v1.4.0’s New Direction | Patreon Weekly #166

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, there’s a new Patreon poll this week! In this poll I’m letting you guys decide on some larger-scale item improvements in v1.4.0.

In this weekly I’m going to discuss my new overall plans for v1.4.0, and the work I’ve done on it so far over the last week.

The Plan for v1.4.0

As I mentioned last weekly, I’ve been having a little trouble with some concepting for the blacksmith quest. I’ve decided that the quest does need a bit more time in the oven, and so will be focusing v1.4.0 more on the side content instead, whereas v1.5.0 will be about the blacksmith quest pretty much exclusively.

With that in mind, here are the actual goals I’m going to be working towards for v1.4.0. Expect to see more about them in the next few weeklies:

• While the blacksmith quest itself is not coming in v1.4.0, I will be looking to make some technical and design progress for it in this update.
• I plan to add some early lore additions to the game, probably with a set of documents in each region written from the perspective of someone who was there before the player.
• I’m going to make one major item change in v1.4.0. Head over to the poll to see the options for that!
• There will also be some more significant hero adjustments. Most notably the berserker change I mention last week, but possibly a few other smaller ones too.
• There will be the usual host of smaller item and talent tweaks as well, of course.
• More on the UX side of things, I’m going to make a few tutorialization improvements, mainly focused on better introducing players to the game’s controls and interface.
• I also intend to make some more targeted UI improvements for larger screens, like the recent changes screen adjustments.
• Finally, I also am making loads of patch fixes.

Patch Fixes Galore

One major thing I want to accomplish with v1.4.0, now that I’ve decided to defer the blacksmith quest until later, is clear through a steadily growing backlog of tiny fixes and adjustments. Some of these date all the way back to v0.8.1! These range from little bugfixes, to QoL tweaks, to code changes, to design considerations that I’ve left a little note for but didn’t actually address.

While not every single item is getting addressed, I have chewed through about 2/3 of the list over this past week. Obviously that’s a too many items to list out here, but here is a more condensed list that highlights some of the most notable changes

• Curse infusion and potion of mastery bonuses now color some text in the item slot
• A few rooms now have custom merging logic where regular ground wasn’t ideal
• Ring of furor now affects the sniper’s special attacks
• Badder Bosses Goo now has a ‘slow attack speed’ pity mechanic, like Yog’s lasers
• Antimagic and magic immunity apply in more cases
• Waiting now always takes exactly 1 turn
• Disintegration no longer damages neutral enemies you haven’t discovered yet
• Several small QoL tweaks for keyboard/controller input
• Small text clarity tweaks in several locations
• Fixed an animation error for attacking rats that has existed since vanilla
• Prison guards now have their own chains visuals
• Various small internal code improvements
• 40+ tiny bugfixes

If there’s a particular small fix you’d like to see, let me know! If nothing else I can add it to the (now much shorter) list to investigate.