Catacomb Kids News

0.2.0d fixes some things, and also brings forward the changes from 0.2.0c to Linux and Mac

Changes

• Increased range of teleport spell
  
• Breakthrough busts locked doors and pushes moving blocks out of the way
  

Fixes

• Crash: "Trying to set a surface target that does not exist" when changing window size during level gen
  
• Crash: "obj_torch_Step_0"
  
• Bug: Repairing weapons above "good" quality reducees their quality to "good"
  
• Bug: Charge stars in walls no longer react to being hit
  
• Bug: Tiles that form the reaper room don't appear on the map in the pause screen
  
• Bug: Map information is lost upon alt+tabbing, window losing focus while fullscreened, switching between fullscreen/windowed mid-game, etc.
  As long as you pause before doing any of these things, that should no longer happen: Current "fog of war" information is now saved every time you pause.
  
• Bug: Can still get stuck in walls with Breakthrough
  

Changes

• All unique weapons (soul, wrench, etc) now effectively have the "durable" trait
  
• Removed durability cap from broken blade traps
  

Fixes

• Crash: "gen_map_features_start" when no start location is found
  
• Crash: "anim_bowshot2"
  
• Bug: Grumbuls adds don't properly spawn in the tank fight
  
• Crash: "obj_snow_deep_Alarm_0"
  
• Bug: Twins fight loops forever
  

Out on Windows only for now. Mac + Linux coming later in the week.

A quick bugfix build plus some changes!

The new rewards are much rarer in this build than in the last build - which is intentional - but they might be a little too rare now. I'm still tweaking the balance of their spawn frequency so just keep that in mind! I want them to be not littering the first floor but also not once-every-ten runs, and I haven't hit that sweet spot yet.

Anyway here's them notes:

Changes

• Heavenly weapons are no longer indestructible, now degrading to excellent after use
  
• Very slightly reduced quality of items from soul chests
  
• No longer alerted to lava by dangersense when immune to fire
  
• Changed appearance of stone platforms in the Upper Dungeon
  
• Reduced range of sound from killing humanoid enemies
  
• Soul chests combine their total soul count when they touch one another
  
• Slightly increased range of soul-gathering on soul-chests
  
• Soul-chests now must be touched before they start absorbing souls
  
• Made device more durable - no longer destroyed by fire or water
  
• Added unstable cold burst effect
  
• Can now pounce onto climbing ladders and ledges again
  

Fixes

• Reward type items spawn far too frequently, too numerously, and in the wrong places
  
• Certain premade rooms that disallow verticality spawning break level progression
  
• Disappearing blocks disallow nearby ladders even when they're behind walls
  
• Shifting barriers can spawn in places that block off adjacent passages when flipped
  
• Shifting barriers in premade rooms spawn in the wrong place when the room is mirrored
  
• Unaligned text in death summary screen
  
• Crash when selling or piping potions partially identified with square bracketed tag items in their name
  
• Powered arm spams messages when carrying a full battery while still having charges left in the arm
  
• Crash with obj_goo_bottle_Destroy_0
  
• 1-height corridors sometimes force humanoids to crouch when climbing down from a ladder
  
• Climbing down into spikes as a pathfinder or cartographer deals damage as though falling into them
  
• Can use Breakthrough to jump outside of the level's bounds
  
• Prosthetic arms don't draw as the correct color on the in-game sprite
  
• Slimes kinda spaz out on corpses in spikes
  
• Lava drips can spawn on death blades, freezing them
  
• Blessings and certain amulet abilities block energy when active like trances
  
• Stowing an item while a hated dagger is already stown makes the dagger stop existing
  
• Crash when eating things while the statistic for number of things eaten is uninitialized
  
• Gills from fishanha meal do nothing
  
• Horizontal moving blocks get stuck over solid tiles
  
• CPU players in vs mode spawn in weeeeird places
  
• Going directly from one transition stage to another from shops still increments the floor count
  
• Cold descent transition stage doesn't have its frozen door or fog of war style transition
  
• Empty bottles have no name when being sold
  
• Crash when blinking in versus mode
  

• 4 New Boons!
  
  
  
  • Weapon Master
    
  • Living Weapon
    
  • Breakthrough
    
  • Spider Spin
    
  
  
• Completely rewrote level generator
  
• Completely re-made Normal Bear fight
  
• Added two new weapons, dropped by Normal Bear
  
• Added collectible learning points
  
• Added collectible blessing items
  
• Bunch of new premade rooms
  
• New type of treasure chest
  

• Raised followers retain weapon skills, boons, and spellcasting abilities
  
• Grumbuls no longer spawn with amulets, gorhounds, or small turrets in the Grumbul Tank fight
  
• If a player with undead followers dies, the followers will reassign themselves to any player who comes near that also knows Raise Dead
  
• Weapon's status effects only apply when an attack deals damage
  
• Grumbuls in the Grumbul Tank arena no longer spawn with amulets of any kind
  
• Completely re-made the Normal Bear boss
  
• Regenerate now makes slimes multiply
  
• New flame visual effect
  
• New "zapped" visual effect
  
• Made dipper effects last longer
  
• Decapitated enemies who aren't immune to bleeding will bleed out now
  
• Reduced damage frequency of acid
  
• Completely re-made the Encyclopedia
  
• Added the ability to specify potion, spellbook, and grenade types on custom kids
  
• Can now jump up to 1 tile higher by holding up when leaping out of whater
  
• Amulet of Force now slightly pulls usable items towards you when fully realized
  
• Campfires can now bake nearby things, as long as the food isn't directly on the fire
  
• More things cause detectable noise now - like being hit, bear-traps snapping shut, corpses falling, and weapons clashing
  
• Can now roll by sprinting while crouched
  
• Unstable plague now produces many fewer flies
  
• Increased drop rate of fishanha corpses
  

• Swarm Form is broken
  
• Grapple breaks if the thrower dies mid-throw
  
• The same items sometimes persistently appear across multiple floors
  
• Disowned player followers remain persistent across floors in co-op
  
• Crash if a corpse currently being looted is destroyed by plague blight or some other means
  
• Lightning Strike (Chain Lightning + Air-Dash multi-cast) sometimes places the player in walls
  
• Reaper deactivates upon leaving the view during certain attacks
  
• Water isn't spawning properly
  
• "fx_sound" surface crash
  
• Byat eye trails never disappear sometimes
  
• Typo "You knows [...]" when looking at oneself
  
• Bear traps draw at the wrong depth
  
• Bear traps continually re-attach to large enemies after falling off
  
• Dangersense only grants a speed boost when traveling to the right
  
• Orbis Malus orbs are affected by status effects
  
• Crash when using Break on arrow turrets
  
• Crash related to fx_sound
  
• Crash related to obj_creature_handle
  
• Tinkerbot weapons don't persist between floors
  
• Reaper can consume keys necessary for progress
  
• Fur Hoods and Coats prevent heat loss entirely instead of slowing it
  
• Crab's skittering sound continues to play even when it shouldn't
  
• One player's pause menu doesn't draw when both players pause in co-op
  
• Raising the corpse of a dead co-op player erases their traits
  
• Controller still rumbles for players using keyboard controls
  
• Crash when backing out of "enchant equipment" shop menu when equipment is all enchanted already
  
• Crash when tracking tunnel doorways
  
• Arrows hit walls immediately when fired up or down while too near to a wall
  
• Can no longer press esc to back out of starting a game, or move the selection left/right after a character has been selected
  
• Spell-dealers now have the proper text for the "Slow" and "Haste" spells
  
• Fixed bug with fire sound effect continuing after explosions
  
• Using poet's Tome ability as a spell while also having incantation causes the tome to always cast its charged version, even as a non-wordsmith
  
• Tinkerbot stops animating when heavy-lifted
  
• Gamepad input doesn't work in single player character select menu if the menu was entered via keyboard
  
• Boulders on pressure pads repeatedly press them instead of holding them down
  
• Sometimes get stuck to ceilings with the sticky feet meal
  
• Tinkerer's class ability was named different things in different places
  

Hey!
Here's a video:


If you don't want to watch that here are the same words below, followed by some extra words:

I know it's been a long time since the last update. There are a lot of reasons for that, but to keep things short, it's because I'm much busier now than I was before - in a good way, working on UFO 50 with Derek Yu and Paul Hubans and a couple other Super Rad Dudes - and because I was working very very hard on rewriting a pretty fundamental part of the game. Namely: the level generator.
So, here, have an update.


The aforementioned rewritten level generator can now produce proper lock-and-key situations, or switch-and-gate situations, or switch-and-furnace situations, or whatever other kinds of "need to get X to go to Y" kinds of scenarios I decide to add in the future. The new generator also features many, many other tweaks to the levels that are probably less immediately obvious but no less impactful. There are also a boatload of new premade rooms that take advantage of some fun things now possible in the new level generator. I finally made myself a proper editor for making premade rooms that makes the process significantly faster and less of a headache than it was before, so just about every update from now on will probably feature some new premade rooms and setpieces to some degree or another.


While I was making all those fancy new premade rooms, I realized that there weren't enough things I could use as general reward type items other than Fancy Chests, so I added a few!

• There are now Soul Chests, which are special treasure chests that power up by consuming the corpses of nearby slain enemies. The more corpses they consume, the better the loot they drop will be!
  
• In addition, you can now find extra learning points and free spells just floating around sometimes.
  
• I've also added a new kind of item called "Blessings", which are permanent passive powerups, sort of like never-ending trances but a bit less potent. You can only have one blessing at a time though, so choose wisely. There are only three implemented currently but more are definitely on the way.
  

I've also added four new leveling boons, two STR and two SPD.

• Weapon Master lets you use any weapon skill that you have access to with any weapon regardless of its type.
  
• Living Weapon lets you use weapon skills while unarmed and removes the damage penalty on unarmed attacks. When you first learn it, it forces you to pick a weapon class to hate, but you then gain that weapon class' full moveset as unarmed attacks.
  
• Breakthrough lets you charge up a super-jump to launch high into the air, bust through single-tile-thick walls and ceilings, and crash through crush traps and boulders.
  
• Spider-Spin lets you charge up a roll that clings to surfaces as you zip around.
  

• I've completely rewritten a certain boss enemy from scratch, so look forward to that.
  
• I've completely overhauled the way the encyclopedia looks, and added a few new illustrations and entries to it.
  
• I've added a stats screen on the encyclopedia where you can see things like your best depth, total kills, and most frequently cast spell.

That's about it for the major new features, but there are also a lot of smaller changes and big bugfixes.

I know, I know, there's no new environment yet, but part of the reason for the level generator rewrite is that as I was working on the Deep Dark I kept running into a lot of things I wanted to do that just weren't supported by the old generator. In any case, I hope it was worth the wait, and now that the generator rewrite is done I'm going to be laser-focusing my attention on adding the midgame boss, the Deep Dark, and bringing back wayward kids in a way that isn't crashy and buggy and broken.


As I'm sure you've noticed, I'm really bad at keeping these here forums up to date on the game's happenings. I'm...super active basically everywhere except on Steam - especially the Catacomb Kids Discord, and my Twitter, and my weekly Twitch Dev-streams - the ones that I've been doing pretty consistently for several years at this point. Even on the Subreddit, when it's not super quiet there. I kind of hate using Steam as both a player and a dev, and frequently forget it exists. I will probably always hate it, especially now that Slack and Discord occupy the space in my life that forums used to.

BUT! Now that I've finally admitted that to you all - and to myself - I figure it's probably only right that rather than continuing to neglect this significant part of the community, doing a great disservice and injustice to all you great many players who have and continue to support the game, I should reach out for help! I'm REALLY BAD AT COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT, but I know there are people who are NOT THAT and would probably be willing to help out with keeping folks here appraised of the game's progress in a way that I never could.

So uh. Yeah. If you're good at community management and want to volunteer to help make this steam forum an informed and welcoming place to new and old players alike, hit me up at tyriq [at] ckgame [dot] net.

Thanks for stickin' with me.
Sorry I'm bad at this.
Hope the update is fun.
I'm not dead yet.