v1.2 - BLOOD ON THE GRID
Leyliner 1.2 (BLOOD ON THE GRID) Patch Notes
It's our first major release since 7DRL!
Here's our plan in a nutshell. We expect to work solely on mechanics for at least a year. During this time, we won't be prioritizing art or polish. We're mostly focused on cleaning up tech debt from 7DRL and building a foundation for further progress. The game may be very unbalanced and buggy! But we'll really appreciate feedback during this time.
We hope this version is a fun distraction and may occupy an afternoon or two but keep in mind we have a much larger game in mind.
What's New
Starter Decks
Each color choice now comes with its own reworked starter decks. We think these starter cards are more fun than before, but also strictly less powerful than the cards you can gain later. You won't see starter cards show up in attunes.
Equipment
Equipment loot has been added to the game to enhance your power (spell power, health, defense, and attack) as well as new UI to track these augments!
Sequential Animations
Chained animations now occur in sequence to add clarity to spells, status effects, and turn order.
Deck Viewer
You can now view your discard, draw pile, and entire deck whenever you like. Full card display (instead of a text list) and working tooltips included.
New Blood Summons
- Blood Slinger: A ranged combatant with weak constitution.
- Blood Golem: As hearty as ever, now gains BERSERK stacks each time it attacks.
- Blood Droplet: A blind hunter who needs a scent to follow but moves very fast, sometimes even leaping over enemies if need be.
- Blood Polyp: Similar to before but starts out wounded with higher max hp, so it can benefit from healing right away.
- Blood Clot: A weaker version of Blood Polyp that beginner hemomancers have in their starter decks.
New Statuses
- Vigor: Target gains +2 healing from all sources per stack.
- Scent: Globally unique, all blood droplets will hunt and prioritize this target.
Balancing
- Player starting HP reduced from 50 to 30.
- No more heart pickups. Instead you can get some bonus HP from gear.
- Monster health and spell damage has been largely rebalanced.
What's Changed
Invoke
We heard you: invoke was too powerful. So we toned it down a bit in this version. While invoke is likely to continue changing as the game evolves, it currently carries much of the weight of the more deckbuildery cards for now.
OLD: 0 cost, generate 2 mana, draw 1
NEW: 1 cost, generate 3 mana, draw 1
Chroma Engine
Chrome Engine has gone up in cost (0=>1), which is a big nerf.
Blood Healing
Blood healing has changed from percentile to flat healing of 2. Some blood units start with the new status Vigor, which augments healing even further.
Allies Stepping On Your Mana
Allies often pace about while waiting for a path to open up when other allies are in the way, now they'll be more careful where they step and try not to idle their way into your leylines of mana.
Illuminated / Eclipsed
Illuminated and Eclipsed now stack, but each stack is reduced in effectiveness.
Bosses
Bosses now destroy all glass items (potions, hourglasses, glass keys) upon waking from stasis. They also drop a glass key instead of a talisman and they wake up much faster.
This gives you an incentive to either fight the boss quickly or grab items before they go away.
What Else?
New Title Screen!
Courtesy of and Credit to Zyalin!
Misc changes
Items are hidden when monsters step on them.
X cost cards can't be cast with 0 mana
Now displaying targeting on 0-range cards when hovering them (since they auto-cast on click).
Misc Bug Fixes
Burning description now mentions it stacks.
Fixed an issue with thunderbolt sometimes not generating mana.
Blood no longer double heals sometimes.
Music now toggles on/off correctly and default music volume has been turned down a lot.
Fix browser control issues like copy & paste, reload, etc sometimes not working.
Free move no longer occasionally highlights as a result of getting hit.
Leyliner hp now updates when they hit themselves with a spell.
Placed mana now always has step on behavior – even when near the exit.
Berserk now uniformly uses the english spelling and not occasionally the traditional norse spelling.
Fixed health bar displaying incorrectly at 1hp.
Fixed mana occupying other spaces (namely items/consumables)
Fixed softlock when there was no more room to place mana.
Fixed a bug with Viewing cards during placement that resulting in automatically placing yourself when closing that menu.
Attune borders no longer disappear.
Fixed staircase sometimes generating so it disconnected the rest of the level. Twice.
Fixed projectile spells going through walls.
Comments
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Is the Windows version unavailable?
It's a web only game for now. We'll offer some downloads at some point in the future.
Awesome. I was confused by the mention of the zip filename.
I'm curious about the sequential animations. In your Roguelike Celebration "juice" talk, I remember you saying that was something you hadn't done yet and that it was really tricky. It's something I've considered as well, and decided not worth the effort for now. How'd you end implementing it? Any tips?
Great question! Exactly right, this is my first time really trying this technique out.
What we're doing is keeping an event queue (basically just an array with FIFO order... with some exceptions). The main driver behind this was the Chain Lightning spell, since we wanted to animate each chain separately (seen in the above gif). Some other examples of things we want delayed are player/ally/monster movement; it's nice to distinguish those in order
The one tricky part so far is that it turns out it's not simply enough to always put things on the end of the queue to be popped off the start. There may already be future events on the queue when we do the Chain Lightning for instance and we want all those parts of the spell to come before anything else. So we added a priority to events as well. I'm sure some other method would work equally well, like nested events or something like that.
It certainly seems easier than doing all game logic immediately and then trying to animate to pretend like the logic happened sequentially. So far I'm really happy with this direction. Hope that helps.
So the game state isn't updated immediately? Does that mean that it blocks player action now?
Game state is updated in sync with the animations. And currently yes it's blocking player action but that's not really inherent to this approach. In either case you can queue player inputs and speed up animations as the player plays faster. No need to block. That's probably what we'll do eventually... It's less of a priority because there's no need to play super fast in Leyliner.
Makes sense. Though if unblocked, seems like there could be some timing weirdness with UI (like if game state affects the UI based on what actions are valid). Not sure if that's applicable at all to Leyliner, just thinking through my own games. Anyways, looking good! Thanks for the insight