Today there’s a significant patch for Escape the Omnochronom! that involves a new UI (first draft of it, anyway), an entirely new way of spawning monsters, new monster types, balance changes, and a lot more.
For awhile we had been working on a lot of systemic stuff: animations, metagame stuff, bug fixing, things like that. What I had fallen behind on a bit was just adding the necessary content to make gameplay, particularly tactical gameplay, interesting. I think right now the tactical game should be a little bit more fun.
Next up, I’m still considering giving players a fourth ability, I’m going to add more items to the game, more sounds, and most of all, more balance. Probably the group-spawning and tower-attack changes are the biggest ones that are going to throw balance completely out of whack, so I look forward to seeing what people experience. In my small amount of testing, it seems more fun?
More notes in the patch notes themselves. My comments in gold! Enjoy!
Gameplay
- New monster: Support Bot. Spawns in the Machine Zone. Has no attack, but heals nearby minions and monsters for 10% of max health every few turns.
- New monster: Wisp. Spawns in the Temple Zone. Deals high magic damage and doesn’t try to get too close to the player – having a ranged monster is going to help a lot with the tactical game. This monster, along with the Temple Guardians, help reinforce the concept of getting Magic Resistance for Temple zones.
- Monsters now spawn in groups of 3-6, depending on the zone – a big issue with the tactical game has been that you’re fighting one, maybe two monsters at a time. Having to fight several monsters at once makes the tactical space a lot more complex and allows abilities to mean much more.
- Your towers now attack nearby monsters/guardians if there isn’t a minion to fire on. – I actually am probably going to need to increase the health of Guardians somewhat to compensate for this, but we’ll see. The basic idea is to create safe zones that disappear slowly over the course of the game.
- Jelly monster now bumps the player back a tile with his attack (4 turn cooldown)
- Super Skellies now spawn in the forest (but beware, they still look like normal skellies) that have higher stats.
- Two new Temple Zone doodads that help it have a bit more of a shape and identity
- Lane chests now drop 500 gold instead of random items
- Lane chests also disappear upon opening – I thought the lane chests were too much of an obstacle, especially given how many of them there are.
UI
- New UI implemented!
- General design is simplified, smaller, and black – black goes with everything, but also I think the old UI never really distinguished itself enough from the gameplay. It was also a bit too illustrative and thematic. I think the UI just needs to be functional, and also more similar to that you’d see in DotA or League.
- Minimap now has an opaque back again
- Stat numbers made much smaller
- Info panel no longer shows stats when you’re clicking on an ability
- Health bar size reduced a bit
- Health bars now always appear, not just when health < 100%
- Health bars are now color coded per team – it occurred to me that because of the limited palette, it wasn’t always clear who was on what team. The health bars should really help indicated this. I’m still not sure what I’m going to do for the health bar colors, but one thing I am sure of is that we’re getting rid of the old “orange” health bars.
Items
- Cooldown Reduction is now a thing. Rings now all have Cooldown reduction of 2, which means all your cooldowns will be 2 turns shorter with the ring in your inventory.
- +2 additional inventory slots (was 6, now 8)
- +5 items in the shop. I still need to do more work on this, because it seems like some kinds of items aren’t appearing as much as they should be. But the big problem before was that players didn’t have options really for what they could buy.
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