In this post I mention some of the latest changes and things left out previously; random thoughts follow in random order:
First, the bloodbound and poolbound gem components: In the previously told version white and black gems affected only a part of the other colors, excluding slowing and chain hit entirely, with fears that they would go out of control. But this solution wasn’t too elegant, and to make the 3×3 gem button grid reflect the black-white gems’ affected components, the colors had to be mixed up, making the grid less pleasing to the eye altogether.
Now, both black and white can boost all other types (except each other). Why: modifications to the math behind how the actual slowing etc. values are calculated made it easier to prevent going out of control (it’s about having an indefinitely boostable raw value and using logarithm for calculating the actual value, which gives rapidly diminishing results after the “ideal” intended maximum value of the gem attribute is exceeded).
Gems won’t have the hard cap of 3 on component abilities, but the more components a gem will have, the lower the “penalty multiplier” each abilities will get (for example, a pure gem will have its special ability at full power, dual gems have 70-70% power modifier, 5 component gems have 35% for each spec, etc).
New feature: one click gem deployment – click on an empty tower/trap/amp to place the topmost gem in the inventory into it, without the drag-n-drop hassle.
The increased versatility of amplifiers (namely, the ability to boost shrines) comes at a price: there will be a deployment time just like with towers and traps. This is to prevent “hit and run” amplifying shrines just for the moment of activation.
A rapid wall building feature was implemented since the buildings blogpost: drag to place a long horizontal or vertical line of wall, keeping shift pressed allows you to quickly place more wall segments (e.g. cascade, spiral).
The mana pool info panel shows separate bonuses (XP, mana over time, mana per kill), with the mana regeneration over time being given exactly instead of a cryptic multiplier value. All these values can get bonuses from multiple sources (including the level of the mana pool, hence the info panel in which they are shown).
Hot key for switching info panels’ visibility will go to “.” instead of the current “I”, which was too close to “U” for upgrading, causing the info panels to disappear accidentally.
There’s a plan to make shortcut keys redefinable, not 100% sure yet if it will arrive in v.1.0. or later patches or not at all, it would be great to have it in the game I think.
Pressing Q will cycle through 1x-3x-9x speeds instead of switching back and fort between 1x and 3x.
And last, many of you told either that the game should be more pale or more vivid. I know there’s no setting that would appeal to everyone, and this really shouldn’t be the barrier keeping you from enjoying the game to its fullest, so, maybe not for v.1.0, but there are plans to add freely adjustable saturation-contrast settings among the pile of game options (mutli-tab options screen to host all the thingies for improved customizability, see in a later blogpost), so you can set the mood from happy to creepy for yourself.
Coming up next:
9th of July:
Strike spells
23rd of July:
Shrines
