Happy New Year! Today we wanted to share our latest Desert Monster Archetype, aside from the end Boss of the zone. These strange little creatures frequently cast a mass of immobilizing webbing at your feet, then peck through your armor with their attacks. They are especially deadly in open areas, being able to catch and net a player, allowing their buddies to close the distance. They come in packs of three and have low health, so it would behoove you to use Area of Effect abilities, or Conal attacks against them.
Very nice monster designs, I have been following the thread but there's a ton of detail and great work displayed it's hard to comment further than "wow, that looks amazing" each time and that might get redundant. Hopefully Pylon will deliver on what appears to be promising pre-release details.
Hey no worries! Really, I'm just glad you are excited to play. What we've covered so far IS in-game, so hopefully we can live up to the promises. Obviously we do want surprises for people who are actively following our thread, so we haven't revealed everything! That said, we don't want to over-promise either, in hopes of exceeding people's expectations for Pylon rather then only meeting them or worse. We are a new team and we are definitely feeling out this whole process, from actually making the game, to involving the TA community and creating a product (which is more than simply the game) in general. Thanks for the encouragement and the bump!
Heyo This week we have been working on a number of things. - Additionally difficulty levels have been added, unlocked by defeating the prior difficulty. - Player abilities have had a polish pass. We found certain skills, passives and abilities to be unattractive, underpowered and underused so we have changed the way certain moves work. In some cases we have completely removed an ability and replaced it with another. We will go into further detail on the abilities once the changes have been sufficiently playtested! - Three additional Cave levels added. See the concept art below for the enemies and expect an overview of each. - GUI overhaul. We have made significant changes to the GUI art. - Minimap functionality. We have added more detailed minimaps, and a larger world map for a player to view. Additionally, markers representing important points of interest and enemies has been added. - An additional level, the Dimensional Rift, is currently in the works. - Two more armor sets have been implemented. - Additional gem affixes have been created. - Enemy save information. When you portal into town and then return to a level, enemies will no longer have respawned. Respawns only occur when the app is force quit. - Breakpoint system revised to allow skill points to remain relevant past gaining the first eight character-levels. That's a rundown of most of the things we have been working on, and here are our concepts for the basic enemies of the Cave Level, sans the BOSS
I'm not developer but find it curious that difficulties would have to be unlocked by defeating the previous and hope that there will be additional features promoting replay. Does this mean starting only at the easiest difficulty or will only brutally hard difficulties be unlockable? Eight levels isn't a lot of levels to start working about relevency of customization; how long is the estimate play time of Pylon? Both of those points imply quick playthroughs to me. The Dimensional Rift sounds promising.
Typically in ARPG's, playing through the game once isn't enough to hit max level, so they unlock harder difficulties after you get through the game once or twice. On harder difficulties enemies get tougher, better loot drops, etc... So that's all that we mean by that. The game starts on "Normal" and beating normal leads to "Hard", and beating hard leads to "Very Hard". We may or may not name the difficulties more cleverly in the future. Yeah generally speaking, ARPG's give you a skill point per level, and you spend that point either on a new skill, or improving an existing skill. Initially, we wanted to try improving existing skills in a slightly different way, using stat breakpoints, but some playtesting of that system showed that once you got the skills you were looking for, skill points didn't really matter anymore (there are 4 active skill slots, and 3 passive skill slots, so if you knew what build you were going for, skill points could become irrelevant as early as level 8). So we're going with a more traditional model in that sense, to allow for some more interesting choices throughout the leveling experience. At the moment, the max level is 40. As for an estimated time, we're shooting for about 8 hours to get through normal mode. So far that seems like a reasonable goal. We also have some ideas we're tossing around internally about how to improve replayability beyond harder difficulties, and if you guys have any ideas you'd like to see, or that you've enjoyed in other games, feel free to let us know!
You're right 8 levels of skill relevancy wasn't very fun which is why we've revamped the skill system. The total number of skill points you could possibly spend isn't known yet but it will be well over the maximum level. This means that at max level you will not have enough points to have every skill at full power. Hopefully this leads to some uniqueness of builds between players. This could also lead to more replayability if you want to try an entirely different character build. Like Andrew said 8 hours is our current estimation for playthrough on Normal mode. There will be some different stuff in terms of gameplay in the harder difficulties so there is definitely good reason to keep playing. It's hard to say whether the harder difficulties will take longer or not but assuming it takes around the same time the total play time to finish all difficulties ends up around 24 hours.
Hey TA! Bit of an update on our progress over the past week. - Story Script and Tutorial polish. We plan to have this implemented by the end of next week, a player's first experience with the game is extremely important so we plan to spend some serious time ironing any wrinkles. - Created and implemented three new small levels/arenas. These may serve as multiple purpose outside of their single player usage. We have thrown around content update ideas that would involve these arenas, such as an endless horde mode where you fight enemies that progressively get harder, for a high score. - Final Boss Implementation. Our villain is in game and fully functional. - Final Level implemented. - New Particle Effects. We have worked on replacing and updating many particle effects, as well as adding new ones. - Story Asset creation. Some unique art assets were needed for the story. - Various new animations have been added and are in the works. - New skills implementation. - Bug fixes/Performance issues addressed, this is something that is on-going. - Buff/Debuff system revised for clarity's sake. We've found that unifying certain aspects of the buff and debuff system helped communicate what was actually going on in combat. - Music and Soundtracks for each level are currently being created. That's it for now! Below I've attached how our Cave Monsters turned out. Instead of going into the gory details on each one, I'll just say that they are based around using a variety of slows and crowd control abilities, as well as some tricky burrowing and un-burrowing! Cheers!
Dear Touch Arcade Forum, Pylon's development has... Continued as planned! Huzzah! We are quickly approaching BETA. People have expressed interest in testing already, so look forward to an official announcement. We have quite a bit of work left, included but not limited to - Music, scored by Ryan Eston Paul - Story and Quest implementation - Tutorial implementation - Ability Icon Art polish - Gem Icon Art redesign - Ability Unlock/Upgrade GUI redesign - Ability Functionality Polish - Ability Upgrade Polish - General GUI functionality polish - Future Content - Internal Playtesting - Misc Backlog fixes - Misc Art and Art Polish Today we'll leave you all with some NPC concept art
Hello Folks! We wanted to get back to you guys by sharing a small read from the story of Pylon. Enjoy! Back Story Snippet
Currently she is the only playable character, and will be at release. Adding an additional character (ie a male character) as an update is potentially something that could happen.
