Hey all!

This week, we’ve added a couple of new floors to the Arcade Mode, based on the Flying Fortress. This has opened up some interesting enemy combinations, as well as challenges (such as perfect guard training and bullet hell dodging). Here’s a screen of an outside room on the 7th floor:

Apart from that, we’re also trying out an updated way of showing damage numbers. We’ve gotten feedback from many testers that say it’s sometimes a bit difficult to see if you take damage during chaotic fighting because the damage numbers look the same regardless if they come from an enemy or a player.

To mitigate this, we’ve made the color of enemy damage white, and kept the player damage red. Since shield damage used to be gray, we’ve changed those to blue! It’s a bit weird at first when you’re used to the old system, but after a while it feels okay again :P

Fred has been getting into the holiday mood by continuing to animate the frosty friend! Below is a charged up version of the summon. Not as cute, but packs more of a punch!

Howdy neighbor!

This week we’ve continued the effort to fill out all the empty spots in the skill trees (or skill planes), and have two to show off!

The first one is called Dodging Strike, a skill we hope will further increase the nimble feeling of the one handed route. When you press the skill button, you immediately dash backwards, landing in the charge stance several paces away. When you release the button, you will rush forward to your initial position, damaging anything in your way.

Click to view an animated gif!

It doesn’t do much good to just use it randomly and attack enemies that come near though. The base damage is pretty meager, and the cost and charge time for higher levels are both high. However, if you successfully dodge an attack with the backdash, the attack will become empowered. You will deal bonus damage, your charge speed is doubled and the cost for higher charge levels are greatly reduced. In a sense, it’s a bit like the perfect guard.

The second hasn’t been implemented yet, but Fred has animated pretty much everything it needs. It’s called Frosty Friend and is the third and final summoning spell we’ve got planned for the game. It’s also the only summon that physically partake in combat! That is, it will move around fighting enemies, and it can be attacked by enemies as well.

Since it works very differently from the cloud or the plants, we still have to work out some details. For instance, how smart it should be, what kind of control the player should have, its engagement range and, perhaps most importantly, what should happen when the creature is defeated. We’re considering to either give it a set timer for how long it will remain incapacitated, or using the same resurrection system that we have in multiplayer (an ally must stand next to your ghost for 5 seconds).

Needless to say, it’s going to be interesting to implement, and there’s a lot of design details we will have to figure out after we’ve tried it out in game!

Apart from the occasional GUI assets, Vilya has been keeping up with the portrait makeover, giving many of the main story characters an updated look:

As some of you might have noticed, and most of you probably didn’t, we didn’t post any recap last week! The reason was we wanted to wait with urging beta testers to revisit the beta until a hotfix addressing some issues became live at Desura. Due to some system error, this took a whole week, and so it came to pass that we didn’t post the update. Here it is, though!

For those of you who’re in the beta, the Arcade Mode was recently added and is in dire need of first impressions, feedback and bug hunting! We’ve already gotten some good feedback from early bird testers, but we’re eager to get more. To that end, we’ll invite a bunch more people to the beta in a day or so!

Apart from tinkering with the beta update, we’ve also added a brand new two handed skill, which for now goes under the poetic code name Smash!

Click the image for an animated version!

Basically, it’s a powerful swing which deals damage and propels enemies away! The bulk of the damage does not lie in the initial smack, however. Any enemies struck by a launched creature will take double damage, and if a launched enemy hits a wall, it will take a lot of additional damage as well!

In other words, this is a skill which require great care of positioning to use effectively, but if you master it the damage potential is huge. Also, you have to take enemy sizes into consideration. Heavier enemies require a higher charge level to be launched, and will only take the initial damage if you can’t send them flying!

Now that most new GUI elements have been taken care of, Vilya is back in portrait land and has been making portraits for some new characters:

To round things off, here’s a spinning insect which we can’t wait to frustrate players with: