Devlog #41 - Full Steam Ahead

Greetings Talented Gamers!

Let's get the most exciting thing out of the way! I'm proud to announce that Talented will be launching on Steam on the 31st of October!

That's right, we chose the spookiest day for our spooky game, how fitting, and sticking with the same theme - I want to share some changes we've been making to the Summoner Class! But first...

About itch.io...

We've had a few questions about what our plan is for the itch.io build. I want to be completely up front about it.

As of the Steam Release Date the build on itch.io will become a demo build, with only Archer available to play on Mastery 0.

We've loved sharing our hard work with you at no cost on itch.io, and it always pains me to take something away from people. Unfortunately we can't make it for free forever (as much as I'd like to).

We hope the low price point on Steam and our roadmap with lots content more to come will make it worth it, if you are able to help us support Talented's ongoing development. If not... then I completely understand and thank you so much for joining us this far on our journey!

With that said.. back to the fun stuff!

Snails too Stronk

You know it, I know it, Snails are too damn strong! 

They oneshot Googlys like it's nothing and completely carry the early game by themselves leading to mindlessly pressing WASD without a care in the world!

In our boldest move yet, we've made the base Helper Damage 3. This means that Snails will deal a total of 6 damage (still more than the average basic attack, but not enough to oneshot an eyeball).

This should add a slightly bigger focus on abilities in the early game, and Snails will need some additional synergies to stay relevant later on. Additionally all Blobs now deal double Helper Damage, giving Squelcharim a bit of a boost in power!

Gravestones are a... DEAD Build?

I'm exaggerating of course! We've seen plenty of strong Gravestone builds out there - the problem is they take a little bit of effort to get going.

Gravestone focused Talents fall into two buckets in 0.9. Talents that create Gravestones and Talents that require Gravestones to work. 

This works.. fine... but it can be frustrating when you only have Talents from one of these buckets, leaving you with 30 Gravestones and no way to use them, or worse, no Gravestones and lots of Talents that do nothing!

To combat that all Gravestone Talents now create a Gravestone at the start of each Night

This should make Gravestone builds more flexible and the individual talents more appealing in the early game. Since Grave Circumstances no longer has a special place, it's been re-designed to grant Lifesteal instead of giving 2 Gravestones per night.

A few more Summony notes...

- Soul Absorption Summon Speed reduced to 4% (from 10%)
- Pumpkania's Pumpkin Helpers have 40HP (down from 60)
- Gigantify now buffs 3 Snails (up from 2)
- Gigantify now increases Snail Health Points by 10 (up from 5)
- Squelcharim cooldown reduced to 5 seconds (down from 8)
- Infestation cooldown increased to 20 seconds (up from 15)
- Pumpkania cooldown increased to 20 seconds (up from 16)
- Spookantation cooldown reduced to 20 seconds (down from 40)
- Call of the Haunted cooldown increased to 30 seconds (up from 20)
- Spectrail has been reworked into Spooktrail

- Essence Thief is now a core Talent
- Lifesteal Up moved to level 4 Core Talents
- Experience Up removed from Core Talents
- Added a new Talent to the base set (available every run) Mind Rend

Slow Down!

Reaching level 100 in a run? That's completely fine. Reaching level 1000?... Less so.

We absolutely love enabling econ strategies in Talented, but there's a few that got completely out of hand in 0.9 leading to runs being a guaranteed win before they'd even reached Night 15.

To help balance these strategies we've adjusted the way our experience curve functions at high levels, but left low levels untouched.

Every 50 Levels the experience required to level up is increased by 40%

In our testing this has left econ focused Talents and Abilities (such as Knowledge is Power) feeling strong, but not completely game breaking. We've very open to tweaking this number throughout Early Access - but we think it's a step in the right direction.

Hope that all makes sense! This will be the very last devlog before we release, so catch you on the other side and as always...

Stay Talented