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The High Priest Marcus leads the hungry and impoverished followers of the Light in an assault on the forces of nature, spirits, and harmony. Never before being exposed to free spirits, wild magics, blasphemous alchemy, and creatures of the night, they begin their misguided genocide. Play through levels that feature traditional tower defence mechanics as well as new ones.

Post news Report RSS Pre-Alpha b3591 News

A quick overview of new features/changes to the game.

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Pre-Alpha b3591
It's been a little over a month since I said I would post an update, so here it is. The last major update's build was 1432; I am now on build 3591. That's a difference of 2159 which is crazy considering in 6 months I surpassed the build count from the 2 years I'd been working on this. That shows how much time I've sunk into development this past half year.

A good chunk of the dev time has been spent refactoring or even rewriting old code. Some big overhauls include game logic, level logic, enemy spawners, spell controllers, and turret placement controllers.

The other huge chunk was spent implementing Unity's new UI system. Starting in August when the beta was released, I completely scrapped my current UI and started working with the new one. This opened the door to a HUGE number of features like sprite swapping, tooltips, easily created windows, button effects, BILLBOARD TEXT, and lots of other things. The speed at which you can implement new menus with the UI update is just insane. I added an options menu and several functions to it in a day.

Anyways, here is a list of either new features or items that received major revisions since the last update:

Updates

  • Turret Upgrade Variations (each turret has 2 variations for a total of 24 turrets)
  • Turret Upgrade Window
  • Options Menu
  • ToolTips
  • Customizable Hotkeys
  • Visual spell targeting reticules
  • Various UI changes/additions
  • Ground Effects (bramble/slime/fog)
  • New Status Effects (Terrified/Haunted/Rooted/S.Burning)
  • Updated Enemy HP bars
  • Demo Map Reworked (Again wooo~)

Turret Variations
As mentioned earlier, turrets now have two variations that the base can upgrade into. These variations have to be unlocked by playing the game, though I haven't thought of a concrete way to do this yet. Let's look at the pumpkin turret for an example of variants:

  • Base Turret (single target damage) -> Lvl2 (+damage +range) -> Lvl3 (+damage +range)
  • Base Turret -> Variant1 (+range +applies burning to target and enemies around it)
  • Base Turret -> Variant2 (+rains pumpkins on enemies at ground location. each concurrent pumpkin does slightly less damage)

With this we can see that the variants are similar to the base, but change it enough to make them useful in different situations. The base and variants can all only have 1 target at a time, but the base turret will deal high single target damage, the 1st variant will deal average damage but apply a DoT, and the 2nd variant will deal average damage to all units nearby it's target.

Turret Upgrade Window
Turrets finally have a window that pops up when you select them. No longer do you have to hit the awkward '+' button to upgrade and 'x' button to sell. This window was necessary for the variations and also lead into the development of tooltips. It is largely complete at this stage but will most likely get a rework once I start focusing on UI design.

Options Menu
The options menu is something I have had in my head for almost as long as I've been working on this project. Being able to turn enemy HP on and off with the 'tab' button was the first step. Now we have an actual window that I can start plopping options into. The ones I have right now are: Show Damage Numbers, Show Enemy HP, Hide Full HP bars, and Show Tooltips. This menu is going to be massively expanded as development continues but it's definitely in a good place right now.

ToolTips
The way I had done tooltips before was so bad I don't want to think about it. Tooltips are in and working fine. Will get some tweaking down the road.

Customizable Hotkeys
This was implemented at the same time as the new spells. I like to hit 1~5 for the spells but not everyone else will.

Visual Spell Targeting Reticules
What the hell does that mean? Well it means when you select a spell instead of just a circle showing the radius, it also shows a little 3D representation of what the effect will look like.

Various UI Changes
Basically what it says. Lots of background work and new additions.

Ground Effects
Implemented. These are effects that certain turret variations will put on the ground. A Stone of Thorns (or w/e it's called) has x% chance of putting a Bramble down when it attacks. Enemies that walk in the Bramble are slowed and take x damage every x seconds.

New Status Effects
With new turrets comes new status effects! Some of the new ones include Terrified(takes increased damage), Rooted (cannot move), and S.Burning (burning effect for siege units).

Updated Enemy HP Bars
The new UI and onGui did not like each other. All onGUI elements have been moved to the new UI system and improved. Currently the bar only represents regular enemies but I'll probably add some boss type HP bars at some point.

Demo Map ReWork
The demo map is entering its final design stages. The one you see in the video will be the final version.

WHEW!! That's all for now. My hands hurt from typing so I will see you again soon~

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