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.

Hey everyone. A brief update on what’s coming up next:

I’d like to do one more small-ish “resting hamster” polish/refinement style build before returning to adding new mechanics/features. This one will hopefully be relatively short and sweet, I mostly just want to knock out some UI related bugs/requests that I’ve been putting off because I don’t like working on UI bugs/requests.

My intent is to have this next build out relatively quickly. Once it’s done, I’ll be ready to talk about the next new thing being added to Demon. Cheers!

Hey. Hope everyone’s enjoying the new Sanctums.

I wanted to take a little bit to talk about the future real quick.

Short term: I’m taking the next week or so off, other than working on bugs. I pushed pretty hard to get the Sanctum build out by 9/18… and also, Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse came out. Given SMT is the series of games that serves as Demon’s primary influence, it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone I want to take some time to enjoy it.

Long term: For about the last year or so, I’ve been working full time on Demon. If you’re new here and that seems crazy to you given that I’ve sworn more or less in blood to never charge money for it in any form whatsoever… yeah, okay, it probably is crazy in some form.

Of course this means that I have to take other work at various points in order to maintain a proper budget, and that’s what we’re coming up on now. With any luck, I will probably be working again starting sometime next month, which will mean Demon development will become part time instead of full time for awhile.

I want to stress that point though: part time, not no time. Demon development *will* continue, but I anticipate a significant slow down for a couple of weeks once the job begins as I ramp up on it, and then things will go a bit faster after that. It’ll still be slower than full time development was of course, no getting out of that, but based on past experience it should still be an acceptable pace.

This seems like a good time to thank everyone for playing up to this point, so: thank you, seriously. Demon may not have many players yet, but I’m happy with even the number it does have, especially given how much some of you play it. As a certain Sanctum included in the last build should prove for those who have found it, the Tower has plenty of surprises left to reveal. Stick around, and maybe you’ll find out what they are.

Cheers, and good luck in the Tower!

- Herbie (FerretDev)

The characters I’m using to test aren’t having as much luck, but then, it IS Demon. There may be a few entries on the scoreboard before the build is actually available.

Here’s a screenshot of the latest test subject, a Faithful Heart priest who just entered one of the new sanctums.

Almost there! Hang tight!

Apologies for not mentioning it sooner, but there will definitely be a new scoreboard in the 9/18 version. Given a game of Demon will be 4 floors longer* in this version than before, not to mention the tweaking of the previously somewhat over-powered Strength buff, this hopefully isn’t a huge surprise despite my forgetting to mention it ahead of time.

By way of apology, here is the current top of the pre-9/18 scoreboard, preserved for future generations:

See you soon with the 9/18 build (I hope, this is coming down to the wire!)

* (Why did I say 4 and not 9? Not every Sanctum will appear every game. There are 4 new Sanctum slots, in addition to the slot Turdak’s Sanctum already had. Each slot has 2 possible Sanctums.)

And now, the in-game view of the 10 new demons coming in the next build. Not going to say much more than that so I can get back to work, finishing this build by 9/18 for ARRP is going to be a nail-biter! Cheers!