Hello! I'm Mr. Slate and here you can find the patch notes for v.0.9.39 of the MoonWard Demo! This is the latest and as of today current MoonWard patch version.
The focus for this patch was the multi-stage boss fights, quality of life features like favouriting items, 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. Multi-stage boss fights.
You can't be a souls-like without having these. I feel like it's baked into the genre. I'm not sure why it took me so long to make this but it happens to be one of the last big features to be built for MoonWard (if not the last).
I wrote a system which allows me to completely change the fight between stages. Everything from AI, stats and loadouts, to music and visuals can be completely changed when in a new stage. I'm very happy with the system as it lets me have much more dynamic and exciting fights.
The brawl included in the demo comes at the very end of it and replaces a previously existing fight with a specific character. Even though this is most likely the simplest transition, it's still such a drastic change that it makes the second stage feel instantly more dangerous. I have so many notes for the full game that it makes me a little giddy.
2. Brawl screen visual improvements.
The big changes here are the new animations on the health bar and the outcome screen. The health bar is more interesting because that came from a live test. Someone mentioned the health bars look like cards, which, with the lockets, they do!
I tried a few ways to break the "card" look but finally realised the issue wasn't that they look like cards, the issue was they weren't clearly indicated to be health bars. Animating them clearly shows their function. When a player sees the health bars filling for the first time there's hopefully little room left for interpretation. At the very least players won't think they're cards!
There were also other small bits, mostly fixing visual bugs.
3. Map screen visual improvements.
I was hoping to touch up this screen a bit more but I couldn't. I'll have to do the rest next time. The one thing I managed to get done is an upgrade to the map icons. Main and side stories specifically.
Someone suggested animating the most important icon for accessibility reasons. I went through a few iterations but I settled on the rotating cogs. I think it makes sense in the broader industrial context... and it just looks cool.
4. Ability to favourite items.
This came from me playing. I realised there was an unwillingness to use the bulk-sell buttons. I didn't want to sell items I had ideas for that were the in the same group as trash. So I never used it, despite how useful that kind of functionality can be.
Now you can favourite an infinite amount of items by tapping their icon on most screens. You'll know if you can favourite an item if an outline of medal appears on the icon. I found that this made me much happier with bulk selling items.
5. Aura multi attacks.
I guess this is the patch of multi-something! I added the ability to attack multiple times per aura tick. There's a delay between the attacks. Of-course this makes auras even more overpowered but in my defence I planned this for dragon enemies, for example - 20 very fast hits to simulate a dragon's breath attack.
Unfortunately there aren't any dragons in the demo... this time. I'll add some content that uses this feature in the next version!
6. Item bonus balance tweaks.
Mostly to do with resistances. Elemental damages are quite overpowered at the moment and I decided to slightly boost the items' built in resistances as well as the generated amounts.
Originally, I was quite worried that someone could make a "resistance" build by having the bonuses on all of their equipment but honestly I think balancing for that was a mistake. I've increased the amounts so even one item giving you some resistance should now be noticeable in a brawl.
7. Quality of life improvements.
Not as many as I'd have liked and nothing major. Some timings on animations, some new animations and not much more.
8. Fixed bugs and typos.
There weren't that many to be honest. Mostly to do with the new multi-stage boss fights. Plenty of typos though. And I found plenty more when testing the release build! So should have enough for next release!
So these were the MoonWard Demo patch notes for v0-9-39. Let me know what you think in the comments or on our Discord server!
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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