v1.13 - Trinkets!

Hello there! :)

A new update to Lost For Swords just dropped, with lots of cool changes and additions:

• The biggest one: Trinkets! Trinkets alter the game in powerful and sometimes weird ways and hopefully add a whole new layer of strategy and deck building to the game. Trinkets are cards a player to their deck at certain points during a run. Once in the deck, their effect is always active (unlike auras, which are placed on the board and need to be flipped to work). There are 10 new Trinket cards available for both heroes. Looking forward to seeing you break the game! :D
• Glass Sphere is removed, Dungeon Deck is back! In the last patch, I removed the Dungeon Deck and instead added a different win condition: fill up a Glass Sphere to reveal the key to the exit. This kinda worked, but thanks to the great feedback of quebaixo, I reconsidered. While the removal of the Dungeon Deck solved the issue of uneven difficulty spikes, it also made the game… bland, and less interesting. It also removed an important layer of strategy for players to plan around. The Glass Sphere was a flawed attempt at re-introducing a suitable win condition, which didn’t work all that well and felt janky (too bad, I spent a lot of time on the blood particle animations 😟 ). So it was back to the drawing board… but I came up with a new solution:
• Reworked room layouts: with the Dungeon Deck back in the game, I needed a different way to tackle the whacky difficulty curve: In order to make the first room more manageable for players, I tweaked the room layout generation. By spawning walls in the top row, the first room on each floor becomes effectively smaller. This reduces the play area and most importantly, reduces the number of Monsters in the room. That should give players a better start into a floor and balance the game enough… I hope! Let me know what you think! 🙂
• Pushing deals 3 damage to both the pushed card and the card its pushed into, instead of 1. Pushing still felt weak, so I increased its damage potential. Feels better!
• Re-balanced pushing weapons: same reason as above
• Reworked Forged By Flames: upgrading cards during a floor felt a bit out of place, especially considering it was the only in-game change to your cards that would persist between rooms. It was also a card that felt too much geared towards the Rogue. For these reasons I reworked the card.
• Reworked X-Barrels to explode in an actual X-pattern: Previous X-Barrels exploded in a ring, so they were really hard to set off without damaging yourself. Almost impossible for the knight, who has practically no ranged attacks. The new X-Barrels explode in a pattern that allows players to safely attack them with melee weapons. I hope this gives players more strategic opportunities to use the X-Barrels against Monsters. And the name of the card now properly reflects its effect as well, so win-win 🙂
• New cards (apart from Trinkets):
  • Powder Keg Bow
  • Heavy Hand (not 100% happy with that yet)
  • O-Barrel (works like the old X-Barrel, explodes in a ring)
• Lots of other tiny balance changes, some prompted by the new Trinkets
• Ability to view “original” deck while in game

As always, thanks for reading and see you at the next patch! :)

Bye! (ʘ‿ʘ)╯