Hey.
Long time no update! I've been mostly plugging away on
UFO 50 in these intervening months (Go wishlist it!!), but I've still been making progress on CK when time permits - in between moving to a new apartment and doing contract work.
[h2]Light and Shadow[/h2]
Here we have at last; one feature in particular that I have dreamt of for years:
shadow-casting lights and line-of-sight based fog-of-war!
At long-last, things can truly lurk unseen around corners and behind closed doors! This is a pretty significant change to a long-standing gameplay mechanic, but hopefully it will be a welcome one. In all other regards lighting still works the same way; lightsources, once encountered, remain visible thereafter. It's still useful to toss torches ahead of yourself to get the ley of the land, but this change also has the effect of making the Wanderer's class ability, lanterns, and equipment that grants telepathy suddenly much more valuable.
Title Overhaul
The other main thing you'll notice is that the title menu looks...completely different!
I called myself clever with the previous version, trying to do something unique with a menu based on quadrants but it turns out there's a reason most games have a menu in a nested list format and that's because it's intuitive and easy to navigate. Lesson learned: don't reinvent a wheel unless it's really central to your whole deal. As it turns out, title menus are in fact: not central to CK's whole deal. So something more typical is warranted (and welcome).
Along with the new menu however, come some other new features:
Seeded Runs, etc.
Seeded Runs are a new kind of game mode where you can enter the seed yourself and play it as many times as you like. Unlike most of the other game modes, however, Seeded Runs never save (not even a little bit).
Daily runs have also been updated to allow you to try them as many times as you want, though only the first run counts for earning coins. Currently the Daily Run and Seeded Runs are pretty similar in that they allow you to play the same seed as many times as you want, but I plan to eventually add twists to Daily Runs like "all corpses explode", "you hate all weapons", or "all damage is 2" etc.
There have also been a smattering of other tweaks, bugfixes, and general housekeeping too so check out the
changelog for a full list.
