Hey everyone! 

Major Changes:

It's been a bit longer than usual since the last update, but I really wanted to get The Black Goat Ancient (One of the end-game bosses) as polished as possible before posting an update, and I ran into a few more technical issues rendering than I would have liked. There are still a few visual issues I'll circle back to later in development, but she's about 80% of the way there, which is better than the placeholder sprite! She comes with unique animations for each of the 12 cards in her abilities deck, plus the usual reaction, idle & death animations. 

This update also comes with 28 cards for the Black Colour Deck.  The Colour decks are drawn from after discovering a Clue, and choosing a boss that corresponding with it's colour, I.e the first ancient you'll be hunting, The Black Goat, uses the Black Deck. More Ancients and their Colour decks will be added later, with their own corresponding themes. Each of  these decks comes with a variance in risk vs reward that can affect the player, the world, and the entities you may face. This means new playable cards & relics, both positive and negative, plus a whole lot more replayability. I have two more black cards in development that are dependant on planned features so I'll add those in later.

Some of these new black cards come with a brand new "play on draw" tag. This took me a while to get my head around without breaking the game flow, but I'm happy with the current implementation and it opens a lot more possibilities in future! (I'm even thinking about adding a new character in future that heavily uses this feature, all going well. For now, this will be mostly used by the Black Deck to add positive & negative cards to your deck that are played to the play queue as soon as you draw them, forcing you to adapt your strategy dynamically.

I've also started working on improving the Clues scene finally. This one has been in my sights for a while now as a core feature of the narrative, but finishing the enemies to precedence. These clue scenes are designed to provide a loose narrative to your hunt against the ancients that plague the lands. I'd like to have a unique background for each of the locations you visit, with each of the colour options possible being present in the imagery, this is a huge amount of design work though so it may have to come later. So far, however, I've set up a filter system so that the clues scene can now determine between cards & relics, and shows the correct one in the 'rewards' window after selecting a clue, and then adds it to the player (with a tooltip when clicking the relic, for more info). Still a lot more work to be done on this scene, but you can expect major changes in the next week or so. 

I've also tested out a new colour-coded system to make parsing through cards easier, i.e Red text for ATK, Blue for DEF, etc. I always appreciate this in card games, and it seemed worth all the tedious re-editing of every single card in the game for some better user experience. So far I've updated mostly just the base cards, but will get to the rest before the next patch.

Bugfixes: 

Fixed an issue with turn order passing incorrectly in some combats with certain enemies, these enemies have now been added back into the pool. It turned out to be an issue with the signals passing back from the animations being overwritten by an overlapping animation. I fixed this by adding extra safety functions so that, hopefully, animations finish playing before passing the turn order over.

Fixed issues with status effects like Thorns & soulbond breaking turn order by damaging the player during their animation, which played their damage reaction animation (hurt, or block) and cut off the animation before it could send the signal to pass the turn order at the end of the animation. Similar fix to the previous bug, annoyingly these took me way longer to figure out than I thought! Lots of tricky issues with mistimed signals, but it turned out relatively simple in the end. As a result, player hurt, defend hit, and later, guard break animations re-added, the only way reliably to get it working was to continue the original animation when hit with one of these status effects mid-attack, which doesn't look great. I'll circle back to this later if it continues to bother me, but atleast it's working now.

Balancing:

- Adjusted room weights so that Creature Battles happen more frequently - around 40% of locations - and Shops &  Camps appear less frequently - around 5% each. 

Thanks for reading if you got this far, and please let me know your thoughts on the new changes!

BW
Dan