GemCraft Labyrinth – latest features report – 2010.XI.17.

Going deeper into the Labyrinth, here are the latest ready-to-show features:

High contrast mode:
For players with impaired vision, there’s a new checkbox in the Options screen. Enabling it makes path tiles lighter, the ground and monsters darker, and shots get a dark outline to make them pop out of the background more.

Pause the game:
GemCraft should not be about how fast you can click, but how resourceful and smart you can be building up your defense, and it’s also a (maybe even more) important accessibility feature as high contrast mode.
Click the pause icon and take your time making adjustments, while the time is frozen. Normal and high speed modes are still there of course.

New XP system:
In GC0, there was score, mana, and XP; you got score as well as mana for killing monsters, summoning more of them, and clicking on wave stones to start the waves early; then at the end of the stage, your score was divided by 1000 and it became your experience points, making you level up and become more powerful.
In GCL, score is gone. What you do turns into XP at the end of the stage, shown in the Victory panel, this way:
-Each stage has a base XP value, calculated from the toughness of the stage (monster hit points, number of waves).
-As I mentioned in a former blogpost, you can mix any battle settings, like amounts of monsters, number of waves, higher monster armor, giant monsters only, and more. The more challenging mix you set for yourself, the higher “settings XP multiplier” you get at the end of the battle if you win. (The base XP value gets multiplied.)
-For many actions you can do during a stage, you can collect battle amulets. Examples are: creating a grade 6 or better gem, destroying all monster nests, or starting 50% of waves early. Each of them has an XP multiplier, that adds up, giving a “battle amulets XP multiplier.
-Summoning more monsters is such a popular feature that I decided to give it an XP multiplier of its own. So the more extra monsters you call on yourself, the higher your final XP gets. (In endurance mode (unlimited waves), you get a multiplier for the number of waves beaten instead.)

Starting waves early:
A risky but rewarding option, formerly it gave a score boost; now it gives you a mana bonus, and has its own battle amulets to further boost your stage XP. The earlier you start the next wave, and the higher the wave is, the more mana you get. Just have your gems armed to repel those early guests.

Amulets close-up 3d view:
This little 3d-ish trick was inspired by collectible cards (from Magic the Gathering to storybook sticker cards to collectible basketball/soccer cards), with their special cards having metallic or holographic frames, strips, and other eye candy.
Not the most important feature, but the idea and a working prototype was ready a year ago (for an other game now on hold), so we just had to insert the amulet designs.
If you click on an amulet, it will zoom in and you can rotate it by dragging the mouse left-right. Release it and you’re back in the game.

Confirm retry/retreat:
One of the main annoyances in GC0 was when you took a break in an hour long endurance battle and accidentally clicked on “Return to map” instead of “Done”. Now, both dangerous buttons, that would make you lose your battle progress, need to be clicked twice. If you roll out with the mouse, they fall back to their initial state.

Extra skill points: taken out
For those who didn’t read their way through the past posts, formerly we planned to have a feature in GCL, that you could buy extra skill points to temporarily boost your skills. I have to agree at least party with those players who stated that this would have been like paying for cheating, ruining the challenge and forcing players to pay unreasonable amounts of money in order to enjoy the game to its fullest. Good news, no need to start a flame war about greediness or promoting cheating, this feature is gone, so you’ll get the normal version for free, and the Unleashed version for a one-time, non-recurring fee of a few bucks.

And finally, thanks for all the ideas you constantly send us in mail and here on the blog, I hope you don’t mind if yours won’t make it in GCL, but this game should have been out for a while by now, so it’s not the right time to start stuffing even more features into it.

Writing again when the rest of the features (labyrinth map, battle settings, skills) reach screenshot-readiness.