With update 0.9.3.0 we are introducing a new defensive layer balancing system for boss fights, a new lighting system for ground textures and player character models, we are also adding complete new weapon slash effects into the game to make melee feel more impactful, adding localisation support for polish, turkish and russian and many further improvements and changes and bugfixes. We are also happy to announce that Striving for Light is now Steam Deck verified.

🌟New Features:

Defensive Layers for Endboss Encounters:

📜Lets start with some history of the Striving for Light balancing...

We adjusted our balancing countless times over the last years. Enemy HP scaling reached from way too gradual up to way too steep rendering the game either too easy or too tedious. Our vision was always to have challenging gameplay and bossfights without tedious fights against enemies with very much HP where each encounter slows you down and throws you out of the gameplay loop. We did not settle with the system we had and around a year ago introduced map tiers which consistently ramped up the enemy and trap damage instead of just relying on map modifiers. Well, players with enough map shards were able to re-roll map mods to keep enemy damage low enough, which resulted in endless runs that went on as long as your hardware could take it. Map tiers allowed us to reduce the overall enemy HP and the enemy HP scaling by a tremendous amount, still keeping gameplay engaging, challenging and way more fluid as you did not get slowed down on each enemy encounter.

Current State...

We have been pretty happy with the overall balancing of the game difficulty recently and have not received feedback of the game being too hard, but there was still the issue that if you got very lucky on the early game skill tree, weapon drops or if you have farmed a lot of shards to optimise the skilltree, the game would become very easy and resulting in endbosses being one shot. Not even speaking from crafting a legendary weapon right at level 1. We have spectated that players managed one shot bosses far beyond level 150 which trivialised gameplay, which therefore becomes less challenging and fun. As this mainly applies to a very small fraction of the playerbase who know the game very well, we therefore do not want to have the game difficulty adapted to these players. So we have worked on a system that will upkeep the challenge in boss fights without making the game more difficult for newer players or lower damage output builds: Defensive Layers.

Defensive Layers:

Endboss encounters (gatekeepers) will now have 3 defensive layers that will trigger at certain HP thresholds. Triggering a defensive layer results in the boss becoming invincible for a short duration of time. The duration scales with the map tiers and is designed to be almost negligible at the first map tiers. This will prevent bosses being one shot and upkeep the challenge especially on higher map tiers with very strong build setups. This system also gives us the possibility of consistently balancing the boss fight challenge a bit more independent from player powers so that we can balance the enemy/ boss HP in a way to keep as much build variety as possible.

Please note that this is a very first implementation of this new system and we will closely listen to your player feedback. This also just marks the start of further systems that could build on the defensive layers like special events triggered at certain enemy HP thresholds.

New Lighting System for Textures and Player Models:

We have created normal maps for all ground textures as well as for the player models which now allows us to use this height information on the textures to render more realistic 3D lighting on our textures. This results in much more plastic looking textures.

New Weapon Slash Effects:

All melee weapon slash effects have been completely reworked and a new slash system has been added that allows spawning weapon slashes on the global coordinate system for more precise slash trails. We have crafted complete new shaders, which feature a new blending technique that does not lead to color blow out on bright backgrounds. The new shaders now deliver great contrast and blend well with all different sorts of background brightness levels. We also have majorly upgraded our weapon slash system that allows us to have much more control over what slash is spawned for which duration to give melee combat more feel of impact.

These new shaders are also applied to all sort of skills where weapon slashes were used like Double Hit, Clash of Steel, Melee Constructs...

New supported languages:

Russian, Turkish, Polish

We decided to make our localisation available on a public github repository so that everyone can contribute and improve the localisation of Striving for Light. If you want to contribute you can find it, together with a guide on how contributing works, here:

https://github.com/IgnitingSparkGames/StrivingForLight-Localisation

Steam Deck verified:

WIth update 0.9.3 we are very happy to announce that Striving for Light is now Steam Deck Verified!

Dynamic Environment

Grass and other map decorations got sway effect.

⚙️Major Changes and Improvements:

• Companions can now break interactible world objects (like jars)
• Added support for 240Hz setting in the options menu
• Blade orbit tower attack now does not scale with player AoE size to prevent the attack from spawning outside the descent map
• Light Staff now has attack indicator glow
• Intensified shortsword attack indicator glow
• Fixed melee attack offset when attacking with the directional buttons on keys and gamepad
• Coop stone got its moss plants back
• Improved tree of light texture

🔧Fixes:

• Fixed bug that spawned you into the gatekeeper arena when pressing F on a map
• Fixed final boss fight stage on awakened serpents spawning to early and triggering too many chests
• Fixed swamp crawler map boss misplaced hitbox
• Fixed unintended graphic glitch on serpent boss model

Come, join the community on our offical discord.