Post-Jam Updates
Mika here! We've been working hard on a post-jam update for Beneath the Throne of the Goblin Queen! The updates have been shifting the game from what it originally was in some ways, but even though the experience is different, the core is the same and even more pronounced! So, what did we do?
Herbs and jewels!
Even though the original had random plants and jewels strewn around the dungeons, it did little with them. Now we have them connected as they were originally imagined: every glyph has its own herb and jewel! Consuming herbs gives you temporary access to the power of its glyph. Using a jewel (casting it) creates a mist around you that sometimes has environmental effects depending on its glyph (it might open all chests, heal everyone around, make everyone recover stamina, etc). One thing that you can be sure of is that it will paralyze anyone who doesn't hold its glyph – so you can use this if in dire straits.
There's a much more powerful reason you want to cast jewels and consume herbs, though, but let's not get ahead of ourselves...
More complicated enemy AI
Here's something fun! This here Hobgob is spawning rats when we're close by. It's also trying to keep at least 5 fields of distance between you at all time, and actively running away if pursued. There's a lot more spawning, running away and being sneaky involved.
With Hobgobs spawning rats, Illusions multiplying all over the place and Oozes splitting when hit, the economy of combat no longer rests only on the resources of health and stamina, and this was my primary goal. We have some decent orthogonality now, meaning that there's an actual reason to consider both tactics and strategy. You sometimes really can't kill everything.
Illusions and rats. Music by Omnia, not included in release!
Altar-cations!
Ok, bad pun. Altars are BtT's version of stairs, or a version of Hades' boons. You reach the Altar, you perform some end-of-level huzzah, and then you get safe passage and a new power. Well, that's a bit different now. Here's the process in short:
- You find the twin altars that lead to the next level.
- You activate them by reaching maximum tension and then releasing it
- You get a new status effect:
- If you try entering the altar while silenced, it blocks you and tells you that the new glyph you're trying to reach for won't take! You now need to survive for some time.
- Your other glyphs aren't working either. Good luck figuring out how to stop monsters from spawning next to you because of that tension release in step 2!
Game End(s)
You get through the game, reach the Throne, go below... and the confusing HATE level is now gone? Oh, that's weird. What happens next? I don't want to spoil, but I will say that beating the game now is not the same as finishing it!
Loot Menu!
We now open crates and show you their content instead of doing auto-pickup! It's quite nifty!
300% More Frames
Stefan has been working on the absolute backend of the engine, rewriting a lot of what we haphazardly slapped together partially in C#, and partially in Lua. Just moving Colors into Lua completely lifted our framerate by 100%. 200% more were gained from using some Lua tips and tricks for improving performance – it's so easy to miss, but also so easy to fix! More frames to animate the fire and magic!
Identification
The identification minigame in BtT is one step away from the usual. We never hide what something is – "it's a diamond", for example – but we do hide its connections from the glyphs and herbs. Well, hide is rough: you have to use it to find out. And it's on you if you forget. To help out with what you do discover, instead of leaving it in the diary (and more words on that below!), we now display those in the detailed inventory view. You can go take a peek whenever you're interested. And if you don't know something, it simply shows ??? and begs you to try it out!
Under a different meaning, we also worked on literal identification, as in: what the hell am I looking at here?! Happy to say there's progress on that front with nice pointers towards altars:
Identification takes priority on screen, and it gets to go over most other real estate:
Diary view!
A much-needed quality of life addition, you can now press TAB to open a much fuller view of the diary that keeps scrolling past at lightning speed in normal play.
Bugfix Galore
I can't even enumerate all of these... There's bugs that we weren't even aware were bugs that, oddly enough, mostly played nice. Those went away as we fixed up the codebase piecewise. There were bugs we knew about but didn't know how to approach – these we focused on more, like what happens when you have a full inventory and open a chest with 5 things inside (spoiler alert: you pick everything up and have a secret inventory now), or why jumping diagonally multiple times doesn't spend any moves!
I'm happy to say, we're in a much better place now.
Beneath the Throne of the Goblin Queen is going to see its one and only big post-jam update this weekend. After that, it's going to be a lot of minor work and tweaking if even that, depending on our free time. There's a lot of fun things that we've gleamed from building this, and we want to explore further. We'll probably come back to some of these topics in the future, repackage the good stuff, redo the bad, but whatever happens - it's a joy to be working on this game and deliver even one QoL update! Cheers, and thanks for the journey!
