Tons of stuff this week!

First of all, quality of life changes: spell tooltips are much easier to read now, and we're implementing the use of a font of our own (courtesy of Lag). The font is still a WIP, so it's not implemented everywhere yet.

Next up, we actually added two new maps! "Fortress" consists of  a single structure in the center, with forest along the flanks. We hope that this layout will create intense fights for the control of the center, especially with walls (which, by the way, you can explode). "Rift", on the other hand, is a small map, only 7 by 7 hexes and two wizards per team. The map has a rift down the middle (hence the name), dividing each team into two separate units. Mages can still use Flight to cross the gap, but that leaves half the stage open for the opponent to grab.

And finally, some balance changes: we thought there wasn't enough of an incentive to move the orb up to the battle, so it ended up being just a desperation move when a player is highly disadvantaged. Although there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, it's not how we wanted it to behave. We want there to be some value in bringing the orb along with the mages, without it becoming broken. The solution we came up with is:

• Increased orb heal per turn from 2 to 3
• Decreased orb HP from 15 to 8

Yes, the HP drop is drastic, but that is so it becomes a viable option for actually targetting when in the middle of a skirmish.

Coming up in the next weeks, we'll be finishing up the music and redoing the tutorial. We wanted to implement a fully fledged interactive tutorial, but that's pretty much impossible with the spaghetti code we have and the deadline closing in.

But don't worry, everything is going to be fine. We would love to continue this project beyond the deadline, this is just a first prototype and we'll have plenty of time to implement all the cool things we want. But that's quite a ways in the future, until then...

Be your own magic.
VVilliam, the VVonderful VVizard
HexCasters Dev Team