Devlog #27 - Gaining Elite Status

[Hello] - Greet Talented gamers, gaining 10% increased development transparency.

It's that time of celebration once again; Christmas a talented devlog. I may not have a beard but I do bring gifts coming in the next update. Let's kick things off with some new visual upgrades!

Elite enemies have seen a boost in visual quality. We now recolour only specific parts of the enemies and we've chosen colours that are a little more pleasing to the eye.

Note: Green is now Infested (spawns a fly) and Yellow is Speedy (moves quicker but has less HP).

The keen eyes will also have spotted that we've added a bright flash whenever a unit takes damage. This is especially useful for seeing when the player takes damage!

Even more Elite Enemy improvements are coming too with two new elite types:


[Spectral] - Cannot be knocked back and moves slightly quicker.

[Defiant] - Immune to Status Effects

Wait.. Status Effects?

You bet! How long can you spend making a game with an RPG combat system and not add a DoT? A whole year apparently.

Status Effects are finally here, and they're hitting fast with 4 already packed up and ready for the 0.8 update. We thought carefully about a robust ruleset that would fit Talented's fast pace combat where an enemy rarely spends more than a second or two on screen, here's what we came up with:

• Only a single stack of each Status Effect can be applied.
• If a unit already has a Status Effect, the duration will be refreshed
• All Status Effects are equal in terms of power. Burning always deals the same damage, Frostbite always slows by the same amount. (With a slight exception for Talents that may buff them!)

Here's a few examples of status effects:


[Burning] - Deals 1 damage per second and causes the target to explode on death dealing 5 damage to surrounding enemies. 

[Shocked] - Stops enemy movement and abilities for 2 seconds.

You'll find these Status Effects on a host of abilities, some old some new in the coming updates. So keep an eye out for them in our new and updated ability tooltips.

Traits

Finally, I want to talk about Traits (the ones in the run setup screen that give buffs to your characters). Improving the Traits system is one of the biggest goals we have for the 0.8 update so we've spent quite a bit of time playing around with ideas and iterating on what Traits should be.

Some things we heard loud and clear:

• Traits should never be a negative (looking at you Astute/Adept on Wizard!)
• Traits should set you up for a synergy in the run, but not decide your entire build
• Traits within a tier should feel different enough to make you want to experiment with different combos

With those thoughts in mind we've landed on the following design structure:

[Level 1] - A basic ability.
[Level 5] - Stat Increase. Worth around 2x Talent Points in value.
[Level 10] - Resource manipulation.

[Level 15] - Base Ability Upgrade. You will be given 2 options to upgrade your  Level 1 trait ability. These should augment the ability in unique two directions.

[Level 20] - Complete gamechangers. You have access to two talents that could potentially start off an entire build by themselves.

We'll be revealing more traits in the next devlog so make sure you follow up and join our Discord!