Greetings Wizards,

With a few waves of players now getting into the beta we’ve been getting a lot of awesome feedback. As stated before, we’d like to keep staggering beta invites because it allows us to fix issues along the way and get better and better feedback from you. However, if you have a burning itch to try it right away just send a message through Kickstarter and let us know and we’ll move you up.

We’re starting to see a little buzz from the larger gaming community!  John Walker with Rock Paper Shotgun wrote a hands on preview article covering Rogue Wizards and had a lot of great things to say.

” … a very lovely, well designed dungeon crawling RPG.” – Rock Paper Shotgun

Rogue Wizards Hands On Preview article

Also added this month is the new cosmic enemy called the “Disturbling”. These guys can cloak themselves and other enemies turning them completely invisible, so watch out!

Disturbling now in game with cloaking magic

One of the most requested features from beta players is that sometimes it’s tedious to have to walk all they way back across an already explored map just to open that last chest or get to the exit. We hear you and agree! Now there are waypoint markers distributed through every level, and you can open the map UI at anytime and teleport to any waypoint, entrance, and exit to get back to the action quickly.

Instantly teleport to entrance, exit, or waypoints

Finally, here are the full list of changes this month

Major Changes

• Disturblings now appear in the game and can now cloak themselves and others. Cloaked enemies have a light source and no other visuals, don’t make footstep noise, and don’t put the game into stepped combat mode. A cloaked enemy that does any action or is attacked is revealed. Items that detect hidden have a chance to reveal cloaked enemies
• You can now teleport to any previously discovered exit or waypoint via the full map UI – Upgrading the Blacksmith, Armory, and Jewler now require an item resource found in the world in addition to a gold payment
• Followers can now die, when they died they turn into a ball of light that followers the player. After a certain number of turns or using a healing shrine they will be revived automatically.
• Mouse hovering over enemies and objects is now done with polygon accuracy and ignores when over transparent pixels in those triangles
• New more stylized in game fonts for everything
• Gold, keys, and materials are now auto picked up by the player and any followers

Minor Changes

• Detect hidden is now done with a radius of 3 instead of 1
• Secondary tooltips now come up a fraction of a second after the primary tooltip, this visual cue helps your brain quickly understand which tooltip is for the target item and which tooltip is the comparison tooltip
• Secondary tooltip inventory slots are now outlined using the color of the secondary tooltip border to help visually connect the two
• New artwork for freeze crystals
• Exploding barrels now do effects at all possible target locations
• Fixed exploding barrels being ultra deadly to players
• Thieflings can no longer steal from your equipped weapons
• Theiflings now have less extra actions per turn (1 extra now) when have stolen goods in their bag
• Yeti’s will no longer try to freeze you if you’ve been frozen with 4 turns
• Harpies will no longer try to silence you if you’ve been silenced within 2 turns
• Malevolence damage reduced
• Followers are now healed when the player drinks a health potion
• Added in world text for healing via potion
• Added tutorial with dialog when the first follower heal occurs
• Shield now protects you from yeti freeze
• Lowered xp and defense modifier boots from 50% to 20%
• Overseer now casts wall a lot less
• Better enemy selection so that you see less repeats and instead see stuff you haven’t seen in a while
• Champions now summon one less wave of monsters
• Tweaked champion scared health thresholds
• Blob replication chanced reduced to 50% from 75% on damaged
• All healing shrines now refill over time
• Health potions can now drop, they have a very low chance to drop most of the time, but if you are low on health and have no more health potions left they chance increased a small amount to try and help you out
• Reduced the ceiling drop rate of vendor upgrade resources
• New game trailer with updated content

Framework and Fixes

– Fixed being able to transmute boss and champion enemies with the anomaly spell, not only is it a stupid easy fight it totally borks the quest logic and you get stuck!
– You can now put materials into the vault in town, these materials are not available for spellcasting in the dungeons
– Actual fix for stuck actions, actor actions are now cancelled when a cell starts hiding and then again just be sure when the cell is deactivated
– Action manager “panic” to fix stuck actions now actually fixes them, although there is not currently a known case that this safeguarding is needed for but it seems super good to have in there
– Actors with invisibility no longer set a stepped turn or cause the player command stack to clear … this allows you to walk seamlessly in non-combat-mode with a cloaked enemy on the screen just as if there was no enemies on the screen
– Changed a couple of actor active in hierarchy checks for starting skills to use cell.IsRevealingOrRevealed instead, this should catch some of those edge cases where actors started skills after their current cell began to hide
– The chakram will not seek cloaked enemies automatically when searching for additional targets beyond the first
– Added support to ModifierSkill to also apply the modifier to the user (invisibility)
– Added support to skills to disallow targets with stolen goods (invisibility)
– Items are now parented to the receiver during the last phase of a pickup operation where the item is fading out, this keeps the item with the visuals of the receiver if the receiver is moving
– Added actor class for “auto pickup”, as parent class of money class, key class, and materials class
– Useable now has a flag for “allow follower auto pickup”
– Added set of bit flags to Usable.Use( … ) where we can limit the logic for flipping items to new locations when inventory full and indicate that the pickup is an auto pickup operation
– Actor.WorldBounds( … ) no longer checks if the drawable is pickable, if you need that logic use Actor.DrawablePickTest( … )
– Added Actor.CanAutoPickupNearby( … )
– Added Actor.AutoPickupNearby( … )
– TeleportTo( … ) has been moved from Player to Actor so that followers can use it in the player version
– Modified all use pickup logic that looks for a player user to instead look for the player in the UltimateOwner() of the user so that followers can pickup stuff, but we can still link it back to the player for purposes of gold values or other statistics
– ActionMove now implements auto pickups if possible
– Safeguard against interact query from a command on the command stack if that actor is no longer in the world (occurs when a pickup command is on the stack but the item was auto picked up before you processed the command due to pathing to the item)
– Replaced a few calls to Actor.WorldBounds() with the center of gravity since that’s the better tool for center points for effects and such
– Added Actor.OnPickupAnimationComplete( … ) – implemented by followers to shuffle auto picked up items to their player owner (materials, keys)
– Pickup tutorial is now never displayed for money since it auto picks up and is confusing
– Sprite and Spine objects now conside game object hierarchy activation inside of their implementations of DrawableIsPickable( … )
– Gold is now exited from the map by the pickup manager during a pickup animation, this allows us to interpolate the light color of the gold as it moves to the receiver without the cell lighting affecting it anymore, the gold actor is about to be destroyed once it reaches the recipient anyway and we have already received the gold value before the animation starts anyway so we’re safe to do whatever with it
– Replaced HOTween with internal tween manager during pickup code
– Fixed floaty text improper z value so it is on top of all actors in the cell
– Expanded the world rect for picking by 1 coord because there were cases where you could not select the guild wizard boss in the head because his head extended over cells that were not active and the expanded box was not large enough to find the cell the wizard boss was in
– Tweaked text positions in the quest details listing description to help the justification strangeness with just the right words and line breaks
– Fixed mimics spawning after receiving the “all enemies killed” award
– Switch shop upgrade random generator to the map one, I think the game rand isn’t seeded properly
– When you teleport via the map, all followers are now teleported with you at the same time
– Knockback no longer affects frozen targets- Sped up blob attack and magic animations
– Removed some dead time during the yeti attack animation and sped it up slightly
– Wayside inn locked door is now usable by movement again
– Added a real fix for getting stuck in an infinte loop of using the locked door in the wayside in via “move” (not tap)
– All usables now have a 1/2 second cooldown before they can be used again
– Fix crash when trying to open the very first door of the game while driving movement the mouse (use the usable door by interact method of ‘move’ is super bugged)
– Small levels now only poulate with 2 types of enemies instead of 3
– Versioned save game files for enemy selector data
– Fixed items not stacking if the stack was in the bag inventory and there was a free slot in the backpack inventory, stacking locations are now preferred if they are found no matter what inventory or order they occur in
– Fixed damage types not being displayed correctly in damage breakdown tooltip on paper doll
– Added support for indented tooltip lines
– Created a TurnMultipleComparer to more accurately compare properties like health regeneration, now the compare value takes into account the the value amount (heath fraction) and the turns until it happeens (turn multiple) to arrive at a value that is “value per turn” which is used to do the compare
– Health regeneration, equipped armor mastery, and wand regeneration no longer occur from an explicitly player passed turn using the spacebar or UI
– Fixed comparision on “extra action boots” so that the arrows are going the right directions
– Added scroll visual to full map ui
– Added tooltips to full map buttons
– Added flipped duplicate magnifying glass so clipping works on the full map buttons (flipped images and clipping caused issues)
– FloatyManager now keeps track of the active floaties and does not allow stacking of multiple text floaties for the same actor on top of each other where they become unreadable
– Moved CombatManager “action text” system into the FloatyManager, associated text prefabs have been moved as well
– Usabe now support interact distances of 0 where you must be on top of the actor to use (waypoints)
– Added UseWaypoint, a subclassof usable that just opens your map
– Added support to dungeon input manager for interaction queries that are for usables which can now be used at range 1 and range 0
– Added teleport via map effects when the teleport occurs
– Added tutorial popup for teleport to button on full map ui
– Floaty now saveguards against leaving scaling tweens active when the floaty is destroyed
– Waypoint travel now works
– Added message text to full map ui, currently only used by waypoints
– Minimap interactive elements are now disabled when they are about half way alpha’d out
– Created new ui button transition set that makes disabled look like default, this is used for the minimap interactives as they alpha partically out and the edge of the map alpha mask
– Sprite text alpha api now includes an optional automatic alpha out after a delay
– Games are now saved before the bug ui sweeps and submits all data for the report so we have the latest save game as pictured in the screenshot
– Added beginnings of waypoint/teleport UI to the full map
– Added actor class “Attrib Waypoint”
– Added Waypoint.prefab actor
– Added Waypoint component, added it to all gateways and the new waypoint actor
– Added a set of shared markers to be used in marker sets and a set of shared markers for totally generic and re-directed markerset population
– Added ThemedMarkerActor.cs, these actors are linked to other marker actors via an id and a theme
– Theme now has fields for all generic marker actors (blocking anything, blocking left, treasure directionless etc)
– Added WaypointPlacer helper class to do waypoint placement via flood filling
– Added map generator architect plan for waypoint placement
– MarkerSets can now be placed using subregions of a map
– MapRect now has a Center member and Scale( … ) can now scale up and down
– Refactored the calculation of Minimap scrolling so that it can be done easier from code to shift the map when the waypoint UI comes up
– Slightly increase the secondary tooltip reveal time
– Added support for secondary tooltip item slot to have an item compare with up/down arrow … this is currently optioned in debug builds via the Debug->System menu
– Removed blue square.psd
– Icreased size of white square psd and tied all prefabs to the exported .png instead of the .psd itself
– Added support to summon skill to summon in revealed cells only
– Sentinel now only summons in already revealed cells
– Added a manually camera offset to Ceremony, the guild wizard death ceremony uses this to push the wizard image more towards the bottom of the screen now that we use the center of gravity point to calculate where to zoom to instead of actor bounds
– When scroll UI is up, noticies are pushed to the bottom of the screen because this is a typical scenario when killing a guild wizard boss when picking the scroll that opens the UI, completes a quest notice, and exit portal activated notice
– You can now always click on and open the item enchanting shrine UI, even if the shrine has 0 uses left. This fixes accidentally leaving your weapon on the shrine and never being able to open the UI to get it back again
– Added UseShrine.AlwaysAllowUse
– Added virtual Usable.NumUsesRemainingRestrictsUse( … ), UseShrine flips the logic for always allow use shrines (enchant item shrine)
– Removed the enum extension method BitTest( … ), it generate garbage, sigh …
– ModiferSkill now respects the result of DoCombat( … ) result to half special effects and does not apply the modifier
– Added a small amount of damage to yeti freeze so that the shield can absorb something and halt the freeze modifier from being applied
– Switched a bunch of skills over to the center of gravity logic
– Removed world offset of enemy electric field cast effect now that it is created at the center of gravity point
– Moved cosmic next/prev swirl effets to the cosmic sprite atlas
– Fixed calls into drawable pick test for drawables that aren’t pickable
– Tweaked size of dialog next arrow
– Added “center of gravity” bone and slot to all spine rigs
– Fixed pickup, modifier on/off, skill effect attachments that all used to use world bounds to now use the center of gravity point as the “actor center”
– Added IDrawable.DrawableCenterOfGravityWorld( … ) and implemented it for all drawable classes
– SpineController now caches the center of gravity slot for use later if needed
– Followers no longer auto heal over time
– Fixed shrines being able to be infinitely reused if you had a magic item that kept succeeding the roll over and over and over
– Added property “Modifer Applied Turn”
– Modifiers can now optionally track the last turn a modifier was applied to their owner
– ModiferSkill now supports restricting targets that had the modifier applied to them too recently
– Removed unused assignment from earlier checkin removing padding
– Moved overworld gateway swirl effects from effect to shared atlas where they can do pixel perfect picking and it makes mores sense to have it be on the same atlas as the gateway stone border anyway
– Fixed dialog next and complete icon positioning in both dialog bubbles and the town dialog UI
– New artwork for the dialog next and complete icons
– Dungeon dialog now has support for and makes use of dialog next and complete icons instead of just the complete icon
– Fixed crash on Anomaly death
– Followers now have a “GhostOnDeath” checkbox to opt-in to the ghost logic … this is set explicitly for the human followers and no other followers like Anomaly
– Stalagmite is now on the shared environment sprite atlas
– Effects atlas texture is no longer readable
– PackedSpriteEx.DrawableIsPickable( … ) now always returns false for sprites that are on the effects texture atlas
– Added EffectManager.SpriteEffectsMaterial to implement PackedSpriteEx.DrawableIsPickable( … )
– Added AI.ExtraActionsPerTurnWithStolenGoods
– StealSkill now has a whitelist of inventories that are valid targets to steal from, which is now only armor slots or the general inventories on the player
– Fixed Thieflings stealing from inventories they should’t have access to like the follower inventory (yikes, stealing followers, ouch!)
– Added bounding boxes to help with pick testing to a few spine enemies that are difficult to pixel perfect only select such as skeletons cause of all the holes in the art
– SpineController now caches bounding boxes for purposes of picking
– Added Polygon.PointInside( … )
– Added IDrawable.DrawablePickTest( … ) as a separate but similar operation to DrawableContains( … )
– Reformatted actor tooltips that show the buy/sell value to appear right aligned and near the bottom of the tooltip where the instructions for right click to buy/sell also appear
– Buy/sell value in tooltips now contains a visual gold icon instead of the word “Gold”
– Fixed combat strip tooltips for damage and block percent
– Fixed block percent not showing up on shield tooltips because of the earlier change to disable the enhanced defense lines … the block property now skips the block bonus property in it’s data drive “next tooltip” chain
– Fixed text on a couple of loading screen tips
– Removed ac couple of loading screen tips that aren’t correct or relevant anymore
– Weapon tooltips now display a damage total across all types as well as the breakdown of damage by type
– Removed the “Enhanced Attack” and “Enhance Defense” lines from equipment tooltips that had affix boosted attack or defense bonus effects, those effects are just simply listed on the line that lists Attack or Defense values only, having these separate lines ends up being more confusing than it is helpful to indicate an affix bonus
– SpriteTextEx now calculates it’s local bounds using it’s Mesh.bounds, this appear to be more accurate than the Sprite.TopLeft, SpriteBottomRight method and uses the actual vertex data from a bounds that has already been calculated
– Removed the concept of “line padding” from all tooltips, just adding padding to a line creates inbalances in the tooltips that are not intended and doesn’t work for instance if you add padding to the bottom of a line, but then no more lines are added to the tooltip
– The new “padding” concept for tooltip lines are to add optional “spacer” lines to the tooltip which can be done by calling Tooltip.SetNextOptionalSpacer( … ) which will add one spacer line to the tooltip the next time a new line is actually added to a tooltip (if any)
– Hack fixed the tooltip background Y centering, there is still a minute mismatch of text bounds in the sizing calculations that I just can’t account for yet.
– Fixed positioning of upgrade control text in vendor UI
– Offset the spell upgrade UI top scroll more forward in Z so the icons on the content parchment don’t overlay it during the roll up and out animations
– Fixed bar menu “Back” text size inconsistency with other menu items
– Added support for PackedSpriteEx.DrawableContains( … ) to work when the sprite is at any orientation or scale
– Fixed not being able to click on active overworld gateway portals, we can now correctly pick the rotating inner gateway effects via DrawableContans( … )
– Undoing the spritefont hack for yOffsetCorrection now that the new Glyph Designer allows you to formally edit these parameters.
– Updated the game default font using the new version of Glyph Designer that now allowed for a subtle inner shadow and manyally fixing of the yOffset for the font
– Touched all game UIs to work with a now properly vertically aligned game font
– Removed sprite offset from bar menu, it messes up the centering of the child text. Offset are still applied for space between buttons in the menu building code
– Removed last vestigates of the old small font including the font itself and fixed up all objects that were referencing it to just use the default font now
– Removed all the complicated damage by type calculation and UI logic from the CombatStrip code and prefab assets
– Fix stack split UI being created at Z value as defined in the prefab (which can change as we drag it into the scene, edit, and apply)
– Removed duplicate stack split UI prefab that was unused and moved background image into folder with the real UI
– Updated stack split UI icons with the current gold and xp artwork
– Fix inconsistent right click tooltip instruction text size
– Fix actor tooltip giivng right click to sell text for unsellable items
– Bought and added new comic style font
– Shortened a lot of skill descriptions to fit the new font sizing in the spell upgrade UI
– Tweaked a ton of text positioning across all UIS
– Added support for sprite text icons to properly position themselves when the parent text has an anchor other than middle left/center/right
– Tweaked the “Beta” title screen artwork to use new font and use outlines
– Tweaked cinematic screen width because there seems to be a bug in the sprite text lines with the new font (probably because of yOffsetCorrection)
– Added support for optional field of sprite font text asset that compensates for what I perceive as wont font y positioning, should contact Brady about this
– Hacked the pickup item world pos so it doesn’t look wierd for a player with a spear or other large height bounds
– FontManager is now instanced from prefab
– Tweaked inventory slot quantity size and value text positioning with currency icon positions to work with new font
– Removed essentaially all references for the “small font”
– Tooltips now have a globa size multiplier in TooltipManager
– Fixed incorrect tooltip sizing for rank effect information for the second set of rank effects of an item displayed in the spell upgrade ui
– Deleted a bunch of old font prefab data that is no longer needed
– Fix crash when dragging and dropping in town due to assumed map being present in WorldToMap coord function
– Added MeshExtensions with Mesh.ContainsPoint2d( … ) with all the needed code to to polygon and polygon+pixel picking using barycentric coordinates for UV interpolation
– Marked several textures as “readable”, this is going to cause more memory unfortunately and needs a mobile solution to turn it off and not use it in the pixel uv picking code
– Swiched cell finding of the formost actor to use Actor.DrawableContains( … ) instead of using the actor world bounds
– Switched spine controller bounds calculcation to use the already calculated bounds in the mesh instead of doing it all ourselves
– Added member for and access to the last mesh used for a skeleton renderer
– Fixed “world point to cell coord” calculations so that cell offsets are now considered in the pick correlation properly making clicking on floor diamond surfaces near pixel perfect with the artwork.
– Added Triangle2D helper class
– Fix for world bounds of spine objects to properly consider skinned mesh attachments
– Edit spine world vertex calculations to return the number of vertices loaded into the array, this will allow for proper inclusion of these attachments in world bounds computations (coming in next changelist)
– New artwork for the Antarit Token, it’s now an orb and is called the “Eye of Antarit”
– Updated dialog for Dungeon Intro to refer to the eye of antarit and the fact it’s an orb and not a key
– Fix crash when enterting town with follower due to trying to make them vulnerable when no tiled map was present
– Added Actor.Status.VisibiiltiyFullActive, when set the actor visibility calculation will be “full visibility” as long as the actor is active in it scene hierarchy
– GhostFormModifier now sets the new visibility status bit on its owner
– Removed hack for interact/dialog validating that was “allow invisible”
– Added prefabs and code for “Ghost Form Modifier”
– Added ghost form visuals using a flocking animator
– Flock animator and it’s boids can now have sprite effects that are linked to the lights on an actor as well as a custom override color for the particles and sprite
– Actor.IsInteractAllowed( … ) now has s set of bit flags to allow invisible and dead actors
– Added support to Dialog to allow dead and invisible participants (for ghost form tutorial)
– Added tutorial entry and dialog for when a follower first dies
– Followers are no longer invulnerable in level of rank 2+
– Added Actor.Status.BoundsBlockingDisabled
– Footsteps are no longer played if the wardrobe is hidden
– Actor.Resurrect( … ) now automatically removes ghost form mods if present
– Cleaned up the virtual API for modifier so that subclases can use onModiferEnabled( … )
– Added Actor.BlocksCell( … )
– Removed old ghost spawning on follower death
– Restricted finding a melee weapons for AIs if the actor is not alive, this prevents ghost form actors from bashing barrels
– Added Wardrobe.GetGhostFormColor( … )
– Added LevelPrototype.BossLevel flag, followers die for less time on these levels
– Debug menu now handles ghosts when killing followers
– Fix vault crash when opening up UI
– Disabling combat immunity affixes, they are too deadly … we’ll create resistance ones later
– Freeze damage up
– Put back the material recipes at the cauldron
– Materials are no longer allowed to go into the vault because the inventory is now on the player and would otherwise be a valid place to store materials when in battle as skills by default check for it and drain actors from it
– Moved the vault inventory from the vault actor into the player actor, this way when the player is in a dungeon we can look at the vault inventory contents when we need to determine if we’re allowed to drop vendor upgrade resources to get the correct count of eminent ranks to use to decide if we can drop more upgrade resources.
– Fixed quake audio playing way too many smashes
– Changed quake on hit effect to use smoke jump puff
– QuakeAudioVisual is now “Quake Glow Light” and has had the audio separated out as a different prefab, both are dded via custom effect in skill data
– Removed audio sources from quake on hit and glow prefabs
– Moved silence and invisibility cast effects into custom skill effect data
– ModifierSkill now executes on hit effects, this is necessary for the Yeti breath attack to always do a visual, even if the target is immune to freeze
– ModifierSkills now use in world action text if their target is immune to the modifier we want to put on them
– Sentinels are no longer immune to freeze
– Removed unimpleneted colorize calls from Freeze modifier
– Removed spammy log from Packed sprite for no implemented animatable freeze call
– Fix spell upgrade UI not displaying next level info when it should
– Freeze now puts an actor in front and behind of the target for the cystals effect
– Add the vendor upgrade resources Sledgehammer, Anvil, and gemstones
– Limit upgrade resource drop when the target buildable would already be at max level
– Added hot keys to toggle the HUD and combat damage on/off
– Cell selectors, noties, and xp UIs are now never displayed in video recording mode
– Fix spell upgrade effects z sorting
– CanUpgradeSpell() now always considers the max spell level even if “ignore requirements” is passed in because the max level is a intrinsic property, not a requirement
– Fixed spell upgrade UI showing the “next” effects for spells at beyond the max level of 30