Heyyo, CraftedCircuitry again. This is kind of a rest week for me, so I tried to only a little work on Deep Dark Wrath(but it ended up being a good chunk).

v0.4.2

The Pathfinding I added last devlog was actually pretty balanced, I just programmed it unknowingly to be able to pathfind from anywhere. I fixed that and I’ll still choose to add it more sparingly rather than give it to each enemy for now.

The Ending Cutscene is now finalized and I think I’m happy with it so far. It’s not perfect, but I think it conveys the ending that I want for this game. Maybe it’ll be easier for me to build off of it in the future? Who knows.

v0.4.3 - Balancing

I haven’t actually finished the game’s story on my own save file. I did the usual dev cheat to test things out, of course. But it’s genuinely been pretty tough so I’ve been in a weird state of limbo between ‘should I tone down the difficulty’ or ‘should I not?’. I’ve decided to add some Angered-only enemies in key places, added more spawners, removed or re-arranged other spawners, and a big one, nerf some enemy stats. I did the nerfing so that the balancing would take Angered state in mind. I honestly thought, ‘one-shots at the end should be fine. right?’ And after some Oracle Runs(with lots of failures mind you), it was just way too cheap so I decided to tone some of them down.

The Player’s Zoom was a little bit of a big change I wasn’t really expecting. I moved it from 3 to 3.2 to help get more screen for the Player to react better. It’s very small but the change felt massive. With this I also moved around the HUD Bars slightly, moved the Stamina and Health a small amount downwards and moved the Regen Uses entirely to the left of the screen.

I also added some other small changes, like trees becoming transparent when the player or an enemy goes near it, and a ‘win-more’ mechanic once you’ve reached a certain amount of Oracle Pieces.

Because of these changes, I plan to also remake some of the photos and videos on the game, especially once the game releases. I’ve started re-doing the screenshots on the itch Page.

New Cover Again?

I did another pass on the New Cover as even I couldn’t see the New Cover while I scrolled through the Dungeon Crawlers tag. With the new atmosphere of v0.4 helping to show the title more, and an actual campfire GIF, I think the latest Cover is better now.

I also did a minor makeover to the itch.io Page, making it slightly sleeker, updated the screenshots with the v0.4 atmosphere, the Player Zoom change, the HUD Changes, and making more bullet points to get the game’s point across quicker and easier.

The Future

I’ll come back and get more done for the game next week. These little incremental changes are pretty plentiful as I polish up the Full Version. Anyways, this has been CraftedCircuitry, signing off for now.