This is the second devlog I've done on here for Mythfall. What better day than New Years Eve? But first, a few statistics:

• 1,349 Commits
• 187 User accounts created
• 91 days since itch release

I'm constantly updating the game, so if you try it out you'll find that its always somewhere inbetween "full" releases. But if you look at the version string in the bottom right corner of the login menu, you'll see what the last tagged version was. Anyways, in this release I changed quite a lot. The biggest change was the addition of the "Realm" (for lack of a better word). Originally I planned to have dungeons be the primary content that the player worked through, but it seemed too repetitive to ask players to just go and replay dungeons to get drops they wanted. Weirdly, for some reason, it feels more palatable to have people go to the realm, kill monsters, get dungeon drops, and then do dungeons. That way they are a bit more like a reward, and less like a rote task.

To compliment this I also made it so that players have a bit more health, so that they can farm the realm with a little less attention. I also added a more diverse crafting progression mechanic. So now the game loop is something like: Go to realm > Kill monsters > get resource drops (or dungeon drops) > craft better gear > Go to harder biomes. Filling out each biome was a bit tricky, because I had to make a set of new monsters with different behaviors and different weapons. So I did spend a good amount of time improving the tooling that my game has to make it easier to test monsters while playing. I think they are turning out okay, but I also think a lot of them have too much of the same behavior. I'd like to have a consistent level of diversity in how they move and what they shoot.

The crafting system is somewhat inspired by Terraria, where you combine weapons and items to make stronger and different weapons and items. So if you want that super cool amazing strong sword, you might first need to get two other semi-cool somewhat strong swords and combine them into a finished product.

When I was working out progression systems I added an XP and levelling system, but I'm not sure if I'll keep it. I like that it gives new players a near-term goal to meet, but it feels like a wasted mechanic if I don't expand on it in some way in the future. So I'll have to keep thinking about it.

Anyways, I'll leave this here now. Hope you try it, and hope you enjoy it!