Greetings Wizards,

We’re excited to announce that Rogue Wizards will be on the show floor at Pax West in Seattle Washington September 2-5, 2016! If you’re going to be at the show stop by our pod in the Pax Rising area. We’ve never been to Pax as either an exhibitor or a fan … the show looks like a ton of fun and it’d be great to meet some of you.

Showing at Pax in Seattle WA, September 2-5, 2016

Even though much of July has been spent preparing our promotional materials for Pax, that doesn’t mean we haven’t been able to get some good stuff into the game too. Last week we released into the beta the “Gauntlet” game mode. This option is available when starting a new game and contains only pure dungeon crawl with an ever increasing difficulty and only one life … ya know, the more traditional game mode for any rogue-lke game 🙂

Gauntlet Game Mode

In early July we received an anonymous in game feedback item from a Kickstarter backer wanting to see some game stats and something like a high score board to give players something to work towards during replays. With the introduction of the Gauntlet game mode it made a lot of sense to put this in there now but we also decided to do it for all game modes. Now when you beat the story mode or die in any permadeath mode, game stats are displayed on screen and that player may be inducted into the “Hall of Fame” for the current game mode

Game Stats and the Hall of Fame

Below are the full list of changes from July.

Major Changes

• New “Gauntlet” game mode, a hardcore game mode of just pure dungeon crawl
• Added local “Hall of Fame” high score board for Gauntlet, Story (Normal), and Story (Hard) game modes
• Quest destinations are now automatically made available via the travel map, there is no need to visit the Inn to inspect and accept quests
• Level cap effectively removed
• Story mode progression is now based on dungeon count instead of player XP, it’s far easier to balance and ensure players don’t level up too fast and miss any content
• “Magic plasma” style environments are procedurally colored and available in Gauntlet games
• Sticky Blobs are now called Acid Blobs, and their replicating goo now deals damage instead of halting movement
• All Kickstarter backers which have been animated in the game now appear as random NPCs in Gauntlet mode

Minor Changes

• Portals to Guild Wizard boss rooms now have plasma effects, unique colors, and a stone dragon skull overlooking the doorway
• Added custom mouse cursor artwork
• Vendors now appear in level chains that have only 2 level instances
• Tutorial tips on/off menu is now in the Home->Settings menu and is no longer a debug only setting
• The spell tree is now accessible from the paper doll so you can upgrade spells while in a dungeon
• Game stats and hall of fame UIs are now automatically presented when completing story mode or upon permadeath
• Experience bar now set to full when at max level
• Tempest is now limited to 3 live eggs total and only tosses 1 at a time
• Increased the egg hatch time
• Tweaked secondary tooltip selection logic to prefer weapons matching the same handedness (1h vs 1h and 2h vs 2h)
• Wandering merchants no longer ever refill their inventory and their loot quality has been decreased some
• Waypoints are no longer usable, but give give players a tutorial when clicked on the first time
• Overseer wall now does damage
• AI now better selects randomly between multiple targets for attacks or movement decisions
• Removed the difficulty settings on quests, they are all generated at a balanced difficulty rank now through the whole storyline
• New audio settings UI with music and sound effects volume sliders

Fixes

• Fix vampire style enchantments generating at 0 health returned to the user
• Shields that have enchantments that give xp when you are damaged no longer do so if the shield blocked all the incoming damage
• Fixed enemy health bar incorrectly showing empty in some rare cases
• Fixed a case of not being able to load a portion of some old save game levels
• Fixed Skeleton Lord raising dead skeletons in locations that were blocked by something else
• Fixed boss death ceremony camera zooms going to the wrong location when the boss was killed with something that moved him around like singularity or quake
• Fix Shield Others effects sometimes not showing up from Guardians
• Fixed NPC conversations happening in dungeons when the entire party is not on the screen