Take that, Alien Champion!

In my process of balancing things out I was regularly defeated by my own creations. The worst of the bunch was the Terror Mode Alien Champion. I ended up taking a break from balancing (for one day) and instead worked on fixing and adding a few things. The major thing that needed to be added was the ability to reallocate your points. I've had the complaint more than once that people really wanted to remove points from an ability that they didn't like too much, but I figured it would be fine. It's only a dollar game and there are 108 abilities and 96 levels. That's TONS for a $1 game, I feel. But in the end I caved in to the imagined annoyance from reviewers and gamers and put it in. I was going to take a screen shot of it, but the version on this computer doesn't have it yet. Instead here is a Paladin starting his journey.



I'm getting so close that I can taste it. I told a friend that I would have it ready for beta testing within three weeks. He let me know that that wasn't the first time he'd heard something like that from me and made me feel the shame. But I'm serious! Okay, so I was serious the other times too. Whatever. All I need to do is balance the last act of the last difficulty, clean some bugs, balance a few abilities and add button mapping support for PC builds.

Oh, and remember this game?



Peter's been working hard on the story. He says he's 60% of the way along now, and when he's done he's going to have one of his designer friends look it over and give advice. I can't wait until it's finished so I can start recording some demon voices! The image above is the new map screen. Active levels are animated. The skeletons walk and the demons loom menacingly. The two white skeletons are levels that have been beaten. They don't move around. And I cheated to get that screen. Levels that you haven't unlocked will appear as nodes to show what levels there are, but you won't know if it's a boss level coming up next or not. And we've decided that the LOADING... text was a pretty bad loading screen. Here's the new loading screen!