Hey Everyone,
Finally, here is the first of the series of blogposts paving a long path, at the end of which GemCraft chapter 2: Chasing Shadows will be released. 🙂
If you missed my last post, a short recap: starting today and going until release, I plan to write a new post every 2nd Monday, going through the various new features and changes coming in the new GemCraft chapter.
Before diving in, please note: everything you can see in the screenshots, and everything I write about here, can still change.
The first screenshot, using mostly the same path layout as the early screen back in December, helps to highlight some of the changes since then.
The whole tree planting and ground/path texturing system was rethought and rewritten from scratch. Paths can be laid out with tiles of various shapes, broken/eroded tiles, or even no tiles at all, giving a path in the wilderness, or large open fields for the monsters to roam through.
Spark and wave stones are now running in one column, giving that extra space back to the battlefield.
Almost everything was redrawn (many times over and over…), including the spell buttons, the mana bar and other parts of the header.
The battlefield is now 44×32 units, with one unit being 17×17 pixels. This gives you more freedom when placing your buildings, and made it possible for pieces of walls to become thin not just visually, but technically as well.
The four buildable structures are: walls, towers, traps, and amplifiers. (what you can actually build during a battle, can depend on the field you play on, usually “normal” fields give you all the options, epic and challenge-like fields can be more restrictive – more about it later). Towers, amps, and traps take 2×2 new units, walls are made of 1×1 sized pieces.
Some battlefields will have pre-built buildings, and even gems placed in them at your disposal.
All building types work basically the same way as before, with some new tricks, like multiple firing modes, charged shots, or the amplifier being more versatile (more about all these later too), and a heavy rebalancing yet to take place.
Shrines were put back from the regular buildable (GCL) status back to special (GC0 style), but also radically rethought. The reason for taking them back was that they were too powerful, especially during long endurance runs, and that pre-placing them in fields gives the opportunity to make the fields more varying and offering more strategical depth.
If you are more familiar with the interface layout that many role playing games use, with the mana bar and various buttons at the bottom instead of the top, in GC2 you’ll be able to flip the battle frame. In this case, wave- and spark stones will roll downwards.
In contrast to the closed location in which GCL took place, the Labyrinth, with its monotonous flora, GC2’s area of play will stretch across many landscapes, from snowy mountains to deserts to jungles, giving a much wider and more colorful variety of battlefields.
I guess this post only raised more questions than it answered – many of them will be answered 2-4-6 weeks from now, and even more questions will arise, waiting to be ultimately answered in the game itself.
Coming up next:
14th of May:
gem types, firing modes, combining/cloning/upgrading/salvaging gems
28th of May:
sparks, monsters
