Hello! I'm Mr. Slate and here you can find the patch notes for v.0.9.29 of the MoonWard Demo! This is the latest and as of today current MoonWard patch version.
The focus for this patch was the codex feature and content for it, some smaller onboarding features, polish and bug fixing.
Lastly, before I continue, you can download the latest version of the MoonWard Demo here!
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Let's get to the patch notes!
1. Restart brawls immediately.
A button on the outcome screen when a brawl is lost. I have to thank one of my designer friends, Aslan, for this one. I'm afraid if he didn't point it out to me I wouldn't have ever thought of including it. It does feel nice to be able to restart main and side story brawls but I found the limited attempts of a bounty caught me by surprise a couple of times so be careful with bounties you don't want to lose.
2. Improved brawl audio and visuals.
I added a couple of elements to the clocks and status bar. My favourite one is when the clock arrow hits an arm it will now produce a little spark. This should draw attention to that moment as it's the most important part of a move - it's when the move effect is executed.
Another thing I added was audio to auras. I can't believe I missed this previously but there you go - I did. When it comes to auras I actually have more ideas. Will most likely work on those ideas during the "boss fight improvement" feature since they'll mostly apply to those fights.
3. Lowered the early game difficulty.
I've had multiple people tell me they find it difficult to get past the first few story enemies, and that bounties are too difficult. I agree to both. To help with that I've done quite a few changes to the very early game (first 5 levels).
The second fight during "Pests in the Basement" has been made significantly easier.
I added a new enemy category - Raiders, who are essentially just weaker bandits only found in the first county.
I increased the length of all opponent attack moves in the first ten levels. After that, opponents regain their move duration as it was before.
4. Main and Side stories can only be started in specified counties.
This is a fairly simple change but it'll have some pretty big impacts in the full campaign. Before this change you could launch a handmade story mission from any county, regardless where its events take place or where it was meant to be played. This was mostly obvious with side stories as they don't require completion to progress the plot. So you could play side stories from C1 in C2 and the opposite.
This obviously makes no in universe logical sense but my thoughts were the game is already abstracted so much that it shouldn't be a big ask for players to suspend their disbelief.
I changed my mind when I started work on the campaign. There are fun thigs I want to do with with the narrative, like adding main stories in the next county without you being able to go there yet. Or forcing you to go to an old county for story purposes.
5. Improved low-resolution textures.
Truthfully, I believe the textures I changed were more than adequate for a mobile screen. I'm talking small icons that you wouldn't have been able to examine closely. BUT I hit another milestone in the last month in that I finally installed MoonWard on an iPhone and iPad! Those were local developer builds only, though. Still fighting Apple for that developer account unfortunately.
It was the iPad that made me realise some textures could use an upscale or re-doing. It was quite obvious on the larger screen. Funnily enough I never noticed any of these when testing on PC. I upgraded a couple dozen textures due to that. Everybody wins!
6. More codex entries (forgot to add this in the patch notes on the Play Store).
Added entries for some more legendary weapons! I'll keep adding more entries as I go!
7. Fixed dialogue bugs.
There were some major bugs to do with the dialogue systems. Nothing game-ending, no crashes either, but a lot of unexpected behaviours. Should be all sorted now.
8. Fixed bugs and typos.
There were some small visual bugs here and there but nothing else major. I did however discover plenty of typos to fix on my last playthrough. Unsurprisingly, taking a break from the game makes these easier to spot.
And lastly, there were a series of crashes in production in mid December! Same device - a Samsung Galaxy S21. From what I could tell this is a known problem and has to do with a piece of tech called Vulkan that's on most (all?) phones nowadays and usually works flawlessly. I'll spare you the details. I wasn't able to reproduce the issue but I did find a seemingly reliable way to fix this and have included it in the patch.
So these were the MoonWard Demo patch notes for v0-9-29. Let me know what you think in the comments or on our Discord server!
My apologies for breaking my "3 week" streak but holidays and the "Giant's Steps" release got in the way! I'll do my best to keep up the schedule in 2025!
Thank you all for your time! I work hard on these patches so please give the MoonWard Demo a try!
Have a great week and like always,
stay awesome!
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