With all the offensive skills in the game, we’re taking a break from skills before looking into how to spice up the supportive ones. Instead we’ve done a bunch of quality of life-improvements to existing systems. One of the more visually interesting of these changes are the new critical strike indication!

crit

Before, critical strikes were displayed as regular damage numbers that blinked white at the beginning, which was difficult to see if you didn’t know what to look for. These fancy new animated numbers, however, should be hard to miss!

Another thing we’ve been working on is Steam integration. Don’t read too much into this; this is not in preparation for an imminent release, but we want to start migrating the beta over from Desura.

steamlol

While Desura has been great, there are certain limitations with the platform that makes it sub-optimal for running a beta. The biggest disadvantage compared to Steam is that all uploads to Desura must be approved, which is a process that can take several days.

The Desura staff has been really cool about pushing our updates quicker than that in emergencies, but it’s still not as good as the instant deployment available on Steam. Steam also saves all revisions, making it possible to rollback to an earlier version should we accidentally upload a way too broken build.

Another advantage is how easy it is to have a primary and secondary branch for the game. This means that we can have one stable release, and one “in house” build with very new features. Right now we only have one branch, and thus the updates are few and far between since we don’t want to break the game. With an opt-in superbeta we can have dedicated players testing the brand new features and not just ourselves and our close friends.

steambeta

Now some of you might be wondering what happens to the existing testers and, of course, what about the thread on IndieDB?

Of course, existing testers will get access to the new version! However, this only applies to users that have posted feedback in the forums or have been making videos of the game (you are safe, IHeartPie)! In other words, people invited to the beta that hasn’t given anything in return will no longer be receiving updates.

Regarding new beta invites, we will still be sampling from the IndieDB thread, only we’ll send a message and ask for your Steam account name.