For this monthly update we wanted to address the "death spiral" effect regarding missed rewards. We also improved the quality of life when using the forge and added a simpler way of crafting items.

Map Portal

Our intention is that you have an amount of mistakes you can make before losing a run, this is where things like the Life system comes from. Currently you recover all missing Life after completing a map, and this is intended to reset that amount of available mistakes. We like this because it releases the tension from the previous map, which is especially felt when you were struggling to complete it, and now you can feel hope about turning things around with new rewards from the next map.

The problem was that once you complete a map you instantly move to the next one, so if you missed any rewards they're gone forever, creating the death spiral effect. We like how map navigation works, where based on how you explore you may not find all rewards before fighting the boss. What we don't like is the permanent penalty of not being able to get the missed rewards before moving to the next map.

Here's how completing a map now works:

• Instead of moving instantly to the next map after beating a boss, a portal now appears in the board and the whole map is revealed.
• Before entering the portal, you are able to freely navigate the map to pick any rewards you missed, but uncompleted combats are kept locked.
• You can go the next map by crossing the portal.

Enhanced Items

The forge was introduced as a way of crafting items by combining 2 different ones. This has a high power ceiling, but has downsides like needing 2 good items to combine, having to prepare a fourth item to equip once the merged item frees up a slot, or centralizing the power of your items in fewer characters. So it requires a bit of knowledge and planning to truly shine.

We added another way of crafting items at the forge, with the goal of providing a simpler option you can use to gain instant power:

• The forge now provides 2 different ways of crafting items, "Merge" which is the previous one, and the new "Enhance" option.
• Merging items works the same as before, you create a new item by merging 2 different ones.
• Enhancing an item grants it an additional random stat modifier based on its Attributes.

Merging will still have its high power ceiling, but Enhancing now provides a higher power floor, to better balance this, Forge Uses have been reworked to "Forge Fire":

• The forge starts with 3 Fire.
• Each forge option has a different Fire cost. Merging costs 3 Fire, while Enhancing costs just 1.
• You can sacrifice any amount of Experience to gain an equal amount of additional Fire.

In addition, the forge now also shows the currently equipped items on your characters while opened, and you're able to drag them from there instead of having to close the forge to unequip them first.

Balance Changes

• The Sleight of Hands spell now has "+5 Mana Cost to spells per time they are used in combat".

General Changes

• The attribute wheel on character tooltips now also appear for items and spells, but only if the tooltip details are toggled on.
• The x2 speed now only applies during combat.
• Saved runs are automatically deleted if you open the game on a different version than the one used when that run was saved (This will delete any saved run from previous demo versions).

Fixes

• Fixed the "Round X" combat transition appearing below tooltips.
• Fixed being able to drag characters during the map area movement transition after toggling the pause menu.

For this monthly update we wanted to finally add the long requested feature of saving your runs, as well as enhancing their visuals to better represent what they'll look like for the full game release. We also made significant spell changes around reservation spells.

Map Progression

The current demo has a single zone to explore, the rest will come with the full game release. We want zones to have completely different enemies and scenery from each other, but a given zone should also provide a sense of visual progression in both.

Each map inside a zone now also progress the scenery to reflect the enemy progression. In addition, we also improved the ambience of each zone to make them more lively.

Run Save System

Player expectations demand a way to save your progress in a run, but we want to be cautios around this feature to prevent saving exploits.

It is greatly important for us that your decisions during a run matter. Previously all your decisions were permanent since there was no way to go back. Adding a way to go back requires a degree of compromise between player convenience and the permanence of their decisions.

We're adding a way to save your runs in the follow way:

• Runs are saved automatically after beating a boss and moving to the next map (a flag will appear in the board to communicate this).
• A "continue" button now appears in the title screen to load your currently saved run.
• Your currently saved run will be deleted if you choose to start a new one.
• Abandoning a saved run halfway through a map will cause you to lose the progress of that specific map.
• Runs are now seeded, meaning that the random events always occur the same way if you try to repeat a map by loading a run.

Spell Changes

Reservation spells are meant to provide a way to passively support your team. Some of the previous spells required you to position your characters in certain ways to gain the effects, but In practice this was trivial to fulfill in most cases.

Another issue was that those same spells simply granted a couple of stats each, often found in items already, which doesn't feel as unique as the effects provided by active spells. More importantly, every team simply got the same flat effect from them, so their potential for synergies wasn't as high either.

We're changing those reservation spells to make their effects more unique and increase their synergistic potential. This also removes their positional requirements since now their power will vary from team to team.

Here's 1 of the 6 changed reservation spells, you'll have to find the other ones in-game.

In addition, you can now start combats by casting an active spell instead, letting you take advantage of character positions before they start moving.

Balance Changes

General Changes

• Some player related text popups now last for a bit over double before going away (particularly those shown when using Regrets to reroll character Traits).
• Added a mouse parallax effect inside explorations (you can toggle this in the settings menu).
• The combat summary now specifies damage done by Immolation (and the newly added Rot).

Fixes

• Fixed Block granting triple Damage Reduction, it now correctly grants double DR instead.
• Fixed combats lost paying the characters Life revive cost first and dealing Life damage afterwards (this was causing some runs to be lost instead of giving you one more combat attempt). The damage is now correctly caused first.

Hotfix 0.17.1

• Fixed the character's Attack Range highlight overriding the Spell Range highlight while casting an active spell before combat starts.
• Fixed the mouse parallax effect over extending when using alt+tab.

Patch 0.17.2 & 0.17.3

• Added the missing 0.17 localized texts for the Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean and German languages.
• You can play the Steam demo if you prefer to play another supported language over English.

Hotfix 0.17.4

• Fixed not being able to start a combat with a spell in the tutorial.
• The Plague and Lightning Fang spells now correctly no longer highlight corpses in positions with connected targets.
• The "reset story progress" button now correctly deletes your saved run as well.
• Fixed not automatically opening the zone selection menu when returning to the title screen after a run win or lose, and after abandoning a run that's not saved yet.

Changes

• Trait tooltips now show their Attribute below their name.
• "Gray text" below tooltip names now separates elements with commas.
• Fixed the Heaven spell card showing an incorrect card sprite.
• Fixed the zone selection menu breaking its layout when cycling zones.

Localization

Try the Steam version if you would prefer to play the game in another available language.

• Added the Korean language.
• Added the Simplified Chinese, Japanese and German texts that were missing from the 0.16 changes.
• Fixed Simplified Chinese, Japanese and German inconsistencies (words, full-width characters, spacings, stat modifiers and effect formulas).

Previous Patch Notes (0.16.1)

Some active spell highlights were creating confusion when aiming for targets, we made the following changes:

• Spells that require a center target to be used no longer highlight characters until you aim the center to a target.
• Spells now only highlight characters that are relevant to the spell effects (characters that will be affected or will scale the effect).
• Corpses are now shown above all other characters when targeted.

Previous Patch Notes (0.16)

We recently released the Underboard demo here on NG, but it has been playable on Steam for a few months by now and we update it regularly, mostly in a monthly basis but also with some minor patches in between. Ideally the NG demo should also receive all updates so here's the latest one.

Challenges

We added a few challenge runs this time, these are experimental in part, but also possible masteries we want to have in the full game, which will function as the meta-progression system. The goal of the challenges is to provide a few more goals to aim for besides the collection, as well as incentivizing different ways of playing the game.

The following challenge runs are now available to players that have completed a normal run:

• Timeless (the run is lost after 30 minutes)
• Heartless (your dead characters revive as ghosts and the run is lost by failing a single combat)
• Hopeless (rewards only offer 1 base option)

Changes

• Characters with skills that perform multiple hits now try to get a new target if their current one became invalid between hits (instead of simply not doing the remaining hits at all).
• The Rebel skill Riot now deals 3 hits instead of just 1 and deals 40% more damage.

Post Update Fixes:

• Fixed forge slots becoming enabled after increasing the forge uses while a forged item was already crafted but not yet picked (this was causing the first forged item to dissapear if you forged a second one before picking up the first one).
• Fixed selected challenges remaining selected after resetting your story progress (this was causing the selected challenge to still be active while being unable to turn it off).