ORX News

The Iron Blessings update is finally here! Improved tutorial, user interface updates and multiple new mechanics to spice up your fight against ORX.

Last time we teased the parts of the Iron Blessings update. You can read it for more details, but we’ll highlight some of the more notable additions and changes.

First up is inclusion of the Tutorial campaign. It can be found in the main menu, and has a selection of pre-seeded levels and cards for you to, hopefully, get a better understanding of the game. Or to get back into slaying ORX!



Next up is the titular Blessings! Now, when you increase a building or unit’s stats above a certain threshold, you will get a selection of corresponding Blessings to pick one from. These provide substantial boosts to other characteristics and will prove very useful in not-so-favorable matchups against ORX. We’ll make the thresholds clearly visible in the reworked info window, coming in the next update!



The last new addition is the Neighbour effects system. Now, when you place some of the buildings or units, they will get a hefty boost to their stats or production, if there are specific “neighbours” present nearby. Keep an eye out for conditions listed on such cards!



[h2]Patch Notes[/h2]

[h3]Gameplay Improvements[/h3]

• Tutorial rework. New, dedicated tutorial campaign is accessible via the main menu;
  
• Introduced Blessings system. Level up unit or building’s stats to get a corresponding blessing. You get a Blessing at 10/50/100 of each individual stat;
  
• Introduced Blessings for ORX. Now they also get Blessings which improve their stats;
  
• Introduced Neighbor Effects for numerous cards. You can find the conditions for triggering the effect in the card descriptions;
  
• Fields and similar gold-producing buildings now generate gold unlimited amount of times, but have a long cooldown;
  
• Added new “:Castle Heart”-type buildings: Arcane Cell (DEX sharing), Medic Altar (VIT sharing) and reworked Voidwalker Guild into Ardent Coliseum (STR sharing);
  
• Boreal Nomads giants now generate gold upon finding a Miracle;
  
• Boreal Nomads rune circles can now be activated even with one relic placed;
  
• Holiday power for Boreal Nomads is now a percent based stat;
  
• Raised the base Gold Cap to 100 coins
  
• Introduced a new Faction-inherent Artefact for Dune Reavers. Every gold coin which goes beyond the Gold Cap permanently increases the amount of health for all units and buildings in the mission;
  
• After being thrown up, units get staggered upon landing;
  
• Added a “Skip reward” card to all reward selection windows, which lowers corruption by 5 when chosen instead of rewards;
  
• Introduced Weak castle parts. They are infinite, but have weaker stats and are non-upgradeable;
  
• Changed normal castle parts to have charges;
  
• Lessened the amount of rune slots available on castle parts and in their upgrades.
  

[h3]Level Design and Global Map[/h3]

• Updated level generation algorithm and added Act-specific map generation presets;
  
• Updated Global Map generation algorithm. Now map nodes are more organically distributed to avoid clustering;
  
• Changed Global Map progression. In order to explore the map you need to clear Combat nodes. This also applies to event and shop nodes — in order to unlock them, you need to clear the adjacent Combat mission.
  
• Added Advisor selection node to the Global map, which always generates near the first Combat mission.
  

[h3]Technical Improvements[/h3]

• Implemented a conventional save system. Now the game saves progress into a dedicated file instead of making a registry entry. NOTE: Steam Cloud saves are not implemented at this time and will be added in the future;
  

[h3]User Interface[/h3]

• Updated all Shops with new visuals;
  
• Updated numerous icons for better clarity and readability;
  
• Updated health bar visuals for all units and buildings;
  
• Updated visuals for the sub-missions list;
  
• Choices in the event windows now show the exact rewards and their drop rates;
  
• Updated font size and style settings to be language dependant;
  
• Improved font visual clarity for event windows.
  

[h3]Performance optimizations[/h3]

• Made numerous changes and improvements to the level generation algorithm, effect interactions and VFX rendering
  

[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]

• Fixed numerous issues related to ORX placement inside the mission preview window
  
• Fixed a bug where a notification bubble would be shown on the Encyclopedia even if all of the new entries were checked out by the player.
  

Thanks for tuning in! See you in the next post.

Johnbell and Critical Reflex

What do neighbours, blessings and new horizons have in common? No, it’s not about Christmas — it’s about our upcoming update Iron Blessings! As always, don't forget that you can click on the headers to listen the songs they reference.

Just like we’ve discussed in our previous devlog, ORX is going to get new features in the upcoming update. However, we’ve focused them around existing systems. Some of them should help with randomness and adaptability, while others just make the game feel more fun and fresh.

[h2]The Book of Heavy Metal[/h2]
First up are the basics, of course. Even though we’ve tried to cover every important mechanic with the tutorial windows — through the years this system started to show it’s cracks. The tutorials are bound to certain triggers as to not overwhelm the player with information. However, this also means, that the tutorials might come in later than the player would need them. And, in general, there were just too many windows. With even more on the horizon. As such, we’re introducing a proper tutorial campaign, with guided scenarios, decks and a new, more organic type of tutorial hints.



[h2]My Land[/h2]
Now let’s get to the foundation. Or should we say the tiles? Regardless, we’ve completely rewrote map generation in ORX. Now, instead one single 32x32 landscape, the game generates chunks. Right now this means that we can experiment with the map’s shape. When you start a new campaign, you will see that maps in Act I not only vary wildly in size depending on the mission’s difficulty — but also notice that the maps in later acts have unique shapes too.



In the future, there will be two more new features taking advantage of chunk generation. First one is the Memory Zone, which we’ve talked about in our recent devlog. The second one — unique sub-biomes. We’re still thinking how sub-biomes could affect gameplay, so initially they might be there just to enhance the scenery.

[h2]I'll Be Your Hero[/h2]
We felt like there wasn’t enough initiative for the player to strategize how they build their Kingdom. Of course, we’ve had auras in the game. But then it hit us: “What if aura, but reverse?”. What? Well yes, it’s pretty much how the system works internally. We call it “Neighbour effects” — it provides a building or a unit you’re currently placing with hefty bonuses, when there are other specific buildings or units are present in their vicinity. Let us demonstrate.



As you can see, when the Militia is placed near farms or villages, they get a bonus to their Strength. Which might come in very handy, considering the next feature.

[h2]Venerate Me[/h2]
In ORX you are deliberately limited in your tools due to randomness of rewards and your deck’s shuffle. However, we wouldn’t want the players to become hard stuck. You should be able to progress the game even if you don’t have the exact cards for one specific case. To help this, we’re introducing the Blessings — passive abilities granted after raising one of your core attributes to a certain amount. You get to pick one of the three random blessings each time. For now they provide simple, but substantial stat bonuses. For example, if you level up Strength a couple times with the Rune of Embers, you can pick a blessing which would give you a flat damage boost, extra damage against armor or defence ignore.



In the future, we plan to add more gameplay-changing Blessings for the Legendary tier, and maybe introduce some trade-offs to all of them. This way you will specialize into a specific role instead of eating all the pies at once.

[h2]Looking Glass[/h2]
We continue working on the various user interfaces for ORX. In the upcoming update we are going to update the health bars, greatly improve the clarity and design of the information window, plus redesign a bunch of icons. You know what they say: “Great design is invisible”. And we hope that after all the work is done, you won’t have to fight both the ORX and the UI at the same time.



We’ve also updated some of the ORX types to be bulkier and larger in size. Specifically ORX Tanks, Mega ORX and Trebuchet ORX. The idea is they should look heavier to communicate the amount of defences they have. And, coincidentally, the amount of threat they pose. Of course, this doesn’t mean we don’t have bran new ORX in production. But those are coming later.



[h2]OUTRO[/h2]
This covers most of the stuff coming in Iron Blessings early next year. Of course, we didn’t cover the balancing changes and some smaller things — but those will be included in the patch notes.

As always, thank you for your support, and for tuning in to read this devlog. Wishing you happy Holidays and a stellar New Year. Next time, after the upcoming update, we will bring an updated Roadmap and more teasers for the future features.

Johnbell and Critical Reflex

Long time no see, esteemed ORX-slayers!

We apologise for the silence, but we’re here to break it today. And this devlog is going to be out of character — to demonstrate our drive and motivation, we’d like to be honest and open with you. But first, let’s take a…

[h2]Look back[/h2]
When we first started working on ORX, it was about a single faction — the Rune Guardians, — and a simple mix of RTS, roguelikes and Carcassonne. Well, not that simple, to be honest. But the game was much simpler overall. And the initial demos for ORX showed that a lot of you liked this concept. You’ve shown quite the support back then.



However, our ambitions grew and we wanted to introduce 3 more factions and make gameplay for each of them feel unique. During this entire time, one of our influences was Gemcraft. A tower defence game, which is pretty number heavy.

Then we’ve released into Early Access with the 2nd faction — which, obviously, didn’t get as much time in the oven as Rune Guardians. To cut the story short — we saw from your feedback, that the game lacked an endgame goal or the long-term pull. Simply having another faction to unlock wasn’t nearly enough. Especially, since not everyone enjoyed its playstyle focused around units.

We took this very seriously. And, as the time would show, a bit too seriously. We’ve began to pile up systems upon systems, while discussing and iterating on even more systems internally.

The result? Well, you’ve voiced it better than we could, again. “The game just doesn’t feel like those early demos anymore!”. It got lost in the sauce (ORX?). There was just too much thrown at the player right off the start. And figuring out how to play efficiently seemed like an impossible task.

All the while the veterans would easily break the game, since the balance wasn’t great either. And we were busy looking at them, trying to match their ingenuity with even more new systems. Classic mistake…



[h2]Round Three?[/h2]
Well, now that you know the history, and we took one more look at it — time to discuss what comes next.

Firstly, we would like to go back and restore what made ORX appealing in the first place. We will retain major systems that we’ve added throughout Early Access, but going to make them feel more organic. Basically, make the game feel whole again. This means changing the balance in all its forms and restoring the initial flow of the game, but also tuning and simplifying the new systems.

This is not all, however! We will also greatly limit the amount of systems thrown at the player at the start of the game. Both inside a run and during your entire time with ORX. Instead, we will introduce them gradually — to match your growing knowledge of the game and up the challenge on a nice curve.



Secondly, we’ve decided to cut on some of the promised content from the Roadmap. Some of those promises sound cool even now, like the Throne Room and meta-progression. Others, however, would feel tacked on. So we’ve decided to not work on them altogether. This won’t affect technical stuff like performance optimization and proper Steam Deck support, of course. An updated Roadmap is coming soon!

Finally, it’s time we’ve added a proper tutorial. Well paced, engaging and accessible. With reduced amount of pop-up, text-heavy windows. Instead having more on-the-map hints — somewhat similar to how tutorial works in games like Star Craft 2. Note, that the upcoming update will have just the very basis of this system. Tutorial is much more work, than might appear at first, and we would like to get it right this time.



[h2]Glorious Evolution[/h2]

Of course, we wouldn’t just say “we’re going back” and call it a day. New content and fresh gameplay ideas will still be added to the game. We’ve already mentioned the tutorial and balancing changes, so here we’d like to focus on other transformative changes that are coming soon.

• Memory zone — through the years, and thanks to your and our internal feedback, we’ve come to realize that starting each mission from scratch gets tedious really fast. To solve this, we’d like to try adding a Memory zone around the player’s main building. Any buildings placed in that zone will carry over to the next mission. Resetting only in the 1st mission of each new Act. And to make it more balanced, we’d like to also make more cards Fragile — meaning they completely expire from your hand after you burn all of their charges. Which should also help with deck bloating from gathering all the cards throughout the missions. Keep in mind, however, that this system might not make it into the game if it turns out to not be as much fun in reality.
  

WIP concept of Memory Zone. Subject to change.

• Tower rework — right now the towers might look too alike. Most of them lob some sort of projectile, which has different behaviour only after it hits an enemy. We’d like to change this and make every tower feel unique. Be it by turning Electric towers into giant Tesla machines, making Poison towers expel clouds of noxious gas or something else entirely. We hope that this not only going to help with different tower combinations, but also improve clarity of effects in a heated battle.
  

Mockup with finalized animations. The effects are yet to be implemented into the game.

• New win conditions — one of the key components in replayability is, of course, the variety of mission types. We have the Endless mission in the works for some time, but we’re still figuring out how to make it rewarding enough, without making other missions feel meaningless in comparison. But we’d also like to introduce new win conditions to regular missions as well. Stuff like city defence, Helm’s Deep style wave survival or, maybe, even an exploration style mission to find something on the map.
  

Even rougher mockup of a new mission type. Very heavy WIP, most definitely will change before release.

• Audio effects rework and improvements — good sound greatly enhances the game and even replayability. And right now the constantly repeating thud of arrows might feel annoying after some time. While we can’t really show you anything right now, we pledge to make the rain of arrows sound like a true hailstorm, put some oomph into blasts and maybe even make ORX sound more chaotically aggressive.

There are also more ideas focused around elevating what we currently have in ORX. Without adding too much of new systems. However, those are just in discussion phase currently, so we don’t want to bring them up just yet. Once those make it into production — we’ll cover every one of them!

Hopefully, now you can better see our train of thought while developing ORX. And our undying volition to improve the game. All of this is possible only to every single one of you. And we’re thankful for every player who chose to support us. Be it by providing feedback or simply playing the game. You are what makes the games whole, and the reason for us to keep moving forward.

Stay tuned for the update overview post this December, and for the updated Roadmap and more devlogs coming next year.

From the entirety of Johnbell and Critical Reflex,
THANK YOU!

Gameplay & balance
•ORX Gunner now appears as a Commander in Acts 3-4
•ORX Commanders' appearance logic reworked: 3 specific Commanders appear only in Acts 1-2; other 3 empowered Commanders appear only in Acts 3-4;
•Adjusted ORX Commanders to be generally more dangerous.
•Increased the difficulty curve of later missions in Act 3 and all missions in Act 4 (aka added hard waves that ramp up ORX count faster)
•Reduced width of resilient ORX for better pathfinding
•Increase durability of earlier Act bosses
•Fixed the incorrect Tier 2 stats for Razor Tower (Rune Guardians card)
•Fixed an error that caused Boreal Nomads to receive wrong card rewards
•Updated behavior and locale of Oasis (Dune Reavers card)
•ORX tanks rescaled to have less defense and damage in early acts, same later.

Localization
•Updated RU and JP locals
•Added attribute tooltips for multiple language locales
•Added Journey events for multiple language locales
•Added tooltips about Spirits with previously missing descriptions

Bug Fixes
•Fixed an issue that caused the final wave to not spawn in certain missions
•Fixed an issue that didn’t grant victory after defeating the final wave during certain conditions
•Fixed yet another instance of cards getting stuck on the screen
•Fixed an issue that displayed the message about the wave start multiple times in a row
•Fixed an issue that kept displaying the exclamation mark after check new unlocks at encyclopedia
•Minor UI fixes

gl hf

-final boss (act 4) adjusted to correctly trigger player loss condition
-final boss now moves 1 tile per round in second phase. total 9 rounds needed to reach player loss condition.
-dune reaver and boreal missions adjusted to exclude castle and military camp quests specific to rune guardians
-RG pooling adjusted lives count
-ORX sniper and besieger damage STR scaling reduced