AVWW Beta 0.540, "Whips, Bursts, And Insects," Released!

This one has two new spell scrolls and one new spellgem.  It also has a couple of tweaks and bugfixes.

The most interesting thing about these new spell scrolls is that these are the first two that are offensively-oriented in a direct fashion.  Previously scrolls were all logistical, healing, or movement type effects, except for the summon rhino -- which, while offensive, is fairly indirect.

Insect Orb and Ice Burst are both as directly offensive as they come, but they are unique from any of the spellgems.  That's something that we plan to do more of, as it's interesting to me to have limited-use offensive spell scrolls that are nonetheless having the advantage of costing no mana.

Right now there's still only about 9 spell scrolls in general in the game (compared to 34 spellgems at the moment), so there's really a lot more to do on scrolls to even get them caught up to the spellgems.  I'm still expecting to have 100+ of each spell scrolls and spellgems by the time we hit 1.0.

The new Miasma Whip is a particularly fun one for me, as it's a refreshingly fast entropy-based attack that isn't quite so short-range as Death Touch.  Given the elemental strengths and weaknesses that bosses now randomly have, it's kind of important to have a lot of offensive options in every element.  We're still not quite there yet, but there's lots more to come soon!

More to come tomorrow!  The rest of today is going to be spent on updated installers, some new distributor setups, and so on.  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.