Welcome or Welcome Back!

In today's regular-tuesday major patch I'm adding a new domain to the random pool for bosses - Dreams! I'm also adding a couple new adjectives, Empty and Rotting to further provide a bit more variety to the game while you're waiting for the bounty system coming in V0.4.0. Also, I'll be talking about future plans for the game and what's coming across major patches, at least for the foreseeable future.

Dreams, the New Domain

So, if you've been keeping up with devlogs, I've talked a little bit about what Dreams' new status is - Veiled - but i'll give a brief overview here before talking about what the design points for Veiled were. 

Veiled cards are difficult to see, and only lightly flicker in and out of existence every now and again. You'll need to keep a close eye on your cards to be able to tell what's veiled or not. When veiled cards are played, they simply vanish from your hand, accompanied by a violin, as they were only a dream. In effect, veiled cards are difficult to spot, and banish without effect when played.

The rest of Dreams' tool kit is mostly based around picking apart your discard pile and deck, to try to remove recursive threats or combo pieces via banish, then punishing the player by dealing damage based on the banished cards when the boss reaches a certain mortis amount. The design philosophy here is two-fold:

• As it is right now, no domain really does much about banished cards. There's some interaction with things like Ruin Cycle for voiding any recursive threats from the discard pile, by cycling it back into the deck, and some interaction from the Decay domain that causes cards in deck and discard to become decayed, but nothing actually punishes the player for ramping up a massive banish pile and using that to win with, as pointed out (perhaps accidentally) by some playtesters and what cards they gravitated to when building decks.
• Dreams, thematically speaking, is about the incorporeal, and I wanted veiled to mirror that uncertainty that comes with being within a dream, where you're not really sure if something's real till you really examine it. Adding the placeholder "VEILED" text to it felt a bit off, eventually I want to move away from that text anyway, as it's part of the left over placeholders, just the same as the boss cards are (yes, they are supposed to be unique, I swear I'll change 'em eventually) and where else better to do it than the next few status effects that will be released?

Hope the dreams boss was worth the wait, but as always I'm open ears to feedback of any kind. Let me know through comments on the itch page or through the feedback form what you think!

New Adjectives, Rotting and Empty

Rotting

Rotting's a simple one in intention, it has some very minor decay application, as adjectives tend to only manage a single method of applying status, and usually have none, and otherwise seeks to have some minor disruptive qualities via banishing discard pile cards, decreasing it's own mortis and playing extra cards and, eventually, compounding it's ability to apply decay with sudden bursts of mortis if the player doesn't effectively remove status effects from hand. Due to "Rotting" fitting really thematically with "Decay", I wanted to make sure those two in specific played really nice together and complimented each other well, so you can think of rotting as a midrange-y little cousin of Decay.

Empty

Empty was mostly supposed to compound with Dreams, being an adjective based around gradually banishing cards from the reaper's zones before they ever reach the hand. Due to the effect being highly disruptive, Empty has less cards than the usual adjectives (which is fitting, in a way), and therefore will play it's cards less than the domain, but I'm also hoping this allows a little breathing room for domains to shine a bit more frequently, due to a higher rate of cards played from the domain over the adjective.

So What's Next?

I figured I'd add a little schedule so you know what I'm working on - gives you something to look forward to! You might note I recently mentioned a refactor of how decks functioned and, seemingly, all is well with that refactor and legacy decks still load perfectly fine. The deckbuilding and cards were recently updated to allow for cosmetics to be applied to them, based on player selection, but the actual process of selection or the new card arts themselves are not yet in the game, so there's no visual tell for it. However, it should make future updates with unlockables way, way easier.

With that said, here's the rough plan at the moment!

• 0.3.5 (YOU ARE HERE!) - Additions of 1 domain and 2 adjectives.
• 0.4.0 - Bounty system added with Zeus... and possibly one more?
• 0.4.5 - Cosmetic system added, not yet with unlockables, but an ability to change cardbacks for your deck picture between a few different options.
• 0.5.0 - Challenge runs! Beat multiple bounties back to back to try your deckbuilding prowess out.
• 0.5.5 - Unlockables from the challenge runs, allowing players to unlock certain cardbacks and card arts based on completed challenges!
• 0.6.0 - Roguelike mode... more info to come!

Hope that sounds interesting, and I hope you stick around to see what's in the future past the given list. As always...

Till next time!