Fifth development diary. This month was about giving weight to your choices: which difficulty you play on, whether you walk into the dark without a torch, what you take from the floor and what you leave behind. Here is what changed.
You pick the game mode
Before the adventure starts you choose the difficulty you want, and that choice holds for the whole adventure, with no going back.
Easy: monsters with 20% less health and no doubled critical hits. For anyone who wants to enjoy the story with room to breathe.
Mysteries & Perils: the standard balance, the way I designed the game to be played.
Hard: monsters with 20% more health and one extra enemy in every group.
Hardcore: same as Hard, and with no Fate Point. If your hero falls, death is permanent, and the name goes to the Hall of the Dead.
Dark finally means dark
Walking into an unlit place stopped being a line of text. The scene no longer shows up: you only see what your own flame reaches. With the torch equipped, the place opens up and the adventure goes on. If you came in without one, you walk on luck alone, risking every trap you cannot see.
Treasure is now in the scene
Finding loot no longer depends on winning a fight. A scene can offer the loot right where the treasure actually is, and the window opens there for you to decide what you take and what you leave. Nothing drops silently into your pack anymore.
On a phone, one tap opens the item detail with a Take button, or Put back if it is already in your pack. Before that you could only take everything or nothing, without even seeing what each thing was.
The game has music
Mysteries & Perils is not silent anymore. Character creation already has a soundtrack of its own from start to finish, and that is only the first step: soon every screen will have its own sound.
Level 3 became a moment
The subclass stopped being a stray popup. When the Fighter reaches level 3, the Champion announcement happens inside the level-up book itself, with Improved Critical landing crits on a 19 or 20, Remarkable Athlete granting advantage on Initiative and Athletics, and Heroic Warrior handing you Heroic Inspiration every turn you are without it.
Less waiting, more adventure
While you read the current scene, the game quietly loads the images of the scenes your choices lead to. When you choose, the next scene opens instantly, with no frozen loading screen. On a weak connection or in data saver mode it holds back on its own, so it never steals bandwidth from the scene you are reading.
In combat, buttons with names
Anyone playing on a phone had to guess what each icon did, because the hint only appeared on mouse hover, and hovering does not exist on touch. Now, the first time the action bar and the sidebar show up, the names reveal themselves and fade after a few seconds. Whenever you want them back, the eye button turns them on and off.
In the Founders Hall
The Hall has a King: Ralf Lintch is the first Founder King of Mysteries & Perils, with his name carved on the only throne there is. And I reopened the race for the Crowns: it now runs until launch day, instead of a single week. Seven seats are still open between Lords and Champions.
I also fixed the character portrait, which had disappeared from the Hall, and invite points are now stamped automatically, without me opening each record by hand.
Closing the diary
Beyond all that, there were dozens of small fixes asked for by the people testing, and a lot of cleaning under the hood that you never see but that keeps the game steady.
Thanks to everyone playing, breaking things and telling me about it. That is how this world stays standing.
If you want to play among the first, join the waitlist.
