Labyrinths 4th Alpha

Hello!

I’m taking my game to a regional fighting game tournament to show off, and I thought it would be great to publish a build with all the changes over the past few months. Most of these are marginal improvements compared to past patches, but nonetheless they add even more polish to the game. There’s been quite a bit of behind the scenes implementation and design work to get the single player campaign working, but even then the existing multiplayer benefits from that work elsewhere.

General Gameplay:

• Added option to start waves early by walking to the beginning or end of the maze and pressing “A” between waves.
• Fixed a bug where a dialogue window popping up would leave preview lines and preview towers if a player was checking a new path
• This isn’t a bug fix, but something that would confuse new players. In the “check path/build” state, trying to build a tower when a player has insufficient essence no longer kicks them out of that state. Instead just showing a ping while leaving them in the build state.
• Path indicators in regular gameplay have been de-saturated and happen more often
• All players now have a placeholder asset with 8 way movement aside from Pitcairn who has something much closer to his final character design
• Removed “yield” statements from the code except where absolutely necessary. This has resulted in more consistent performance.
• Added a fifth map
• Updated Enemy health bars to be larger and more visible. They also only show after an enemy has taken damage for the first time to reduce screen clutter.

UI:

• Essence menu shows the name and cost of the currently selected tower to build at all times to reduce confusion on price. Leaving the price of something next to the essence menu means it’s been easier for newer players to compare that information.
• Essence menu has a text pop-up for when the player’s ability is ready
• End-of-game stats menu shows kills, essence gained, essence spent, towers built, towers removed, critical hits, and damage dealt for all players.
• A contextual prompt will show when standing over a tower to “show info” urging players to view tower stats and their range indicator. When standing at the beginning or end of a maze between waves it will change to say “Start Wave”
• Further reduced size of wave timer to give more screen real estate to gameplay, especially on smaller screens
• In the first wave of the tutorial, the path length is shown as a fraction to give a constant reminder of what the start condition is. I find it hilarious how players have been conditioned by other games to just skip all the dialogue in tutorials and figure it out themselves, only to be absolutely lost. Rather than changing the dialogue system here, a little bit of contextual information is what I’m trying for now.

Balance changes:

• All towers now have a base 5% crit chance. This means towers access their crit multiplier 5 times as often (approximately 1/20 attacks), and the Lord of Blades tower is less reliant on Pack Hunters to be effective in co-op.

Jezebel:

• The Lord of Blades now adds +5% crit chance in addition to its crit multiplier, freeing Jezebel players up to not rely so much on their Pack Hunters
• Queen’s Chosen reduces attack speed by 10. While I want them to be powerful, I want tier 4 towers to not be the exclusive win condition. Especially in conjunction with accumulating death marks a conditional nerf to attack speed results in some interesting late game choices for Jezebel that just didn’t exist before.

Icarus:

• Updraft Tower now has a proper idle animation