GemCraft Labyrinth – progress report, more insight

Hey Everyone,

Still don’t except the game released next week, but we’re making progress. Here are some screenshots and some more info about the new and changing features.

Battle amulets play a major role in how much XP you will earn at the end of the battle (they all give some bonus % to the net stage XP). There are plenty of them, but you don’t have to keep in mind which ones are done or unavailable, and which should you pursue. Just roll over the Battle amulets “button” in the header, and a floating info panel will tell you about what’s available. Some amulets have 3 different tiers, like “build 2 shrines” has its “4” and “6” variants, but only the one you are the closest to obtain is shown (so if you have 3 shrines built, then you have obviously already gained the “build 2 shrines” and the next one is “build 4 shrines”, so it’s the only one in the list).

But how do you know how much of a given action you have to make to get a battle amulet? That’s what the Stats panel is for. It shows your performance in real time, listing only those stats that are connected to battle amulets, so you don’t have to read through dozens of stats in the heat of the battle. As in GC0, you can review all your stats in the Stats screen accessible from the map (stage selector).

A kill counter with a shrinking red backround shows you your current kill streak. If there’s no new kill before the time runs out, the kill streak is over, otherwise the timer starts over and waits for yet another kill. In GC0 it wasn’t there, and kill streaks just ended with seemingly no reason. Now you can see when it wants to end and help it roll on with a gem bomb.

Gem target priorities: Now you can see it in some of the screenshots (look at the bottom of the floating gem info panel). The final variations are: Least hit points (great for sticking to a wounded target), most hit points (to pick a giant monster or some other major threat), fastest monster (to take down those nasty runners), random (to spray poison or other specials), and structure (fires at monster beacons and nests even if there are monsters in range). For technical reasons, targeting the monster farthest/closest to orb was left out, but these 5 modes will still give a great way to make your hits count more.

Amplifiers: it still needs a lot of balancing, but the game mechanics is implemented and working. If you place a gem in a tower or trap next to an amplifier, the gem in the latter will give some of its attributes to the active gem. The gem info panel shows the amplified (grand total) values as well as how much was given by the amplifying gem(s).

And finally: If you run out of mana and a monster reaches your orb, it will blast to tiny shards. Nothing functional, just a fancy effect.

Next time (it can be 2 weeks or 4, I don’t know) I’ll write about and show the victory panel, the amulets screen, the map of the labyrinth, the battle mode setting selector, and the skill selector. By then the game will be almost complete content-wise, but it will still need lots of playtesting. If we need beta testers, I’ll announce it here in the blog. Again (and again), thanks for your patience!