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Hello everyone, time for the (not so) monthly dev blog of April May June!!

You are welcome to share your application at [email protected]


The current focus for Update 1.1 is the addition of many new content elements—a ton of small things that the game definitely needs. This means there will be no new World Rank.

A big issue in the game currently is that many runs just end up with very similar builds. There simply aren’t enough cards in the game. It's not unusual for a run in High Rank to end up having only Tainted cards by the 4th or 5th zone.
Especially now that there are a lot of small mechanics to allow players to more accurately target the cards they want, adding more cards to the game should avoid bloating the card pool too much.

The current target for the update is the addition of hundreds of new soulcards, doubling the number of different events you can encounter, a few dozen additional artifacts, as well as reworked challenges.


So far, a huge part of the work has been focused on expanding the capabilities of the game...

One of the biggest changes development-wise is the upgrade from Unity 2022 to Unity 6.1.

Changing engine versions is not a casual change that you want to do all the time...
To be honest, it's something you usually don’t want to do at all. Upgrading engine versions usually creates issues that you have to fix (and with this one, I had quite a few issues that took me a bit of time to fix).

But doing so has its benefits, which is why I spent the time to do it!

First off are performance improvements
(Unity 6 has better visual effect batching, better draw call handling, and better performance on DX12/Vulkan compared to Unity 2022)
From preliminary measurements, I noticed reduced CPU lag spikes and slightly improved GPU performance.

Another reason is new tools for future development.
Notably, Shader Graph for UI or the support of custom HLSL nodes for Shader Graph
(and oh boy, that allows me to fix all the issues damage number scaling could have)

Another big rework is the code for how statistics were calculated.
Until now, there were three hardcoded "layers/steps" used to calculate stats: the "Base" stats, the "Multiplier," and the "Post," with the final value being equal to "Base" × "Multiplier" + Post.
However, while this allowed handling many different cases, it was still lacking flexibility for a lot of situations.

I'll explain two examples that are common in the game—effects that increase one stat based on another.

Hermes Hood is an artifact that increases your attack speed multiplier based on your movement speed multiplier.
However, at which point do I take the value? Because doing so during the stat calculation could result in incomplete results. And what if later on there’s another effect scaling from attack speed?

Until now, the game used a "hack" where during stat calculation (after picking a card), the game would create a fake step that happens after the multiplier but before the post (called "Late Multiplier"), but it was still added to the "Multiplier" of attack speed.
The issue with this is that it only grabbed the value during the stat calculation, and other effects that might use "dynamic modifiers" wouldn’t be properly updated.

Transmutation cards are also another example of conversion cards.
These grabbed the Base × Multiplier value of a stat, and then applied the change to Post.
But it led to a few issues (like the impossibility for conversion cards to scale off Post values, or some bugs that some players experienced with health being set to 1 for a frame).

The new system now has dynamically defined "Layers." Each layer has an order and a type (additive/multiplicative).
A layer keeps different values like the default value of a layer, its current static value, the dynamic value due to modifiers, as well as the final value of the layer.
In addition, a statistic remembers the actual value and static value after each step (for example, getting the value of a statistic after Base × Multiplier without recalculating it every time).

I’ve also added 2 new layers: Late Multiplier (used for now only by Hermes Hood) and Conversion (used by transmutation/stat conversion).

Here is a simplified graph of how statistics now work:
The game uses a lot of "Events" to allow many modifications to effect behaviors.
For example, an event is created anytime an enemy takes damage. Then anything in the game can hook into the event and modify parameters (like disable damage if time is lower than 5 sec), when an ability is activated, when a card is picked up, when the player levels up...
This also allows the game to be heavily modified/customized by modders.

I’ve spent some time expanding the number of events. Recent additions include:
- During soulcoin calculation (to allow more complex modification to the soulcoin formula)
- When buying anything in the shop
- When entering or leaving a shop
- When calculating player level for card/artifact effects
- When checking if an item can be dropped
- When the player gains experience

In addition, I’ve also expanded other functionalities outside of the events system, by allowing equipment to be separately locked, having separate item efficiency per slot...

This kind of change allows for new artifacts such as this:
(Artifact sprite and name are placeholders)

While there is nothing functional to the player yet, a lot of preparation work has been done to support custom run parameters in the future, allowing players to apply any stat modifiers they want or enable any challenge at any level.

While all these backend improvements don’t add new content or anything exciting to show (which is partly why this dev blog is more than one month late), they are important to allow the game to improve in the long term.

Well, enough with the boring stuff—here are the new shinies:

A new type of shop, unlocked by investing enough into the shopkeeper, can sometimes appear naturally in A-rank runs.
Only sells items that you cannot obtain otherwise (other avatar-exclusive weapons/cards, banned cards, and Limit Breaks).
Prices will quickly scale based on the player’s total gold.

Similar to equipment loadouts, this allows multiple talent loadouts for each avatar, making talent swapping between runs less of a hassle.
The only drawback of this great addition is that saves are not backward compatible (which means once the beta is out, you won't be able to load your save if you return to the main branch).

This allows you to pin any card in the encyclopedia during a run and have them (or their components) highlighted during card selection.
When the pinned card is picked up, it is automatically unpinned.
(The reason is that cards usually have a much higher drop chance once picked at least once, so it's usually less of an issue finding them again.)

I'm not excluding the possibility of upgrades that increase the chance of pinned cards appearing.

The recent Unity 6 upgrade also allows for better visual effects related to the UI.
The first place to benefit from it is the card selection menu, with Banishment, Rarity Reroll, and Reroll now having a little bit of "juiciness" added.

I teased a few new artifacts earlier, and some are now added to the game.
These artifacts were made by Fernanda, who is now helping me create content for the game. I trust her a lot with content—she’s played a *lot* of the game (likely more than 99.9% of players) and has a very good grasp of the game mechanics and balancing.

Here are a few (again, sprite and name are placeholders):

Challenges are an important aspect of the game, and their capabilities have greatly evolved since their first implementation back in 0.7.
The issue is that many of the early game challenges were made back then and barely received any changes. While they were fine at that time, with the current content, they feel mostly shallow since they’re mostly just "here is a small change that barely affects your run."

1.1 will change some of these challenges to make them a more unique experience that adds variety to the game. One such change is the Cursed Challenge (D-rank).

Now, an unkillable & unstoppable ghost will spawn and slowly follow you. Being in contact with the ghost will quickly damage you.
Additionally, on each level-up, you'll gain a random Cursed card. Each cursed card you gain will slightly speed up the ghost.
To help manage the cursed cards, new events are added that allow you to get rid of them.
This challenge will, in addition to what is already unlocked, also add new events (and event options) to remove cursed cards in the game (allowing new events that add cursed cards as a drawback).

1.1 will also add new challenges—particularly to Survivors Mode, which definitely lacks challenges for C+ ranks.
Two of them are "Kill’s Them Up," which basically turns the game into a side-scroller,
and "Infinite Descent," a super late-game challenge for veterans looking to spice up A-rank Survivors Mode.

(yes, spoiling a B-rank Hardmode rog challenge)

Some challenges will now also add variations to stage selection, with a few of them enabling rain!

There are a lot of smaller things that got changed/improved, but it would take too long to speak about all of them (and there’s a bit of fun in keeping a few surprises).
So here are a few additional spoilers while you wait for the beta of 1.1
(which will be out when it’s ready—there’s still way too much to improve to give an ETA for the next beta)