The next build coming up is going to be a bit of a long one, but with good reasons: not one, but two new systems are being in Demon. Tonight, a brief peek at the the first of these: Relic Wraiths, Demon’s version of the “player ghost” mechanic you may be familiar with from other roguelikes.

But, on the chance that you aren’t, a brief explanation: starting with the next build, when you lose a game of Demon, ghost data for your character and their party will be saved locally, as well as sent to the score server. Making certain choices during the game will cause ghost data from these sources to be used to generate Relic Wraiths.

Relic Wraiths function as enemy summoners that use a slightly modified copy of the deceased player’s party. The main changes you will see in the conversion from a player to a Relic Wraith are as follows:

• Relic Wraiths use their own resistance tables based entirely on the relic chosen, not whatever resistances the summoner had. If the summoner had Soul Armor, the Relic Wraith’s resistances will be improved to a degree based on character level.
• Particularly lopsided stat distributions will be smoothed out somewhat, matching the limits imposed on designed enemies.
• Unique demons will be removed from the summoner’s party, however, modifiers granted by uniques to other demons via Fuse Demons will be allowed to carry over.
• Significantly higher level demons will be adjusted in some way I have not yet sorted out yet, but basically, you won’t run into a Tower:4 ghost that got lucky and managed to nab 3 Raiju from Ccoa’s Sanctum.
• Any empty slots in the summoner’s party (whether from removed uniques, deaths, or other mishaps) will be filled from the “coffin” that stores targets for Restore Demon, starting with the most recently killed.
• Like enemy summoners, Relic Wraiths do not possess, nor can they use, items.
• The floor a Relic Wraith appears on is not necessarily the floor it died on: this is particularly true in cases where you die on a level containing a branch *after* completing that branch. In some cases, a Relic Wraith’s summon method may make character level the main factor rather than the floor they are haunting.
• Otherwise, everything carries over as it was: abilities, party, relic upgrades, etc. Note that many relic upgrades (those related to gaining additional Credits for example) will have no further affect on the Relic Wraith, since it is assumed the ghost data already reflects the benefits these abilities provided.

Finally, let’s have some art. Geminimax has put out some awesome sprites for the Relic Wraiths, so I thought I’d share those with you now too.

That’s it for now on Relic Wraiths! I’ll post again at some point about the other major feature of the next build: Interactables!

Maintenance on the server is complete. Blog, forum, and leaderboard are all back up now. Have fun, and thanks for your patience. I’ll have a post about what’s coming up in the next build soon. Cheers!

Due to technical difficulties, the server maintenance scheduled for yesterday will be taking place this Monday the 24th at 3pm CST instead. Still slated to last 2 hours. Blog, forum, and score servers will all be down. Apologies for the bumpiness on this, it should be a one time thing as we shift everything over to a different size storage plan. Thank you for your patience and understanding, and good luck in the Tower.

Hey folks.

The server the website, forums, and scores are kept on will be down for maintenance tomorrow starting at around 3pm CST.

If you have a particularly great run you’re working on and want to see on the scoreboard, try to not to die while the server’s down.

Estimated downtime is 2 hours, so we should be back up by 5pm CST tomorrow.

Thank you for your patience, and good luck in the Tower!

Next build is in testing! Have an update log to read while you wait. With any luck, should be releasing this tomorrow. Cheers!

Updates, 10/13/2016

UI
 - A new option has been added that determines whether or not you see
 other players' summoner names on the scoreboard... and other future
 online features.
 - The option defaults to off, and when off, you will only see your own
 summoner names on the scoreboard: all others will be replaced with
 the default "Player".
 - For anyone who is interested, the game identifies your scores by
 a local file that is cross-referenced with the online data: I take
 seriously my pledge not to track user-identifying information, and
 have not violated it here.
 - F1 and ? can now be used to view the manual in many more locations,
 including during character creation, while viewing character sheets,
 and while choosing things from a list of things.
 - Particularly large scores are now handled better by various interfaces,
 including the use of K and M abbreviations when required. i.e.: A score
 of 1203246 might show up as 1203K instead if the given display does not
 allow 7 digits. Note that even when an abbreviation is hiding part of
 a score, the hidden part will still be used properly for ordering the
 scores in sorted lists.
 - Tooltips for stats now show how effective the level of the stat will
 be against other relevant targets. When viewing friendly stats, it
 will compare to the last enemy you moused over. When viewing enemy
 stats, it will compare to the last friendly unit you moused over, or
 the Player if that unit is not available.
 - Tooltips for abilities and items now show the range of the ability or
 item in question.
 - Tooltips for characters now show HP and SP numerically, rather than
 only showing an adjective describing HP.
 - You can now press Shift+V in game to view a "resistances report" on your
 current party. This will show you how many demons you have that use
 attacks of, are immune to, resist, and are weak to each attack type.
 - The same report is also now a part of party dump files.
 - The last 50 messages will now be shown in party dump files.
 - You will now get reminders when entering new floors if you have unspent
 bonus points or relic upgrades. These reminders will get more dire if you
 have large numbers of bonus points/relic upgrades unspent.
 - Using the scroll wheel in the manual now scrolls the text much more
 quickly.

Balance
 - Levels now require about 8% more XP to gain. Note this does not mean your
 level will be 8% lower, due to how XP works. In most cases this will
 probably only work out to -1 level by the current end of content,
 or -2 at most.
 - Bonus MaxHP now caps at 33% of your base MaxHP, rather than 50%.
 - Soul Armor's credit costs have been reduced by about 20%.
 - Quick Summon and Quick Dismiss now have cooldowns of 0.1 instead of 1.
 The only practical effect of this is that characters with > 100% Speed
 will be able to use these every turn even at their hasted speed.
 - Modifiers no longer count reactive abilities when deciding whether or not
 the first bonus ability needs to be from the "untrained in this type" list
 or not. This should generally improve the results of applying modifiers to
 demons that do not already use the element(s) associated with that
 modifier.
 - Reduced the item spawning rate for side dungeons from 150% of normal to
 125% of normal. 
 - Enemy summoners with Consume or Recycle should no longer delete their
 unique demons.
 - HP and MaxHP drain effects now round a bit differently: you are much more
 likely to gain at least 1 HP or MaxHP if you dealt any damage at all to
 the target. (This is still not assured, by design.)
 - Ghost Pierce must now target a character.

Sprites
 - Geminimax has updated several of the sprites in his character sprite set,
 with a focus on improving the player summoner sprites. Thanks Geminimax!

Bug Fixes
 - The Full Power passive no longer causes crashes in very rare
 circumstances.
 - Fixed a bug that caused some mouse over/click zones for interface objects
 to be slightly off.
 - Mobility no longer erroneously gives less than the listed movement speed
 bonus.
 - Bloodlust no longer erroneously returns less *total* SP per additional
 target.
 - Leadership will no longer erroneously proc on the holder's enemies.
 - Fixed a bug that limited the effect of Vitality on MaxHP. (The effect of
 the bug was fairly minor except at relatively high Vitality.)
 - Improved level creation spawning considerably. This will be most
 noticeable on the two maps using the "forest" generator, which before
 this fix usually spawned with far fewer items than they should have.
 - Pyre Rite can no longer be used while Muted.
 - Enemy summoners with Soul Armor no longer end up with immunity or
 resistance to... unusual... damage types.
 - Mending can no longer target enemies (but it never affected them anyway.)
 - Jayle has finally spent her leftover relic upgrade point.

Refactors (usually not noticeable to players)
 - Improved how abilities handle various restrictions like 'must target an
 enemy', 'must target a character with Ignite', etc.
 - May have improved performance on very low power systems, since the old
 method was somewhat burdensome during AI calculations.

Hey everyone. Just wanted to drop a line that the next build will be up within a few days. Mostly UI improvements and quality of life features, alongside bug fixes and small balance adjustments. A bit dry, I confess, but I think what’s planned in the build that follows this plate of veggies will be a bit more exciting. Stay tuned!

One of the hopefully helpful UI upgrades coming in the third polish build: tooltip upgrades!

Three specific tooltips have been upgraded for this pending build:

First, ability tooltips now show the range of the ability. (For abilities that radiate or blast out from the user but can’t actually be aimed, it instead shows the area of effect range.) Here’s a few examples.

Flame Dart is a straightforward ranged attack that can hit almost anything you can see:

Mending is a heal spell that can be cast on anything you can see, including yourself:

Terrifying Cry can’t actually be aimed, it affects everything in a radius around you. Since this effectively acts as range for such a spell, that is the value used by the range indicator here.

Finally, Bull Rush has both a minimum and maximum range, and this is represented in its indicator as well.

Next up: character tooltips now show HP and SP numerically instead of just using vague language about the character’s relative HP.

This Slime has seen better days. Just like in other HP displays, the HP will be colored appropriately for its value.

Chindi usually spawn with a few bonus MaxHP since they sometimes demand it during negotiations, and like in other displays, you can see this indicated by the different color for MaxHP.

 
And finally, mousing over stats in a character sheet not only shows the bonus versus an average character of the same level, but also shows the bonus versus the last character of opposite faction you moused over:

Level 1 might be a bit too early for a summoner to take on the likes of Bigfoot… +186% damage, yikes!


Early characters often find Will o’ Wisps to be agile and annoying opponents… but it doesn’t look like Bigfoot would be too impressed.

But with the help of some free levels from the dev cheats, we can at least get Ogun’s Cunning vs. Bigfoot into the green.

Hopefully players will find these changes helpful for having a clearer idea of what their abilities and stats actually do, and make it easier to keep an eye on HP/SP levels (particularly of enemies) during combat.