Thanksgiving Build

 Labyrinths of Elfhame was largely inspired by Thanksgiving LAN parties with my family growing up, so I try to put out a build every Thanksgiving. The main feature I’ve been working towards since June (tutorials and single player specific content) isn’t quite finished yet. However there are still a bunch of improvements, bug fixes, and features that have been added over the past few months that I’m excited to share.

More of the improvements this time are under the hood and not exactly player visible. However over time as the single player content is built the changes over the last few months will become very apparent.

I’m exporting the MacOS build from Linux, which means that the build isn’t able to work on every MacOS device. For more information please read more here: https://itch.io/docs/itch/integrating/platforms/macos.html

Patch Notes:

UI:

• Added a UI element that shows each player’s currently selected tower. There was a lot of trial and error that went into this, but from playtest it’s helped reduce the cognitive load of players even further and freed up mental time to focus on the most important part of the game: maze layouts.
• Added a stats page that shows at the end of every game that breaks down damage and kills by player.
• Added a spinning “Essence” crystal that establishes at a glance player color, and follows the same “bounce” animation that the essence value text does.

General Gameplay:

• There was a bug where if an enemy died the frame after a projectile targeting it died the projectile would spawn on top of the tower and not fly away. Now there’s a function that checks during the first few frames of each projectile that there’s an enemy to target, and towers deal damage more consistently. Especially when more enemies are dying quickly.
• Added player color selection on the character select screen with the bumpers (the same input as changing selected towers). This change has increased player expression so much, and really has helped the game feel less strict in what each player can do. In turn this color cascades down to so many different gameplay elements I’m really happy about.
• DIFFERENT ENEMY LAYOUTS DEPENDING ON THE MAP. This has been a long time coming, and I’m so glad it’s here. The larger two maps have much more difficult waves since players can build much higher damage mazes in the space given.

Enemies:

• Added two new enemies named “Big Demon” and “Speedy Ghost”. The Big Demon has 500 health and walks at the same speed as a Red Slime. The Speedy Ghost has as much health as the Pink Slime, but moves significantly faster. These two enemies drastically increase the level to which a maze can be stressed, since they can soak up damage and not spend hardly any time in any specific tower’s attack radius (which can be negated by finding one of the many different optimal maze layouts).