AVWW Beta 0.537, "Elemental Resistance," Released!

This one is a pretty sizable one in terms of what it changes about the "feel" of the game.  The big new thing for existing players is the elemental damage system: spells each belong to one of six elements (fire, water, earth, air, light, and entropy), matching the colors of the gems used to create them.

Enemies then have weaknesses or resistances to specific elements, meaning that (as in many games) lightning attacks are more effective against robots, and you can't hurt a being made out of fire by attacking it with fire.  Beyond that, bosses also now get randomized elemental resistances mixed in with their other unique-to-the-individual health/attack/casting-speed bonuses.  And lastly, the various shield spells that were introduced a month or so ago now have proper elemental resistance bonuses tied to each of them.

There actually was a sort of elemental "combo system" that we'd implemented, too, but as the very savvy Jerebaldo1 pointed out from the release notes before the release even came out, it was possible to exploit.  We have some other ideas about elemental combo systems, but coming up with something simple, fun, and non-exploitable is going to take some more thought and discussion.  I overlooked one major class of exploit with my first pass at such a combo system, but that doesn't mean that a combo system of that general sort is impossible.

There are also two new enemy types in this new release.  The first is Red Slime, which is a stationary enemy that you'll only encounter (for now) in the intro mission.  I imagine that the slimes will make some appearances elsewhere in the game in the future.  The second new enemy is the Water Esper, which is now mixed in with Lightning Espers to show a bit of what can be done by mixing "identical" enemies that have differing elements but little else.

Let's see, other stuff... There's an awesome new ocean music track in this release, and there's a goodly bit of new furniture/objects, particularly in the ice age areas.  The intro mission has another two surface chunks and a new building with ten rooms in it.  Coffers are now used in some stash rooms throughout the game now, rather than being exclusively limited to the intro mission.  And there were a number of bugfixes.

Keith is still completely immersed in the multiplayer aspects of the game, but that's getting to a point where I expect we'll be able to do some internal testing with staff within a week or so.  There's still a lot more to do before a public release even after that, but it's a promising step.

More to come tomorrow: my ardent hope is to wrap up the last segment of the intro mission (which takes place underground) tomorrow.  Knock on wood, I think that all of the major game extensions that are needed for the intro mission have already been put in place, so I should be able to wrap things up.  Then I'll be back to new content for the main game itself, which I'm really looking forward to.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.