Forum Mortuorum

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• Patch Notes·18 Jan 2025Official

  Update 0.6.2 - Restocking, Balance, Quality-of-Life

  Salve, amici! Having recently presented at Boston's Festival of Independent Games, I returned to my workshop to hammer out some tweaks to make the game just a smidge better. Changes Shop Restocking & Destocking The shop stock now dynamically restocks. Items also come off of the market each week to represent other buyers. While it's a nice way to make the game feel more alive and make rare equipment more scarce, it's really preparation for Patch 0.7, which will introduce travel. In 0.7, each city's stores will carry different equipment at different frequencies and the number of goods on offer will be proportional to the city's size. All of that nice systems logic is now there, under the hood, so that we can sail smoothly in to sailing smoothly around the Mediterranean. Balance Injured gladiators now sell at a discount. No more buying a recruit, throwing them into an easy match and selling them right after! Matches overall are slightly easier, especially 2 skull matches. Previously the step from 1 to 2 was a bit harsh for new players. A 1 skull challenge will now always be available until the player has won their first match. In addition, the challenge system now loosely tracks your successes, making more higher-difficulty challenges available as you win more (and more difficult) matches. Quality of Life Added a button to unequip all items from a gladiator in outfitting Added a button to return from team select directly to challenge selection Made the last selected gladiator 'stick' in the outfitting screen when moving back and forth between menus Increased tooltip font size (and fixed a typo in one of the perk tooltips) Rearranged outfitting a bit to keep the funds in the same top-right location they normally appear in. Previously they moved to the center of the screen, which was unpleasantly inconsistent What's Next? The next big patch will take your school on the roads (or, more often, the seas). Equipment and arenas will be more tied to the local culture and size ...
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• Patch Notes·15 Dec 2024Official

  Update 0.6.1 - Balance & Typos

  Salve! Just dropping a couple small tweaks to 0.6 based on some additional testing and feedback Changes Balance Power is less powerful, granting +1% damage per level instead of +2%. This should lead to fewer instances where a gladiator is dispatched in just a couple successful hits. The final fight of the demo is a bit easier to make it a tractable challenge after 30-odd rounds of prep Legibility Enlarged the elements of the training UI. Since you'll likely only have 3-6 gladiators in the demo, there was no need to cram 9 into a single page at the cost of readability Fixed some typos in tooltips. No longer will you suffer "rgladiators"
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• Patch Notes·11 Dec 2024Official

  Update 0.6.0 - STATS! (and training)

  Salve, dear players! I'm thrilled to announce patch 0.6.0 just in time for the holidays! The biggest patch just occurred in my own life: I got married since the last update! In that spirit, I hope you will fall in love with your new starting gladiators, Dacius, Leander, and Pio. But more on that below. What's New in 0.6.0 Major Features Stats: In 0.5 and before, gladiators were basically interchangeable. They looked a bit different and had different perks, but they weren't really unique. That changes in 0.6! Each gladiator now has three stats, Power, Constitution, and Agility, which roughly correspond to damage, health, and chance to hit an dodge. This gives some compelling reasons to pick one gladiator over another as well as to specialize them towards one or another weapon or defensive skill (dodge or block). Training: Each week that a gladiator is uninjured and not participating in a match, the gladiator will train to improve the aforementioned stats. Under the hood, the gladiator has a certain proclivity for each stat which will affect their training rate. They also have an overall level of talent which will help them learn stats across the board. These talents and proclivities also affect the initial skill you'll see when you recruit the gladiator. Aging: I'm feeling this one in AD 2024 and the gladiators are too. As gladiators get older they heal more slowly and have a significantly harder time keeping up their stats, even if they train regularly. This puts a soft expiration on even the best gladiators and also makes a more interesting choice for recruiting. Obviously, aging (and training) is a somewhat slow process, so I expect the impact of this mechanic to be more apparent as the game expands Starting Recruits: To get off to a bit of a quicker start, your roster will now include three gladiators: Dacius - towards the end of his career but quite skilled, Leander - a decent mid-career gladiator, and Pio - a promising youngster. That should give a decent and f...
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• Patch Notes·22 Jul 2024Official

  Update 0.5.1 - Balance & Bugfixes

  Salve, readers! Patch 0.5.0 introduced practice matches and healing and I didn't get the new balance quite right. With a thank you to Malthe Sørensen, who contacted me by email with some detailed notes on where the balance felt off. Thanks to that and some further playtesting of my own, this patch fixes a couple small bugs and tweaks some values to keep the demo challenging, but eminently possible to win. Changes Features - Added a UI element to show what level gladiators are when recruiting them Balance Changes - Increased daily healing rate from 6 to 10 . This is a pretty dramatic increase that should get your gladiators back into the fight quicker and leave more room to experiment, learn, and earn money between practice matches. - Increased starting funds from 2500 to 3000 - Slightly increased "wood axe" damage and cost. Slightly increased mitigation from the high-tier "plate" armors Bugfixes - Fixed bug in which no gladiators would not heal on days where the player opted for a practice match - Fixed a bug where buying or selling a gladiator would not refresh the schedule to show or hide the 'fully recovered' event - Fixed a bug where the demo ended on the practice match after the last scheduled match
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• Patch Notes·30 Jun 2024Official

  Update 0.5.0 - Healing, Exhibition Matches, and Time

  Salve, dear readers! It's the end of June and time for a major update before I head off on vacation for a couple weeks. So... What's New in 0.5.0 Major Features Healing: Gladiators wounded in combat will now remain wounded after the exit the arena. Each day (more on that in a second) they will heal a small fixed amount of health. You can, of course, return them to the arena should you be in a foolhardy mood. Exhibition Matches: Before all matches were fatal and you had fight matches continuously to advance. That made it difficult to feel like you were progressing your gladiators and getting to know them. As of this update, you only need fight the major, preset 'sponsored' matches. However, to have a chance to beat those, you will need to judiciously participate in optional, non-lethal exhibition matches (at most one a day) to make the money and gain the experience you need to stand up to the sponsored matches. Time for Time: To underpin healing, exhibition matches, and - soon - training, Forum Mortuorum needed a real concept of time. This update adds it along with a new schedule UI. Minor Changes Added some new tooltips to buttons that have only icons displayed Added a 'shine' effect to some buttons to help orient and remind you what actions you likely need to take Expanded the 'navigation bar menu' to include buttons for the upcoming training and school upgrade pages Changed the cursor graphic on the Main Menu and added fade-in/out when starting the game. Rebalanced match sizes, difficulty, and starting denarii to adapt to the various new changes, and to make the difficulty curve more intuitive What's Next? Next (major) update (0.6.X) will be focused on making gladiators uniquely skilled (right now they're all blandly similar) as well as a bit quirky. Additionally, it will introduce the ability to train them (while they're healthy) to further develop their talents. That's all for now. See you next patch! Nick
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