But we were not planning to go before one last update before the end of the year. The open beta players are already familiar with the content of this update, since we released it last week in the beta branch.
Today, Benjamin and Victor (who joined the team just last month, and who’s been doing an amazing job at it!! <3) will take over this blogpost to deep dive in the “Enemies Update” that we’ve just released publicly today!
If you want to read the full changelog, you can click here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1105670/view/3142946404923883200
First of all, Victor will talk about the new enemies and the wound system revamp that were introduced in this update;
New Enemies
Our main objective while designing the new enemies for this update was to diversify combat strategies and decision-making in battle, and encourage the player to stray away from the common “kill the enemies closest to the magic circle” approach. That is why all new enemies will make you want to focus them in specific situations, so be prepared for some tough decisions !
Blocker:
This enemy is called the Blocker for two reasons: they have a high Block stat, but also block your line of sight.
Since we have a basic enemy for almost every defensive stat, we knew we wanted to make an enemy whose primary stat was Block. While their block stat is fairly low in the first nights, it can become a serious threat later on, especially against weapons like the one-handed crossbow.
Blocking line of sight is something we knew we wanted to expand to enemies other than the Guardians, and the Blocker fit the bill perfectly. Line of Sight block creates an interesting dynamic for ranged weapons: having to choose between eliminating the enemy blocking your attack or repositioning yourself, which is usually only present with melee weapons.
This should make gameplay on some of the first nights a bit more varied, even for veteran players.
Hunter:
This enemy has long distance, line of sight ignoring, high damage attacks, and will try to focus backline heroes as much as possible. As a counterpart, they’re one of two new enemies to use the “Charge” mechanic, so this dangerous attack will take two turns to complete.
Our goal with this enemy was to create a danger to ranged heroes sitting in watchtowers. However, since their large range makes them very dangerous to backline heroes, they can easily surprise and punish the player. The Charge mechanic is meant to alleviate that, giving the player a few turns to deal with the threat.
Having an enemy focus on heroes can be troublesome, but keep in mind that it also makes them less focused on the town and the magic circle, so I hope this change of focus will feel refreshing.
Hopper:
The Hopper is the first enemy that can inflict poison to the Heroes. It’s a mechanic we wanted to try out, and potentially expand on in future updates. Additionally, they can buff their allies Resistance stat, as an action during their turn, or when they’re killed.
The poison is not very strong, but since it ignores defenses it can quickly take a good chunk of health from a Hero with a low health pool. Since we are still trying the mechanic out, and that it can rapidly inflict damage to any hero, we kept the poison damage fairly low, so it acts mainly as chip damage.
We didn’t want the enemy to just stack additional poison on the heroes every turn, so they alternate between spitting poison and backing away to buff their allies. While the buff is rather low, it can quickly stack up to a noticeable amount, especially since the same buff is cast all around them when they are killed. In this regard, Hoppers are pretty much the opposite of Boomers.
Finding the best moment or course of action to kill them without buffing too many other enemies should make for some interesting - and sometimes tough - strategic decision making.
Twisted:
This fallen mage is a late game enemy that you will, for the time being, only encounter in Glenwald. They can buff the move speed of multiple other enemies at once, and, like the Hunter, have a charged attack that can be incredibly dangerous.
This enemy looks terrifying and cruel, thanks to the work of the artists on the team, so we needed him to act accordingly.
As a mage, he needed a variety of spells, so we decided on him having a buff, an area of effect attack and a single target attack. Making the AoE of the buff and the charged AoE attack work well was a big challenge for the devs, but the mages are now more clever than ever thanks to them.
With their buff, the Twisted will send their allies - or, more precisely, what they consider their underlings - to the frontlines, distracting the Heroes while they prepare their devastating magic attack.
This charged AoE magic attack is strong, but since it is a charged ability, players will have some time to anticipate it. To reinforce the cruel personality of the Twisted, we allowed him to hit allies with this attack, so he will not hesitate to hurt other enemies if it allows him to land this attack on a hero. Scary!
The Twisted is meant to be on the same power level as the Bulky. While they don’t have nearly as much health and block, they have high damage and a high Resistance stat. For now, we decided on having the Bulky be the “strong late game enemy” of Lakeburg, while the Twisted fits this role in Glenwald. However, this is bound to change as we don’t want to make too much content that is exclusive to very advanced players.
Wounds System revamp
The main reason why we wanted to revamp the wound system was that the old one was very disparate : having a wound effect common to all enemies was very difficult to balance correctly, as any stat change can be crucial on certain enemies, but also completely useless on others.
Additionally, changing the system to have custom wound effects for each enemy brings a lot of very interesting design possibilities, which we tried to explore as much as possible.
The main objective of the revamp was to create unique and diverse approaches to dealing with each enemy: Depending on the enemy and on the situation, it may be better to eliminate them, or leave them wounded… The choice is up to you !
However, we didn’t want to burden the player with having to learn the wounds of all enemies. To keep things light and manageable early on, common enemies also have the most common and simple wounds. Rarer enemies have more specific wounds, and so on.
For example, all basic enemies have similar wounds to before, losing movement and panic when wounded, but now also lose some of their main stat.
More advanced enemies have more complex wounds. A good example of this is the Boomer, who gains +30% Damage when wounded. It may seem like a buff, since they will deal more damage to you and your buildings… but it can also help you deal more damage to the enemies surrounding the Boomer ! We hope you will find diverse and interesting strategies using these new wound effects.
There’s one last part to the wound revamp, and this one also affects heroes. Wound thresholds are not fixed anymore, and scale depending on the unit’s Max Health. For enemies, it allowed us to place wound thresholds at specific parts of the health bar, or even make enemies that only have one wound threshold.
For heroes, it means that the more health they have, the harder it is for them to get wounded. Visually, you will easily notice that the wound thresholds of a high Max Health hero are closer to the left of the HP bar than the thresholds of a low Max Health hero.
And now, I’ll pass the baton to Benjamin, who especially worked on the Elite enemies and the many QoL changes that we did for this update!
Elite Enemies
Commander, we’ve detected new mutations of enemies coming from the mist and it’s NOT looking good…
Fun fact about elite enemies, we had an early concept for the Elite Lancer from our beloved artistic director Jacques since very early in the development of the game. At the time we were very excited about this idea of having a more powerful version of enemies but then the reality of game dev production hit us, and we had to delay this feature to this day (game dev can be frustrating sometimes).
Early concept for the Lancer Elite
When we decided to implement this feature in the game, the first thing we did was to find all our intentions. After discussing, we agreed with the fact that in The Last Spell, enemies have a short lifetime, and it lacks a feeling of “mini boss” in the wave since all enemies are numerous. So elite enemies had to fill this void. Also, for replicability we wanted something procedural to help us create some crazy/memorable moments.
Obviously, we took a lot of inspiration from hack n slash and rogue lite games since both genres generally have elite enemies with a lot of procedural elements.
To create the feel of “mini boss” we basically increase a lot the health and armor attribute of the enemy. This increase extends the enemies lifetime on the battlefield and sometimes will force the players to think if he really needs to kill this enemy in one turn. This feeling is also reinforced thanks to the awesome visuals for these enemies. It was (and it still is) a hard challenge to reimagine all enemies in a gory/extreme version of themself and I can’t wait to see your reactions when you will discover your favorite enemy (or your nemesis) in their elite version!
For the procedural part, we’ve came up with what we called “affix for enemies”. When an elite enemy spawn on the map, he will have a random affix. An affix for enemies is a gameplay effect that will affect the enemy’s dangers. For now, there are 6 different affixes implemented and some of them have parameters, so it creates a lot of variety (you can read all the affix effects in the changelog). You can expect some wild combination like a crawler that plays 2 turns, a lancer with a great bonus in Armor, a clawer that generates light fog around him or a lumberjack regenerating 30% of his health every turn.
Elite enemies are now a part of wave composition and will appear at specific days in both Lakeburg and Glenwald, but we have some ideas for the future to create a risk&reward system like in other roguelike where you choose to fight more powerful foes in exchange for more rewards.
QoL
New update also means a new batch of quality-of-life improvement to make the game smoother and more enjoyable to play.
Again, thank you all for your suggestions, most of the new QoL comes from your suggestions so feel free to share your ideas, we are very attentive to all of them!
Speed up the game
One of the most asked QoL is here: you can now accelerate the hero and enemy turn during the night phase
We also added some cool options to customize how you want to accelerate the game!
And that’s not all, we heard you about the night report being a little annoying after hours of gameplay so you can now skip all the animations thanks to a button in the panel
Enemies poison
My favorite QoL for this update: the upcoming poison damage for the turn are now displayed directly in the health gauge of the unit and we added new feedback that shows when an enemy will die from poison on his turn.
Camera
For this update, Maxence, one of the developers from the team, had ideas to improve the camera for the enemy turn. Now there should be no enemies acting off screen and the camera movements are smarter, accelerating the turn. Also, magic circle attacks are now in first position in the turn so you will no longer have to wait until the end of enemy turn to see the game over.
What’s next
As we mentioned in a previous news, we’ve changed our way of working and the schedule for releases. Basically this means that a part of the team is already working on the next update for some week and I’m happy to share with you a sneak peek of our perk update :)
In this futur update you can expect a rework of the perk system and new perks for the tree!
Aand that’s it for today! Finally, we wanted to say how thankful we are to each and everyone of you for this year. The reception of The Last Spell has been absolutely amazing, we definitely didn’t expect so many players to like our game x)
We also know that the game is not perfect (we read all your comments, the positive AND negative ones!), and every day we work to make it better :)
Happy holidays to all of you, and we hope you’ll love what we’re preparing for next year! <3
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