning and upgrading was added and now gem grade selection is gone too, so there is no use anymore having such a large inventory taking up precious screen space. The new tiny inventory is the central highlighted area of the right column hosting all the spell buttons and info fields.
The mana pool fills bottom upwards, trying to resemble its inspiration, the Diablo III magic stuff globe, even more.
Speed buttons got simplified, since the “1x” speed was too slow and barely used, the new “1x” is 2.5x faster than before, and the new high speed button makes the game roll 4x faster than the new normal speed, thus 10x faster than the normal speed rate of GCCS.
The next post arrives by the end of February, with the new shrine system, stay tuned!
Sorry for not posting anything for so long! After some adventurous dead end side projects, the next GemCraft has been in development for a while now, but I wanted to wait to have a screenshot to show. And so now here is the first shot made as a winter holiday greeting card.
Just a quick note: I’ve uploaded a free full version of GC Labyrinth on our site.
After the shutdown of GamerSafe (who provided the paid content support for the game) many paying players were left without the premium version and many of them emailed me about it. Since I can’t know who bought it in the past, there was no other choice but to liberate the game for everyone. (I hope I didn’t add any new errors to the game in the process…)
On a side note, I was quite surprised and of course it felt so good that there are more than a few players still playing this game in 2017. 🙂
I’ll write as soon as I get there with the next GC!
