Please note that most of those features were highly requested by the players, on Feature Upvote, our Discord Server, Steam forums and Reddit! We have the best community in the world, and keep sending us your feedback and suggestions! <3
Character customization – Be whoever you want to be.
Being able to rename your Heroes was probably one of the MOST requested features sent to us. And, as some of you already knew from Discord/Reddit, it was also a request we had foreseen (I guess we have a Seer in our game dev Haven!) and thus already planned for “soon enough after the release”.
However, only being able to personalize a Hero’s name is nowhere near the amount of customization frenzy we envisioned for TLS, so we geared up and prepared a full-fledged character customization system! Now, at any moment during your run, you will be able to modify everything and anything about your Heroes: name, appearance, color palettes, individual facial features…
You can hand-pick everything manually or use one of the several Randomization options offered (be it per feature or more global ones).
And we even devised an additional VERY nice feature. Thanks to our devs' magic, you will be able to share your favorite portraits with the use of an in-game Code. Basically, if you have a character that is SO cool you want to share it with the whole world, it will be VERY simple to do it!
Please keep in mind that, for now, this feature is limited to the Portraits Parts (the various facial features), and does NOT include the color palettes... We're currently investigating a potential remedy to overcome that limitation, so hopefully it may come a bit later!
We’ll probably organize some things related to that feature in the future, so stay tuned…
Last but not least, we also took that opportunity to add a few additional, more "funky" color palettes to our database. These palettes can be chosen by the standard procedural generation (please keep in mind these are random, not tied to any gameplay aspect!), albeit with a lower chance, and can also be picked freely within the Hero Customization interface.
Keyboard remapping
Here's another feature we've had in our backlog for a long time and actually taken into consideration at all time as an upcoming addition, but never found the time to implement into the game. As the public release was rushing towards us like a crawler towards the Magic Circle, we had to prioritize tying everything together.
We definitely want people to be able to setup their hotkeys however they want, as this is an incredible tool regarding accessibility – be it for preference/muscle memory purposes, or because some setup that seems perfectly coherent to us may fall completely flat for people with different needs, abilities, hardware, culture... you name it. And noticing that it was quite highly requested by players bumped this feature back into the top of our TODO-list.
Please note that only keyboard keys are remappable.
Screenshake + UI scale settings
One other requested feature is more options, especially regarding screenshakes and the size of the UI. Many players stated that they wanted to be able to the screenshakes. That’s now possible! What's more, you can actually tweak the strength of the screenshakes, so if you like them but they were a little too intense for your liking, just tone them down a little bit.
Now, regarding the size of the UI, we were actually aware that depending on your resolution, the UI size/ratio could end up being quite unpleasant. Truth is, despite many internal discussions during the development, we had been reluctant to add means to resize it at will because of artistic considerations: without going into details, the pixel art technique is beautiful but comes at the cost of a lot of constraints/limitations, especially when it comes to scaling (upscaling is painful, downscaling is outright hell...).
But hey, that's why your feedback is valuable, right? We admitted that the elephant was still in the room even though we wouldn't look at it (how comes?!), so we swallowed our pride and embraced the custom UI scaling. We still want to state that any value other than integer multipliers (x1-2-3) of the original UI size may end up with some UI elements losing quality, depending on your resolution.
On the other hand, most of the time it actually doesn't look as ugly as we were afraid it would, so... better for everyone, right?
Also, please note that the UI Scale slider adapts to your current resolution, meaning that the min/max values available will change if you change your resolution, to try and avoid really absurd values.
First run Tainted Essence
We listened, and heard your frustration regarding the feeling of not being rewarded properly during the first run. I'm going to be honest here: we tried to do a little something to alleviate the issue a bit and show you that we are indeed listening, but we know this most likely won't be The Perfect Solution™. Doing so will take much more time as it will require more analysis, design, development and fine-tuning.
The main issue is that TLS is a complex game, with a lot of mechanics, and we really wanted new players not to be too overwhelmed ; and as many of you guessed, this first run takes the role of the acting tutorial, and we need to control as accurately as possible both the amount of content already available to the player and how it will evolve at the end of this very first run. The only way this would change drastically is by completely revamping the early campaign and how this tutorial run is handled, which is definitely not impossible but a consequent enough challenge that will not be undertaken right now (at least not in a way that will leave it finished and available in a close future).
Anyways, without further ado, here's what we could change: from now on, the Essence reward for the first run isn't fixed to 500 no matter what, but instead is a portion of the Essences granted usually by the enemies killed. It will still be less impactful than a subsequent run, because we still need to control the player's progression a bit over this first run (acting tutorial, once again), but the rewards can still greatly vary depending on how long they managed to survive – we estimate that surviving the 2nd night will already net you a total a little bit over the previous 500, and surviving until the 5th night can grant a total of 2-2,500 Essences (so more than 4 times the current one!).
Keep the horde out!
We felt that the stone variant of the walls was a bit underwhelming: the enemies damage during the last few days (even Clawers start hitting quite hard!) combined with the loss of Vision when upgrading from Wooden to Stone didn't feel like it was viable to do so. We decided to bump their Health quite a bit as a compensation.
In addition, we also added a new, stronger Gate for the same reason! We did split the current, only Gate into a Wooden Gate and a Stone Gate: the Wooden Gate has a brand new visual, but otherwise retains all of the characteristics the old Gate had ; the Stone Gate keeps the old visual but gets to match its Stone counterparts' characteristics.
For technical reasons, any ongoing run loaded after this patch goes live will see their Gates replaced with Stone Gates directly.
Show the move range of all the enemies
Another one of the highly requested features: there's now a hotkey (default to [LeftAlt], but hey, one can remap their hotkeys now anyways!) that, while pressed, displays the aggregated move range of the entire horde. It can become quite hectic with all those enemies at once and their big move range, but knowledge is power.
Also, if you start using this regularly, this devious Runner/Crawler that made a habit of hiding behind a building to then the Magic Circle rush unhindered should be waaaaaay easier to spot!
Concluding note: Balancing
We wanted to add a small statement regarding the overall balancing and what’s been/being changed since the release.
Having so many players helps tremendously in discovers the strengths and flaws of the game, which is really nice! We can’t react to everything, but we try to follow/read the plethora of feedback and discussions appearing on so many channels (Discord, Steam, Feature UpVote, Reddit, etc.). As one can guess, this is really time consuming, though. What’s more, we obviously can’t just « follow », we have to analyze, debate, and devise solutions (lots and lots of “solutions” are often proposed, but not everything is feasible or interesting or even accounting for the whole picture).
We also have to accommodate our own planning, available resources, etc. We definitely notice some trends, and the fact that they have not been addressed (or not “properly”) doesn’t necessarily mean we disagree or won’t do anything more about them. For the time being we were more focused on improving the overall User Experience of the game, fixing bugs, and adding accessibility-oriented features. We don’t want to rush some deep, heavy, modifications so we preferred keeping the balancing on the lighter side, while still keeping them consistent with the bigger goals.
A few examples:
- Perks: they need some deeper changes (some reworked, some removed/added, etc.) but we can’t do this at the moment; in the meantime, we tweak a few numbers and reorder some of them in the “tree” (not a tree!) to smooth things and make the best of what we have. (spoiler alert: changing/adding completely a perk is definitely a lot of work)
- In this patch we did nerf a bit the Momentum because it was definitely very exploitable. Those are simple, small changes because we don’t want to destroy Momentum completely either, and doing heavier changes without taking the time to do so would be very risky. All of this probably won’t prevent dedicated players to “momentum goes brrrrr!”, but this is a first, quick step towards balancing this mechanic as a whole in a way that will keep it fun but not OP.
Changelog 0.92.1.0
New features
- Addition of the heroes customization popup :
- Addition of an option to change the intensity of the screen shake
- Addition of an option to change the size of the UI with a slider
- Addition of a tab to remap the keys
- Visual rework of the options pop-up
- Display of the enemies range by using the Alt key
- Rework of the first run: The amount of earned Tainted Souls depends on the number of survived days.
- New defense: Wooden Gate
- When a unit is stunned, their dodge is reduced to 0.
- Wording change for the new game/continue button
- Acceleration of the animation for the souls gain in the night report
- Change in the numbering of the numbers of runs, you now start at 1 instead of 0 (visible on the name of the city: Lakeburg #XX)
Bug fixes:
- Fix of the Apocalypse 3 that didn’t increase the cost of the buildings and items upgrades
- Fix of the perk “Potion Thrower” that didn’t work on the potions skills with a level superior to 4
- Fix of a bug that could trigger save corruptions
- Fix of a softlock that happened when players made too many buildings on the first line of Mist
- The stats bonus related to the perks now respect the stats caps
- The doors stay open if a hero is on the door when the save loads.
BALANCING
Item Affixes
- Reduced drop rate for big rolls.
- Reduced drop rate of the multi hit attribute.
Momentum
- Attribute is now hard-capped at +100%.
- Reduced momentum values on items, affixes and level ups.
Defenses
- Stone Wall : 165 Health > 215 Health (30% increase)
- Stone Wall Reinforced : 220 Health > 330 Health (50% increase)
Lancer
- Block : 50 from night 11 -> 20 from night 10 (the 50 definitely was an integration mishap, and we understand why many felt like night 11 introduced a huge difficulty gap)
Perks
Reordered some of the existing perks:
- Vampire: Tier 5 > Tier 3
- Poisonous: Tier 4 > Tier 2
- Initiator: Tier 2 > Tier 4
- Thrifty: Tier 3 > Tier 4
- Mana Collector: Tier 4 > Tier 5
Changed files in this update