It’s been a long road (over four years!), but we’re super happy to present version 1.0 of Vagante. It wouldn’t have been possible to make it this far if it weren’t for all the people who supported us. Thank you all for sticking with us throughout Steam Early Access!
What’s in store for the future of Vagante you might ask? We plan on continuing development as we have throughout Early Access, with bug fixes and new content, as well as adding localization and porting to other platforms. We’ll also start looking into support for modding and adding user-generated content to the game.
Vagante will retain its Early Access price until February 25 2018, after which we’ll be increasing the price to $17.99. However, if you miss this window of opportunity you can look forward to Vagante participating in future Steam sales.
It’s been a while, but we’ve been hard at work on preparing for our exit from early access. Mark your calendars, we’ll be leaving Early Access on February 21, 2018. This update is our last major patch before our 1.0 release, although we’ll still be releasing some minor patches before then to fix any serious issues. This update consists of a ton of bugfixes and polish, as well as a number of new features.
New/Balance
New difficulty scaling:
Character starting stats are now consistent no matter how many players you have
Monster damage and health scales up with additional players
Monster health increases by 50% for each additional player
Monster damage increases by 10% for each additional player
Numerous tweaks to enemy difficulty
Added some new spells: Charm, and Summon Monster
Elemental enchant damage on weapons now scales with weapon damage
Elemental enchants now affect Rod spells
Added ability to remove certain positive status effects from the status menu
Improved game loading screen and speed
Removed disclaimer from NetMenu
Homing arrows now eventually lose rotation speed
Improved online packet compression
Identified Identify scrolls no longer work on identified items
Magic Rods now trigger by holding the attack button
Before, players needed to press the [Interact] button
Players can now switch facing direction with a charged bow by double tapping a direction
Before, players needed to press the [Interact] button
Removed old up/down tooltip indicators, replaced by controller-specific sprites
Added a few frames of delay before BoulderTraps trigger
Affinity levels are now visually displayed in-menu
Forest
Reworked Forest’s Plant Boss (again)
Ruins
Added SFX
Reworked Demon Knight
Improved summoning animations of Cultists
Forest Temple
Added SFX
TikiMan AI improved
Arrow traps now have a more visible animation
Improved Chimera Boss attack tells and behavior
Fixed monsters spawning on Sawblades or Pendulum Axes
Improved level generation and room variety
Tower
Added SFX
Imps can now drown
Improved Fishman and Imp AI
Players can now jump through collapsing platforms (like normal platforms)
Improved level generation and room variety
Factory
Added SFX
Improved level generation
Polished enemy and boss behavior
Volume slider values are now based on a non-linear scale
Numerous optimizations
Pathfinding calculations are now spread out over more than one frame
Added a collision detection broadphase based on a bounding volume hierarchy
Improved cache coherency of critical sections of code
Bugfixes
OMP - Online Multiplayer
Fixed being unable to enable player controllers after disabling one
Fixed some AI targeting bugs in the Forest
Fixed Fleaman being able to see stealthed units
Fixed some issues with grappling hook code and netcode
Fixed BossGoblinKing’s charge attack effects persisting after death
Fixed Boulders sometimes not correctly squishing enemies
Fixed Piranha and DiveBomber dealing damage while frozen
Fixed an issue with fast-moving entities not behaving identically to non-fast moving entities
Fixed poltergeists getting set on fire
Fixed elemental damage causing CombatText to spawn when dealing 0 damage
Fixed numerous cases of entities animating while frozen
Fixed broken Lurker frozen animation
Fixed title screen animation offsets being unsynced
Fixed NetMenu having a pressable Host Steam Game button when Steam is not loaded/detected
Fixed some offset and fade issues with pause menu
Fixed skeletons being able to roll
Fixed GrappleHook sometimes spawning with attributes and being equipable
Fixed explosions or dig effects not being reflected in minimap
Fixed some issues with Forest level generation
Fixed a memory leak of some entities not being cleaned up on level transitions
OMP: Fixed player damage sound effects not being synced properly
OMP: Fixed numerous issues with status effect client/server sync
OMP: Fixed netcode of Rogue’s Shadow Affinity
OMP: Fixed netcode of Knight’s affinities
OMP: Fixed critical combat damage not appearing correctly
OMP: Fixed fast weapons not animating correctly for other players
OMP: Fixed crash related to an edge case in swinging weapons
OMP: Fixed a crash related to using wands and teleporting
OMP: Fixed interpolation issues with ice shards
OMP: Fixed netcode of electricity arcs
OMP: Fixed instantaneous blinks or teleports looking strange
OMP: Fixed netcode of magic wands
OMP: Fixed clients timing out sometimes when connecting to a new server due to connecting too early
OMP: Fixed a bug that prevented players from joining a new game after disconnecting from one.
OMP: Fixed netcode of chaos magic effects
OMP: Fixed an issue with healing potion effects being duplicated
OMP: Fixed mimic’s attack cooldown not resetting correctly
OMP: Fixed some visual issues with Boulders
OMP: Fixed Wisps hurting players more than once
OMP: Fixed double use text appearing after using a magic scroll
OMP: Fixed stack items’ quantity not being properly synced
OMP: Fixed players not properly dropping held units when hanging on a ledge
OMP: Fixed interpolation issues with other players crawling off of ledges
OMP: Fixed some visual issues with Slime’s lunge attack
OMP: Fixed some particles not being drawn when they should
OMP: Fixed Spriggans releasing drawn arrows when hurt, instead of cancelling their attack
In terms of level content, Vagante is nearly complete. From the very beginning of development, we planned four main acts of content, as well as four unique branches. With each of these areas now in the game, all that remains is the final end-game content. We hope the ending will reveal a little more of the world’s lore as well as wrap up our game in an appropriate manner.
After we finish the last area and game ending, we still need to go back and do a lot of balancing and polishing. We also need to flesh out the level generation rooms and add additional content such as items and backgrounds. Suffice to say there’s a lot of work to do, but I’m personally excited by how close we are to a version 1.0.
More details about this new update and patch notes below.
Item Generation
In a single Vagante run some players collect nearly 100 items. Even if a player throws away an old piece of equipment, they have a good chance to find a similar one later on in the run. We want items to feel unique, such that players get attached to the rare items they have. To that end, we’ve added a new classification of item rarity now, artifacts.
Artifacts spawn with a unique item attribute which can only ever be found once per a run. While items from boss chests are much more likely to be an artifact, they can rarely be found in normal chests too.
Some existing unique items have been marked as artifacts as well, such that you’ll never find more than one of these items in a run (Ring of Seltioc, Ring of Zygox, and the Grappling Hook are examples).
Patch Notes
New/Balance
Added new type of item rarity to item generation, Unique
Added a couple of new unique item attributes
Added a short windup-time before BossGolem throws a boulder
Jumping up and hitting the bottom of a boulder that’s resting will now push it away slightly
Re-enabled per-packet compression (reduces bandwidth used by online games by ~10%)
Added support for unicode chat and player names in online games.
Before now, unicode characters from other languages did not show up properly
Added new sound effects for enemies in The Catacombs