Hello! I'm Mr. Slate and here you can find the patch notes for version v.0.3.20 of the MoonWard Demo!
Before I continue, you can get the MoonWard Demo here!
1. Significantly improved performance.
I've been meaning to improve performance on low end devices for a while but I've had to focus on nicer visuals, animations etc. for obvious reasons. By low end I mean budget devices from about 6 years ago. My control device is a Motorola g6 running Android 9. In this patch I optimised materials, textures, 3d environments, lighting, settings and canvases. Happy to report that after all that, on the g6, I managed to get all menus to run at the 30 fps frame cap (except for popups - the blur shader I have, while heavily optimised is still reliably halving the framerate) and the battle screen at 45 to 50 fps. I would like to get battles up to the 60fps cap on the g6 but for that I'll need to employ some more complicated trickery and I didn't have the time this sprint. Either way - very happy with the results.
2. Decreased download and install sizes.
Shrank some textures and audio and compressed everything. Replaced and removed textures that were used once with ones that are used repeatedly. Combined categories of images into sprite sheets. As a bonus, I also fixed some textures with jagged white edges (a known issue resulting from using certain scaling algorithms) I've not observed any drop in quality.
3. Major rebalance of starting abilities and gear.
I wanted to give players a bit more equipment flexibility in the first few levels. But also a bit more distinction. Finally, I didn't like how the system forced players to place points in martial abilities to keep up with gear progression, and to ignore social abilities. To deal with all of the above I increased starting class abilities total from 92 to 140 which means your maximum ability is now 30 instead of 20, and there are steps at 25, 20, 15 and 10 (the base).
4. New item stat: damage % to enemy type (Humanoids/Animals/Etc.).
I've introduced a character stat that keeps track of how much damage they do to enemies of all categories. For example, the pugilist class has gear that gives them +10% damage to all humanoid enemies. I haven't introduced this stat in the item generation system because it's obviously quite powerful. I'm still considering my design options but for now it will remain hand set and only on starting equipment.
5. Rebalanced stamina consumption.
All moves have had their stamina consumption increased. Especially moves by heavy weapons and shields. This is partly because the amounts between moves on light and heavy held items were too similar and partly an attempt to balance heavy weapons, which is something I've been struggling with for a while. Here's a little secret - I'm planning a major buff to light weapons.
6. Increased effectiveness of all affliction item stats.
Afflictions are types of damage that isn't applied directly to characters. You have affliction resistances and damage. Think of resistance as a regenerating pool of points that affliction damage takes away from. Once you reach 0 resistance an affliction damage over time (DOT) is applied to you. The current afflictions are Burn, Poison Frost and Shock. Damage was too low to deplete resistances and resistances were too low to be meaningful. On top of that the default regeneration (before the DOT) was way too high for the bonus to be necessary. I increased all affliction stat types drastically, meaning that even a low level item will be able to apply the DOT effect after hits. The hits don't even have to be too close now unless the target has an item with high affliction regeneration of the type. In short - all changes make afflictions way more useful and dangerous.
7. Improved map visuals and county handling.
A large part of this sprint was me figuring out how the county system will work. I'm happy with the result although there was a good reason not to include it in the demo. The second county has areas that are missing content to work. Hopefully I'll have the time for this content in the coming sprint. Either way - you can finally see your current county in the UI, as well as the province name on the map, and you can see where the other counties are roughly positioned thanks to the tokens.
8. Two handed move counters and animations in battle.
Special two handed moves (all weapons have one) now have more animations and a counter showing remaining uses (like consumables) when applicable.
9. Fixed typos and bugs.
Plenty of those. Trust me. I'm Mr. Slate.
Once again, thank you for your time! I work hard on these patches so please give the MoonWard Demo a try! I hope to see you again soon!
Have a great week!
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