- Dredgers on Sale! - 16 July 2024
Since I've been able to update the game, decided to put up a new sale for those who missed out on the summer sale! So Dredgers is on sale this week for those who are on the fence about trying out the game! There's been a large update a few days ago with a lot of fun stuff to try out, so check it out here! :D
- Version 48: Mechanist - 13 July 2024
Greeting Dredgers! Version 48 is finally here in full force, the highlight of this patch is the Mechanist class, allowing you to craft new limbs and place or even replace your own body parts, along with adding more with the new harness item! This system required a rework of how limbs in the game work, and so most races have had tweaks to their body slots. Wroughts, EMPU and Domples in particular got the most work. This patch is a big mix up of a lot of small changes I've been adding over the last two years, along with some bigger additions. Mechanist Our first new class in a while. With the new limb system there had to be a class to interact with it. Mechanists effectively let you customise what equip slots you want, and can effectively give you two extra slots if you're willing to forgo armour. Limb Rework Limbs, aka equip slots, have been rework, giving me a lot more flexibility in ho…
- Version 48 Beta: Now available for testing! - 30 June 2024
It's been too long, but Greetings Dredgers! I've finally had some time to work on Dredgers after about, 2.5 years, sorry for the wait :( I plan to release this patch properly soon, but I need some help testing it, so jump on the buggy branch and give it a whirl! The password is IDoNotCareAboutBugs Limbs The limb system has been totally rewrite, this does come with some changes for players: You no longer need to press both right and left click to use both weapons, you can just press left click now. Books now use right click to swap spell. There are now two shoe slots instead of one, double the shoes! About half the races got small or minor changes to their limb slots and what they can equip, so make sure to read before reporting bugs regarding this. Wroughts Two of the wrought passives, (Iron Wreath and Metal Taste) are now a single usable skill that marks an enemy with Iron Wreath, but…
- Version 47 Hotfix - 25 January 2022
Greetings again Dredgers! Some of these changes already rolled out yesterday, some will have rolled out by the time this has been posted! EXP Unfortunately the green EXP changes did not go down well, as it seems my play tests didn't quite give me correct info (since I habitually play human, I was getting more blue EXP). Also coupled with people's concerns about it introducing heavy RNG to levelling, I decided to revert the blue EXP change. However, you'll now need more blue and green EXP to level up. As compensation, you now get 2 skill points per level (Gloomp gets 3) so you should still be able to go through classes at the same speed as before! Archery Something I didn't have time for last patch, but Archery critical rolls now scale of INT instead of DEX. This make crits something you actually spec into, rather than a weird barely interacted with source of damage. As a result, face gu…
- Version 47: Crafting Prefixes and Balance - 19 January 2022
Greetings Dredgers! We came off holiday 2 days ago and really got stuck in with development, so here's a patch already! "Rob aren't you supposed to be working on other things?" No I'm a free man I can do what I want. With the long form streams coming in from Chinese and English streamers after the update, and some play testing of my own, I decided I really wanted to do a balance patch. If you've played at all last patch you'll know green EXP was totally out of whack. Similarly if you've played for any length of time, you'll know levels are kinda whack too! And likewise, crafting is rather... lackluster, even Quooz in the end game get outshined by their brothers. Crafting Prefixes Crafting now costs 50 Hunger by default. This can be reduced directly by having STR, ENG or SPD. You can still technically craft without hunger, but you'll get a Flawed item. Here is the VERY temporary prefix m…
- Version 46: Save Games and Translation - 20 December 2021
Greetings Dredgers! I'm just as suprised as you are that there's a patch so soon, let alone the contents of this patch. If you've been following news for a while, you may know Saves and Translations have been the two largest requested features of the game. They were also huge undertakings I really didn't have much time for. However due to some strange circumstances, I was able to greatly reduce the work required needed to translate, probably at the cost of shaving a few years off my life. Likewise, I realised the game would need very little tweaking to actually work with gamemaker's save functionality, which is normally limited to simple games. I was very wrong and it was quite a hassle getting saving working, but still a lot easier than coding it from scratch! I still will likely be rewriting saving in the far future, so that visiting previous floors will be possible, but that's for an…
- Version 45: Crafting UI overhaul, Maintenance - 1 October 2021
Greetings Dredgers! I swear I haven't abandoned you! I apologise for the long wait for an update, a lot of personal stuff has been happening in my life which lead to a rocky few months, and by the time I got back to dredgers I had a mountain of work and bug fixing to do. During these few months I started work on another game to sell on steam, since I need to make sure I can keep working on games. Do not worry, I don't plan to stop developing Dredgers forever in favour of another game. To this end, I've hired my sister, Nonnen (the one who has been making all the update art), to help create art and sprites fulltime. This should massively speed up the creation of assets for my games. So my current plan is as follows: After the release of today's update, and the bugfixing that occurs afterwards, we'll be swapping over to a smaller game to finish. If you've been in the discord or on the for…
- Version 44: Bugfixes, Qol, Options - 14 September 2020
Greetings Dredgers! Today I have a small update for you, the primary goal of this update is just some set up and housing keeping before I get to the big crafting updates. Some of the work done has been setting the game up to be able to be translated, still a ways off from having the entire game load in text but it's getting there. Related to this, the options menu has been expanded so I finally have more space to actually put in options, which will be required eventually for loading language files. New options: Auto Pickup - Allows you to disable almost all automatically picked up items. Start Runs Paused - Automatically pauses the game at the start of runs. Pause Time Scale - While playing during pause, the passage of time is affected by this scale. Time to Unpause - How quick the game goes from 0% world speed to full speed. Auto Unlocked Rusted Locks - Allows you to disable rusted key…
- Version 43: Necro and Undead Update - 31 July 2020
Greetings Dredgers! For anyone not following on the discord, this update probably seems quite out of place. After all, I did say crafting was going to be the next big update, so what gives? Well, in short, I decided to have a 'small' break from working on item systems, and decided to 'quickly' polish up one of the most broken/buggy things in the game, that being undead and the necro class. Unfortunately this took much longer than expected, due to a few reasons: The update required far more work than expected, I got side-tracked a lot, and simply put, I was lazy for 2-3 weeks in which no work was accomplished. I am not trying to excuse my negligence, but I just wish to be transparent with you all. But hey, we actually get to be a Lich now, so that's something! Necro I, II and III Necro is the first class to reach rank 3! Which was probably inevitable in all honesty, I originally thought…
- Version 42: Item Rewrite - 29 May 2020
Well the big day is finally here dredgers! I've been working on this update for about 4-5 months and it's been, phew, quite a workload. I ended up touching on just about every part of the game while doing this, and since I was rewriting an integral system of the game, pretty much everything kept breaking, the last 2-4 weeks were delayed due to an infinite loop bug which was being a pain to track down, since it left no error message. But that's all past and gone, that update is ready for release more or less! This post has a lot to read through and digest, so prepare yourself. The first 3 headlines should be enough to get an idea of the update if you don't want to read the whole thing. Projectiles Arrow modifiers now stack, so each fletcher skill (and the starting arrow modifiers) now uses a different layer. So for example you can create a fire-bomb-splinter arrow! Not only that, but as…
- Item Rewrite Nearing Completion - 7 April 2020
Greetings dredgers, sorry for lack of updates over the past 3 months or so. I've been working on the item rework as I stated in my plans and it's taken a whiiiile. However, thankfully the update is now reaching the final stages of testing, bugfixes and qol improvements! So to recap the major points of this update: Rewritting the item system to allow for stuff like saving/translations. Allowing items to have more than one prefix so loot (and eventually crafting) is more interesting. Reworking item types in general to be improved. Reworking the item tooltip so players get as much information as possible. This update will not contain any new crafting stuff, in fact most of the crafting stuff will be more or less the same until next update. As of today, every item has been recoded into the game, and all the item systems are finished. Since a huge chunk of the game has been edited or rewritt…
- Post-Holiday Plans - 16 December 2019
It's finally the end of the year, and as much as I'd love to keep working on Dredgers, I know I'll burn myself out if I don't take a holiday, as I've been working about 13 months on end without much in the way of holidays. (In all honestly, I'm quite burnt out already, but the hype from launch has kept me going) So after the next small patch, game development will be paused for about 2-3 weeks. So my plans for next year are not 100% set in stone, but I have an idea of what I'd like to do: The first and major thing is rewriting the item system. The way the system currently works is that each item has values that are loaded from code when the item is created. This means that, unless I create an item, I cannot get any info about it. Obviously this is quite bad, but I never realised it'd be an issue when I first coded items. Items are fairly complicated and a big part of dredgers, so re-cod…
- Version 41 - 10 December 2019
Been wanting to put out this update for a few days now, but many events sort of came together so I was only able to put out the game last night. The main feature of this update is the improved class menu, which has been requested by many people. You can now see exactly which classes lead into others, and see what each ability does in each class. The graphics look somewhat better as well as a result: And, as you can see in the image above, the three classes previously after cultist are now in shiner. This was for a few reasons: Players would like to go priest+solar abilities, but couldn't before due to priest and cultist incompatibility. (the AI priests were already doing this which was extra painful) The class abilities were often times more like incantations rather than skills, so by moving them to shiner I can make them actually be incantations. Thematically shiner makes far more sens…
- Version 40: First Boss - 22 November 2019
After quite a while working on it, the game finally has it's first boss fight! This brings with it a few new things that should probably all be explained separately: The King As you may have guessed by looking at the images and title, the boss fight takes place in the castle, against the King and his aide. To reach the boss battle, simply all you need to do is go into the castle via the dungeon as usual, and descend into a trapdoor with a golden handle. Naturally you may just pass through if you do not actually intend to fight the boss, so don't worry about the castle now being a death sentence if you are not prepared. After the battle Once you defeat the boss battle, you get the chance to end the game as a victory if you wish, or just simply head back down into the dungeon. The boss battle can only be fought once during a run, so no rematches. This may seem strange at first but will ma…
- Version 39 - 31 October 2019
Another day, another patch! So as stated in the future plans post, I plan to rework majority of classes to improve them all. As part of that I really needed to update the class and race HUD, since while it was working and serving it's purpose, it really wasn't good enough. The empty black bar on the left is reserved space for buttons later. So a major change was made that certain classes combine when learnt, allowing you to splash points from the second class into the first class. While this is mainly for the rank 1, 2 and 3 of each class, it's also being temporarily used by some classes now. Other changes are scrolling being smoother and mouse-wheel support. You can now see how many skill points are remaining, and you now just click anywhere on the skill in order to level it up, rather than the tiny green button. Ability frames are now coloured based on rank, and some now have various…
- Version 38 - 28 October 2019
Another version is here! This time we have a new primary class, the leader! Leader is a CHM based class that focuses primarily on followers and commanding them. Changelog: - Added the Leader primary class, leads into Summoner, Necro and Seducer and Healer. - Bard now only leads into Cultist, Seducer, Healer and Priest. - Non-Leaders are restricted to 1 follower at a time. - Primary classes are now 3 levels long instead of 2. This is preparing for class rework, along with making non-advance player mode players feel less disappointed. - Added a randomize button. - Tooltips are now semi-transparent, so you don't feel blinded when they pop-up. - Blocking damage with (armour) and {CHM} now used different brackets surrounded the numbers so you can tell which is which easier. - Updated Hunger, EXP and armour tooltips to explain more. - You can now hover stats to get a rough idea where you are…
- Near-Future Plans - 24 October 2019
Greetings all, I hope you've been having fun playing Dredgers, I can't say how excited I am to finally have it out and about in the world. I'd like to babble a bit about what's coming up and where I'd like to go with the game. Firstly, things that should be coming shortly in the next few days: - More fixes and QoL changes - Discord integration - Some minor polish Most of this is self explanatory, these next few days will mostly be "look and react" for me as I get feedback. Longer term goals I'd like to accomplish soon: - Add a 'Memory/Mind' System - Rework Dashes - Rework Classes - Release the first themed content update Big fore-warning: What I have here are just plans and ideas, I cannot promise any of them will be added, but these are things I would really like to do for the game. Memory/Mind The Mind/Memory system I'd like to add is a way for me to better control what each character…
- Version 37 Released - 24 October 2019
Day 2 since the game was launched, and I've had tons of feedback on the game thus far. Majority of this update was to fix things players have found either confusing or frustrating, along with actual bug fixes and some QoL things. Changelog: - Items can now be sold for 50% off! Quooz sell for 25% of the original value. - Passives and Skills can now be seen from the race select screen - Interact-able objects in the world are highlighted green - Visual improvements to stats and skills, so it's easier to know remaining points - Various Fixes - Various other QoL things In a few moments I'll be writing up a news post to talk a bit about my plans for the near future. So check that out as well!
- Version 36 Released - 19 October 2019
A new version has been released for Dredgers and will be the final version before the game launches on Steam! Barring any last minute fixes of course! This version of the game adds two new classes, which are available after you go athlete: A change has been made to how the game loads data, loading some of the more intense stuff at the start of the game. This will increase the game's starting load time, but reduces level generation time to near instant. This also removes the stutters that would occasionally happen during gameplay. And finally, the dungeon area has been given some love and been made far more interesting, on top of getting new rooms added. As for future updates: the after launch period will be mostly fixes and QoL, after which I have a lot of ideas for new content and larger additions/changes I'd like to make if I can afford to. Thanks for reading, I've come quite far on t…
