It’s getting cold out there, Rune Knights. Bundle up, grab a hot cup of...aether...and join us by the fire as we look into what’s new for 0.4.0.

For this update, the big feature is a new difficulty mode system. Complete the tutorial, and upon your first visit to the Runeforge you’ll be able to swap difficulties at your leisure. Currently implemented difficulties include, Easy, Medium, Hard, and Nightmare.

0.4.0 also boasts one of the more-often requested features: the ability to hit your weapons together. I’m serious, it’s awesome. We’ve done a good chunk of work to allow you to scrape and clank them together, throwing sparks and making sound effects.

Additionally, we’ve added basic support for LIV! If you’re unfamiliar with the software, it’s a great streaming/compositing suite that helps you use a green screen or stream with a virtual avatar.

Lastly, this update includes a variety of balance updates, bug fixes of various size, and other small quality of life improvements, including a lovely new texture for the training dummy.

With 2019 rapidly coming to a close, the Dev Team will be winding down for the year and getting ready to celebrate the holidays with some well deserved time off. That means we’ll be less responsive than we normally are for the next few weeks on our Discord.

That being said, we’ll still be listening and gathering your feedback. After all, the new year is ahead of us.

See you in 2020, Rune Knights!

- Dave, Project Director

Release 0.4.0 Changes & Additions

Difficulty Modes

As we’ve better established a baseline difficulty, we’ve received plenty of excellent feedback about ways folks wish the game was easier...and more difficult. Now, after beating the tutorial, you can swap between difficulty modes at will in the Runeforge.

• EASY: Intended for players who want to experience the game at a more relaxed pace. Enemies are slightly slower, and will give the player more opportunities to counter-attack allies before stepping in. Additionally, the Rune Knight will regenerate 1 Health crystal at the end of every room, even if they were not in the ‘Death’s Door’ state.
• NORMAL: Very close to the pre-existing difficulty mode, with some minor speed nerfs to Empowered Enemies. This mode awards 10% bonus Aether.
• HARD: Intended for players that have not yet beaten the game, but feel that the early levels have become too easy. This mode dials up the speed and aggression of standard enemies, while leaving the speed of Empowered enemies similar to Normal Mode. (Awards 15% bonus Aether.)
• NIGHTMARE: The first of our ‘Prestige’ difficulties. Nightmare is intended to be an endgame challenge for Rune Knights looking for a place to use Level 10 weapons. This mode makes numerous tweaks to baseline enemy Guard, Aggression, and enemy composition.

Basic LIV Integration

Based off of feedback from our community, we worked to integrate the LIV compositing suite with our game. With 0.4.0, we have added basic integration to the game. If you experience any weirdness or requests to improve it, please let us know on our Discord!

• Players can now use LIV to stream and record Until You Fall.

Combat UI Rendering Updates

For players who use the vignetting to prevent them from getting sick (like myself), an annoying issue was having premonitions and other important UI covered up by the vignette netherspace while moving. With this update, we’ve changed the rendering order to have important UI render in the vignette space.

• Blocking Premonitions, Off-screen Warnings, and other important Combat UI now renders on top of the vignette ring.
• Blocking Premonitions have had some visual tweaks to try and make them stand out more in the heat of battle.

Variable Walking Speeds (Comfort Setting)

After increasing the walking speed after entering early access, we had some players mention that they had begun to feel slightly motion sick. In order to help those folks out, we’ve added a new slider into the comfort settings.

• Added a slider with three walk speeds, ranging from “Comfortable” to “Fast”
• The “Fast” walking speed is equivalent to what was the default walking speed in 0.3.0, with reductions for each speed setting below it.

Increased Boss Aether Payouts

All Boss Fight Aether rewards have been doubled. We wanted to ensure that after clearing a boss Rune Knights were able to buy, try and upgrade their new weapons.

• Tier 1 Boss Fight now awards 125 Aether (up from 75)
• Tier 2 Boss Fight now awards 400 Aether (up from 125)
• Tier 3 Boss Fight now awards 1000 Aether (up from 500)

Weapon Collision SFX & VFX

Juicy feedback has finally been added so you can hit those swords together! Clang clang!

• All weapons now have VFX & SFX when clanging together or scraping along one another.

Shardstorm Adjustments

After reviewing Shardstorm for a bit, we identified that its overall utility had fallen behind the other Supers. We want Shardstorm to be a tactical, Guard-damage based AoE spell with a moderate cooldown, and have tried to push it in that direction with the following changes.

Shardstorm Rank 1:

• Increased the maximum Speed of Shardstorm to 6 m/s (from 1.5)
• Reduced the lifetime of Shardstorm to 5 seconds.
• Increased Guard Damage per Second to 40 (from 15).
• Ensured that Shardstorm will slow dramatically when dealing damage to enemies.

Shardstorm Rank 2:

• Doubles the duration of Shardstorm (to 10 seconds.)

Shardstorm Rank 3:

• Doubles the Guard Damage per second to 80 (from 40).

Shardstorm Rank 4:

• Shardstorm now deals 4 Health Damage per second through guard.

Quality of Life Changes

• Made Spellweaver’s projectile audio more noticeable
• Fresh new look for the training dummy in the Runeforge.
• Better weapon collision in the Runeforge environment.
• Boss Rooms now feature larger Aether Blooms, because they’re filled with more Aether.
• Run Time and current Difficulty Mode is now displayed in both the Pause screen and the Death/Victory screen.
• Timing and Visual updates to the Boss' ground attacks.
• The Sucker Punch trait now has VFX / SFX feedback for when the trait is ready to be used / has been used.
• Improved voice palettes and increased vocal variety for some enemies.
• Added an audio indicator for when your dash charges go from empty to one.
• A heapin’ helpin’ of balance changes to both our Enemies and Encounters across all difficulty levels.
• A variety of small visual and audio improvements.

Notable Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug that could cause enemies to stand side-by-side and not approach to attack the Rune Knight.
• Fixed a collision issue that prevent slain enemies from dramatically falling into the depths of the bridge level in Tier 1
• Fixed a bug that could allow Empowered Captains to attack without premonitions.
• Aether Horror is no longer Dash or projectile targetable when outside the combat arena.
• The Aether Horror is now susceptible to Concussive Blast and Stasis Strike properly, even when in its final phase.
• Fixed a bug that could cause Empowered enemies to attack faster than intended, particularly the Knight and Captain.