Man, what a journey.

After 11 weeks, we're finally closing in on the deadline. The game night is coming up next Wednesday, and we are insanely hyped up about it.

We did a few more rounds of playtesting this week, with tons of positive feedback and great suggestions from the testers. Last weekend was another Bug Squash Weekend, which we kind of forgot to announce in the previous devlog. Oops.

But anyway, this was a crazy productive week. We made changes to balance, nerfed some things, added some quality of life improvements and, most importantly, said goodbye to Golems. Instead, now we have spoopy Skeletons. Functionally the same, but they look a bit nicer overall.

Something you might notice about the downloads is that now we have a build for other platforms! We realize we should have done that a lot sooner, but better late than never. Now, you may notice that we skipped version 0.5.0. We actually didn't! It was up for a few hours, but a crash was found and we had to rebuild it as version 0.5.1.

Anyway, to the changelog!

1. New info dump tutorial!

Finally we got around to reworking that old thing! Not exactly ideal, but the codebase's spaghetti index was just too high for us to actually code an interactive tutorial. We would need to rebuild the game from the ground up for that to be possible... though that isn't as absurd as it might seem. ;)

Anyway, back to the tutorial changelog, now we've divided it into 4 parts: how a match works, what the units do, what are the terrain types and what the spells do. All of them can be accessed through the "Help" option in the main menu.

2. General quality of life improvements!

We got a few of them! Here's a list:

1. You can finally undo movements!
   FINALLY! We've wanted to include this for quite a while, but it was never quite high enough priority. Previously, if you selected a mage and clicked to move it, you were forced to actually finish the movement of that mage. Now you can cancel giving a command to a unit at any time.
2. There's now a safety lock to prevent double clicking "End Turn"!
   Prevents accidentally ending your turn in general.
3. You can now move the camera around!
   Now you can move the camera around so the spell list won't block your vision!
4. Map select screen now has thumbnails!
   Now if you see someone playing on a map and you don't know its name, at least you'll be able to recognize it from an image.
5. Mouse over HP display now has a solid color background!
   Previously seeing the HP display's text could be quite difficult depending on what was behind it. Now that is no longer a problem.
6. Units which have not yet acted now have a more visible highlight.
   Yes, it was there before, it was just very subtle. We don't like subtlety.
7. Now there's an official way not to cast anything with a mage!
   You no longer need to cast a bolt on an empty cell, or throw a rock in a random direction! Now there's a button that skips the spellcasting action of a mage.
8. Job's done!
   "End Turn" button starts emitting particles when all units have acted.
9. Better tooltips!
   Spell tooltips now include numerical values for the spell, such as damage or amount healed.
10. Rock has now a better highlight system!
    Now it also highlights the cell behind the target if it would be pushed back or hurt the object behind it upon casting.
11. And last but not least, we've built the game for more platforms!
    Now we have builds for Windows (32bit and 64bit), Linux (32bit and 64bit) and Mac OS X.

3. Aesthetic changes!

Things that make the game look or feel better, but don't actually change how the game works.

1. Golems no more, spoopiness increased.
   What we used to call Golems are now Skeletons. Functionally identical, but spoopier.
2. Spell tooltips tweaked.
   Content stays mostly the same, this was mainly a formatting and grammatical check.
3. New abyss sprite!
   Now instead of a pitch black pit, it's hot brimstone. Now it actually makes sense for you to put it on fire.
4. New victory screen!
   Now you can mock your remaining opponents (or lack thereof) with pride as you take home your win!
5. New sprites for the side of the hexes!
   New sprite variations for the earth underneath the battlefield.
6. Turn indicator now only colors in actual flag.
   Previously, it would apply a red or blue filter to the whole image.
7. Storm now has a sound effect on cast.
   This was one of the last spells to have a sound effect.

4. Mechanical changes...

4.1 For consistency!

Minor changes and bugfixes. Not really design related, just emergent properties of spaghetti code that we've fixed.

1. Hitting a unit with a Rock will always damage the unit behind it.
   This was not the case if you were to kill the first unit.
2. Always process Orb heals before Skeleton / Fire damage.
   Previously the system was not deterministic, and that was against one of the concepts we had for this game from the very beggining.
3. In game menu button.
   To the surprise of many (including one of our devs!), we have an in game menu where you can access options and exit to the main menu. Now we have a button on screen for it so you don't have to press Esc to open it.

4.2 For balance!

There are only 2 buffs we've made this week, both of them coming from playtesting suggestions.

The first one: buff the range of Rock.
Rock required a few very specific conditions to be met for it to be useful. We've increased its range from 3 to 4 so that it may be useful for sniping unsuspecting units. We don't think this is too strong because of its inherent restriction: it can only be thrown in a straight line. It is on the attacker to actually find a way to line up to its target.

The second one: buff the range of Life (as a heal).
We've increased the heal range from 2 to 3. The reason: the only times we ever saw the heal part of Life being used was when there was no other option. Healing was never the better option, only the least bad. We hope that with its increased range, we'll see new strategies arising, especially with Skeletons or even with deep diving mages.

This will be the last regular devlog. As stated before, the game night is on Wednesday, August 15th. After that, development will cease and we will start working on the post mortem.

We still plan to make two special posts though: one on Tuesday afternoon, with the final changelog, and one on Saturday, August 18th, to say our proper goodbyes and thanks.

That's all for today, folks. We'll talk again on Tuesday, but until then,

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