Farja, the arctic sorceress - v0.20 Update news - Path to the Sky

The biggest addition for v0.20 is Farja, a new playable character. For more information on her, check out the video above!

Additionally, tons of things have changed in Path to the Sky. Since there was no changelog for 0.19, we'll be including all the changes right here.

General

• Farja was added to the game, and with her, a character selection screen
• Most enemy attack patterns have been reworked
• Enemies can now equip bows, staffs & shields
• Several new enemies have been added to the game
• An item-log has been added to the lower left of the UI
• A target name, mod & level display has been added to the lower left of the UI
• Several new monster mods have been added, mods can now combine properly
• A slowmotion and zoom effect has been added to the death screen
• Akamos vocal sounds have been completely reworked to fit the quality of Farjas vocals
• Daily leaderboards have been added and are now the standard leaderboard mode
• You can now traverse the leaderboards with the left/right/up/down buttons

Combat & movement

• Stamina is a new resource, gained by attacking enemies
• Casting spells, rolling, and blocking, will consume stamina points
• The combat system has been fundamentally reworked
• Wind-up and release timers have been added to all combat mechanics
• Rolling has been added to the game (Shield + Move Key)
• You will now stand still while shooting
• Targeting is now guided and your shots can fly off the 45 degree grid
• Dropping off of bridges and platforms can now be done by pressing the Down + Jump buttons at the same time
• Staggering has been added to the combat mechanics, stopping an enemy attack or shield wind up (this can also happen to the player)

World & nature

• A new transition screen has been implemented, showing the current islands silhouette
• Islands are now generated by biomes, which will allow for more diverse levels
• Rock, Ice and Bog biomes were added
• Monster level, health and damage now scale with the island level
• The game will now continue after the 6th level, and allow the player to play as long as they can survive
• A new room type, the choice room, inhabited by the drowned sailor, has been added.
• Room tokens, representing the rooms type, have been added
• Item pools and item pool depletion were implemented
• 23 new items have been added
• Several items were reworked to complement the new combat style
• Swords & shields will now not drop in the item room anymore
• The shopkeeper and the item room are now fully sized rooms
• The boss room now always drops a chest
• Chests now all require keys to be opened
• The shopkeeper will now sell cheaper stat items
• Grass can now be destroyed by player and enemy projectiles
• Equipment carried by the player as well as by enemies will be dropped on death and turn into visual props

Visual & sound changes

• A new series of visual effects, based on distortions, have been added
• Environmental props now have spatialized impact sounds
• Entity shadows were changed to now be a round area behind the entities, as opposed to a line on the ground beyond them
• The area around the rooms is now darker, to decrease visual confusion and increase the immersion feeling of traversing a big cave
• Removed outline and lighting settings due to renderer changes and easier maintenance. Visual consistency was turning into a issue to big to ignore, so it will from now on be streamlined

Technical changes

• You can now configure your controls in the settings menu
• the separation of controller mode and keyboard mode has been removed
• The OpenGL renderer was rewritten to use instanced rendering, reducing the drawcall amount by around 90%
• The OpenGL renderer & GLSL compiler are now set to 3.3 core profile with compatibility mode
• Settings are now stored in an XML file locally, as opposed to in the steam cloud (no-one uses the same settings across devices anyways)
• A compressor and limiter have been applied to the master audio channel
• Sound volumes were adjusted
• I am delightfully surprised you read this far
• The A* pathfinder was changed to now work on a grid equal to the game grid rather than a 2x as fine grid to help with enemy tunneling