Heyyo, it’s CraftedCircuitry again. Now that the Free Demo has been released(check it out if you haven’t btw xD), I can apply full force on polishing the Full Version of Deep Dark Wrath. I’ve also taken a few days to get some rest and do some marketing on the socials I use.

New Cover

It’s been something that slightly irked me for a while. The lines are nice as the background for the page, but I really wanted something with more substance that will grab more attention. So I put the Campfire GIF I liked so much and put the Game Title there. Presto, new cover that I really, really like. It kind of gives a bit of an Exanima vibe.

V0.4

The Meat of the Update, the juice and the art. One of my main polishes that I am aiming for is the 2nd pass of the art inside the game. I got some of the tilesets like the Forest finally fixed. I also aimed to make the Dark-part of the game more apparent, making the light circle of the Player smaller and making the top overhanging walls not affected by some lights.

Chipped Enemy Sprites were also added. I wanted to give the Player a bit more info on how much HP the enemy may still have so these chipped enemies tell that the enemy is close to its defeat. I’ve also added more juice to enemy spawning via animations.

I also focused on balancing and tried to look up dungeon crawlers and see how they did their balance of their harder dungeons. One of the final enemies would have actually one-shotted the player, so I decided to lower it so it incentivizes the use of defensive Cards like Intimidation and Armor to let the player take a hit. It would still have the potential to one-shot but it makes the player have more decisions on how they’ll go about their Dungeon Runs.

In addition, I also boosted the amount of enemies, especially adding stronger ones in early areas when the Wrath is angered.

Enemy Pathfinding was also added for v0.4. A very nice little buff for some of the roaming and chasing enemies. I decided to do something a little weird with it and sprinkle them here and there, rather than everything having access to it. It helps me because I’m lazy(hehe xD) but it does make even the early Forest area become pretty deadly even without Wrath.

This is a whole new balancing issue I’d have to work on, so I might finalize how much to add in the next few weeks. But I’m glad that most of the functionality of it is working with just a few tweaks. Maybe it’s just feature creep? Maybe I can fine-tune and perfect it too.

Fixing the bugs of the Free Demo was also done during this week. There wasn’t much feedback, so I just did the bug finding on my own and tried to fix the Enchanted Compendium and Zoom bugs.

I’m excited for the end of the game. At first I thought that the reward at the end is kinda meh, but with some new changes, I can definitely say the reward is very strong and worth it.

The Future

Polishing and full completion is going smoothly for the most part. I’m still contemplating a bit on these next steps of selling the game. Let me know your thoughts if you have any in the Comments below.

Again, if you haven’t and if you’re interested, go try out Deep Dark Wrath’s demo! This has been CraftedCircuitry, signing off for now.