Patch Alpha 1.0.7 Preview: Character Customisation, Bows, and more! news

So, this is a big update. I won't talk here, because I will need my fingers for the typing to follow. So: News!

Character Customisation

Your character can now have all sorts of wondrous hair styles and skin tones, and, probably more importantly, a name! On starting a new game, you will enter the character creation screen which allows this visual customisation. Due to your new found hair styling abilities, you can also choose to toggle the displaying of your helm on or off, and, once you die, your hero's name and appearance will be displayed on the leaderboard, allowing you to fondly remember your little adventurers and the expeditions that led to their eventual demise. New skins and hair styles will be added over time, including unlockables.

Bows and Weapon Swapping

Bows, from launch, have been overpowered, both in the fact that you could shoot enemies which were stuck, and could normally kill enemies before they even reached you. While an archer's job is to keep his enemies at bay, they had it too easy. Therefore bows now require ammunition, which can be both crafted and picked up. This means you must think more about how and when you spend your precious ammo.
However, due to this addition, ranged damage has been increased, and multiple weapons can now be equipped at once. This means you can have a bow and a sword equipped, and, if an enemy reaches you, you can switch to your melee (Q) and finish your target off, without wasting ammo at point-blank range.

Pathfinding and Enemy Logic

Proper pathfinding has finally been implemented! This means that you can now select any cell in sight, causing your player to jog over to that spot without any more player input. If an enemy appears, or the player takes damage, the movement will be cancelled.

Likewise, enemies also benefit from the new pathfinding. They will no longer get mindlessly stuck on bookcases, shops, doors, each other, or, in fact any animate or inanimate objects. They will actively search for you by any path they can find, and attempt to block you in and surround you. Ranged units will also stand out of the way of melee units, so long as they still have vision of you. Enemies now also have a chance of spawning/falling asleep when nothing has happened in their area for a long time.

Gear rescaling, new Items, and new Enemies

All gear stats and pricing have been reworked, and shops now spawn with much better quality items. Good gear is now much easier to find early level, which balances out the difficulty a little. Gear that is worse than the starting gear is less likely to spawn, and necklaces and rings have been fixed, meaning they now all spawn with stats (handy, that).

New items and enemies have also been added, but I will leave their purpose to either your own discovery, or the patch notes (your choice).

New Trailer and GamersGate

A new Trailer is up for the game! You can check it out here:

Secondly, if you watch that video, you will notice the "Available on GamersGate!" notice. While this is currently not quite true, it will be within the next few weeks. Yay!

The Closing Bit

There is so much more in this patch that I haven't talked about, but to save a post which is already tl;dr, I will be finishing here. As well as all this, 1.0.7 includes a new skill engine, healing rescaling, text window changes, UI additions, and a tonne of bugfixes.

Phew.
~TheIndieForge