Beta 1: Clarity and Tower mode

Developer commentary:

I'm beyond excited to finally say Clairvoyance is in a beta state. It's been 3 years of work (even if most of it overlapped with my time in college), and it is easily the largest project I have ever created. It is no doubt my magnum opus at this point in my life. I have learned so much along the way, from programming to team management to music to marketing.

There's no strict definition of what "beta" means, but typically it means everything is pretty much locked down from a big picture perspective. The only major work left is balance and polish. I'll still be adding content along the way, but the content will be more of what's already here, rather than new gameplay systems. For example, I could add new characters or enemy types, but I won't be adding anything like meta-progression or a level editor. At least, not for the forseeable future.

Anyway, I want to spend the rest of this describing the final new gameplay systems.

I've always wanted each character to express themselves through gameplay. The player is controlling a person with distinct values and personalities. Clarity is meant to be an abstract measure of how well your character has been able to express and ground themselves in who they truly are, through the "virtues" I designated. Each virtue has a unique way to act upon it. Every character values each virtue differently. For example, the Acolyte gains far more clarity from knowledge, while the brawler gains more from domination. These virtues are explained in more depth below in the patch notes.

Your clarity level scales your clairvoyance. Clarity represents the metaphysical or philosophical type of "soft" power in game through foresight and spatial sense. It provides little direct combat power, but instead lets you circumvent threats and plan your actions in advance. Gene mods embody the physical, mechanical, scientific levels of "hard" power, giving you deadly and unstoppable augmentations but lowers your clarity. This now creates multiple viable gameplay paths, from high clarity transcendants, to heavily augmented transhumans, to balanced hybrids.

Trials mode began as a generic "tower challenge" idea, but it evolved into a sandbox for all sorts of wacky and fun ideas for experimental content didn't really fit anywhere else. It wouldn't be entirely inaccurate to describe it as a testing grounds for potential new gameplay additions, but it is still a fully fledged game mode in itself with replayable hand-crafted challenges that are reminiscent of traditional "level by level" games.

-Dan

"Clarity" mechanic

-Clarity acts simultaneously as a currency and a power statistic

-Having more clarity increases foresight and spatial sense, with diminishing returns.

-Taking a gene mod lowers clarity by a certain amount.

-You start with 0 clarity, the baseline amount. When clarity drops to -1000, you no longer have any clairvoyance. It goes up to infinity, to a limit of doubling your clairvoyance.

-6 ways to earn clarity, based on what your character values

-domination: by killing an enemy if they did not manage to land even one hit on you.

-knowledge: for every new room you discover on the map.

-wealth: every time you obtain an item.

-expression: by landing 3 different moves in a row. Resets if you get hit or repeat a move.

-ambition: by killing boss enemies.

-freedom: by entering a new room you haven't already been in.

"Trials" mode

-Series of unique replayable challenges

-New challenges:

-Spider-men: fight hordes of tiny enemies that inflict poison.

-Iron Mike: defeat an extrmeely deadly boxer

-Vampire Hunt: your health drains over time, but you have maxed out lifesteal.

-Karate Tournament: first to land a strike wins the round. Defeat the bracket and become champion!

-Dojo Storm: Your school has been attacked by a rival dojo. You and your students must defend yourselves!

Gameplay

-Increased balance scaling from flat to cubed of fighter height

-Increased head movement speed across the board by approximately 25%

-Decreased default knockdown damage from 20% of max HP to 10% of max HP since stomping is now more powerful

-Story mode spawning has smaller delays between enemy groups

-Story mode map generation makes it such that rooms have more guards the closer to the exit the node is

-Story mode heal action requires a morphine shot to use, but now heals the same as a morphine instead of 33% of max HP.

-All foresight stats have been increased by approximately 33%

-Arcade mode now starts at 1 enemy, increases 1 total enemy per level until level 4 where it increases by 2 enemies per level

Other

-Fixed a bug with attack validity that made enemies far slower in their decision making than intended

-Reset data for real button brings you back to the main menu

-Updated settings menu layout

-Everything that was meant to be unlockable is now unlockable