Universal Demon's Rise (by Wave Light Games)

In the current version, there is a pool of 40 patrol levels that gradually get harder and harder. However, you don't have access to all 40 from the beginning ... at the beginning you have access to a pool of the first 8. Every time you finish a major quest, it opens up some new patrol levels and eventually as you move up the quest, the early patrols fall off the list as they would be far too easy for your party.

The next patch adds a further 8 new patrols to bring it up to 48 and also adds 4 very easy patrols at the beginning of the game. When playing a new game, the first 4 patrol levels will always be these special, easy patrol levels. This is because a lot of players jump into the patrol when starting a new game and the patrols are actually more complex than the normal levels as they have a lot of random elements thrown in.

 

That's a bug. Can you tell me the Hammer's name? I'll look it up in the item database and fix it.

 

Can you tell me what device you're using? Is it happening frequently? I haven't run into any crashes on my iPad Air or iPhone 5. Let me know the details and I'll see if I can reproduce it.

 

Hmm ... interesting. I don't have one of those for testing. Can you let me know if it happens often or if it was just a one off? Perhaps it has to do with how many apps are loaded in the background? I'm honestly not sure how iOS does its memory management.

 

Hey guys,

Check it out ... Shaun did a Mobcrush on Demon's Rise, showing some of the new characters. He seemed to like the High Wizard as well. I think that guy came out really well designed.

http://www.mobcrush.com/TouchArcade/v/56207f47b68d3719353753b4

 

Cool ... thanks. Found it and fixed it on my version.

 

Another quick fix today. I noticed in the Mobcrush video that Shaun was sometimes confused as to whether or not he had hit or missed his attacks when the action camera comes up. This is because the damage or "missed" message doesn't show up in the action camera view. I took another look at this and found a way to fix this. So now if the action cam pops up and you see a close up of the attack and you miss or do damage, the wording will show up to tell you that.

Working on some other minor fixes today to improve the UI a bit. Another thing I noticed is that Shaun never brought up the unit stat sheet to check the effect of spells and abilities so I think that element isn't very clear. So now I'm switching that around to highlight it a bit better and make that element more intuitive.

 

After watching the mob crush session, I decided to swing the focus back onto some UI improvements. These UI improvements as they'll be used in all future games. I went back to the requests some of you had earlier about improving the ability buttons. It isn't ideal to have to hold down the ability button to read the ability description. Similarly, it is easy to accidentally activate a one-click ability that doesn't require target selection. Lastly, the ability doesn't display cooldown and number of uses remaining.

Therefore, I came up with a good solution (I hope). Now pressing the ability button brings up the ability screen. You no longer have to hold down the button to read the ability description. You then have two new buttons ... one to activate the ability and the other to cancel the ability selection. You can also freely select other abilities to read through them all and see which is the best for the situation. Here's a screen shot of what you see when you now click the ability button:

Screen Shot 2015-10-17 at 2.31.32 PM by Rajpreet Dhillon, on Flickr

Now if the ability requires a target, clicking the "Perform Skill" button closes the ability screen and activates the target selection process as normal. Now, however, there is a "Cancel Skill" button that now appears at the bottom so you can still cancel the process if you decide to do something else instead. Here's a picture:

Screen Shot 2015-10-17 at 2.31.56 PM by Rajpreet Dhillon, on Flickr

I think it's a big improvement from the current system as while it does add one more click to the overall process, it eliminates accidental ability activation, gives more information to the user and feels more logical. I'm going to test it out more and unless it breaks something in an unexpected way, it will be in the 1.6 update.

 

Ah okay ... are you playing the patrol levels in between quest levels? The patrols are varying difficulty (some hard, some easy) and are designed so that you can play them as you get stuck in the main quest levels. You can play the patrols to get more gold and get more XP and level up your characters. You can then go back to the quest level that you find hard and hopefully clear it and move forward.

That being said, I actually did put in some code to prevent early arrivals of enemies in newer levels. I could certainly go back to the earlier levels and set them up in the same way so enemies don't come in until turn 3 or 4, for example.

Glad you're really liking the game. Please do let me know what you like and what you think could make the game better.

 

Another fairly minor improvement / bug fix today ... the button to move to the next character in your team now works better. It will cycle through your team members in a fixed order and not ignore those that have moved or attacked this turn. Also, when you click it, it now moves the camera to that character so you can see where he / she is more easily.

Overall, I'm starting to really like the dynamic camera option. i think I will set it as the default in the next patch. Players can, of course, still turn it off in the options but I think many might never find it.

 

That's great. Week 5 is pretty close to the end of the current campaign but the next update will add a further week quest to it so that will extend play a fair bit. Going to gradually keep adding more quests though it will be slow as I'm going to start on the next major game release once I iron out the remaining UI refinements and such.

Can I ask what your team composition is? I'm curious to know how strategies have changed since the recent updates reduced effectiveness of ranged units. I haven't gotten to quest 5 yet on my play through in version 1.5 yet.

 

Hi guys,

Not sure if it's something just in my development version but I've noticed that on my iPad Air, enabling dynamic shadows sometimes causes the game to crash when loading a new level. Disabling dynamic shadows seems to fix this. Dynamic shadows are a real performance hog so if you're running into any crashes, try disabling the dynamic shadows. It also really speeds up FPS and the game overall. I'll do some more testing on my end and put a warning to users on the next update.

 

Another quick fix ... when a unit dies, it now plays only the death animation and not the "get hit" and then the death animation. Getting killed now looks a lot more natural in the game.