- Rift Wizard 2 Launch - 25 March 2024
Early Access for RW2 begins today. The game is quite similar to RW1, using the most of the existing graphical assets and a slightly modified game engine. I wanted to focus on making the game better rather than newer, and on serving the existing player base rather than chasing new ones. IMO the game is a very big improvement on the first. A quick summary of the most significant changes for veteran RW1 players considering making the jump: - New equipment system. Find and equip staves, robes, and other equipment. Replaces shrines. - 31 new spells - 28 new skills - Most spells have reworked upgrades (one per spell rather than piecemeal) - Free HP refill and portal reroll at end of each level. - New procedural boss generation system - New multi-tile boss monsters - Compressed level curve - Larger level size if your monitor supports it You can check it out here. I hope you enjoy playing it as…
- Rift Wizard 2 - 30 October 2023
Greetings Wizards. Been a while, hasn't it? A while ago I decided to stop updating Rift Wizard 1 to devote my full energies to Rift Wizard 2. I did this because I wanted to try some things that would be wildly inappropriate for a patch- things that, in my opinion, have the potential to improve the game quite a bit. RW2 started as a direct fork of RW1, but unlike in a patch, I had absolute creative freedom to go in any direction I pleased. I tried quite a few things. Some worked, some didn't. Those that worked, well, they are Rift Wizard 2. Its been a blast, and its nearly time to start sharing it with a wider audience. The most significant new feature in Rift Wizard 2 is equipment. Random drops are a part of most roguelikes. Rift Wizard 1 plays around a bit with random drops in the form of shrines, but mostly emphasizes the non-random SP buyable skills, spells and upgrades. Rift Wizard…
- Bugfix Build - 16 May 2022
Todays build is just to fix a few bugs: Fixed an occasional crash in the spell shop Fixed an occasional crash involving nightmare aura upgrades Fixed volcanic eruption flow range upgrade not working Fixed hollow flesh hp loss upgrade not working Fixed poison debuff description in help screen Fixed devour mind desc typo Fixed devour mind gluttony upgrade not respecting max charge upgrades Mushbooms can now apply their effects to non living enemies
- Spring Cleaning Patch - 15 April 2022
Greetings Wizards! This patch focuses on making poison a more useful and reasonable mechanic in the game and correcting some longstanding balance issues. It also contains a few new high level challenges, and of course plenty of miscellaneous bug fixes. Full notes follow. Skills and Balance: Poison now disables healing in addition to dealing 1 damage per turn Megavenom New skill Level 4 ND Deals 4 additional poison damage to all poisoned enemies each turn Acid Fumes New Skill Level 5 ND Each turn a random enemy gets -100 poison resist Voidflame Lantern New Skill Level 4 FA Whenever you cast a fire or arcane spell, gain starcharged for a number of turns equal to the spells level. Starcharged deals Fire and Arcane damage to 2 separate random enemies in line of sight each turn it is active. Essence Flux New spell. Reverses the resistances of a group of enemies. Void Beam level 4->3 All "Eye…
- Beta Update 20220404 - 4 April 2022
One last experimental change I want to test on beta: Poison now disables healing. This applies to the Wizard as well, and healing potions cannot be used while poisoned. In addition, this patch contains fixes to two longstanding moderately annoying bugs: Dragons are now better at imagining where their breath weapons will actually hit, and will no longer 'miss' with them Red Cyclopes batting soul jars will no longer crash the game. -Dylan
- Beta Update 20220328 - 28 March 2022
A few small beta tweaks as we push towards a merge to main: Fixed a bug where click to move sometimes failed to swap the wizard with his minions Renamed Purple Flame Radiance to Voidflame Lantern (PFR was too long for the UI) Adjusted the frequency of the new idols down to normal Crucible of pain spawns furnace hounds every 500->300 damage -Dylan
- Beta Update 20220321 - 21 March 2022
This weeks patch mostly deals with code optimization: Optimized many commonly used functions Optimized threat range calculation (threat range calculation is much faster in many cases now) Pressing 't' should result in much smaller delays, and the game should be able to process slightly more stuff before incurring slowdown. Also made a few changes to Purple Flame Radiance: - is no longer sorcery tagged - no longer wastes hits on immune enemies Thanks to Anotak for help with the optimizations. -Dylan
- Beta Update 20220311 - 11 March 2022
Purple Flame Battery revised to Purple Flame Radiance: Whenever you cast an arcane or fire spell, gain that many turns of starcharged. Starcharged deals 6 arcane and 6 fire damage to 2 random enemies in LOS each turn it is active. Fixed Mordred music not playing when the Mordred level was reloaded Fixed single enemy threat range display only working with mouse Essence Flux charges 6->12 Added graphics for new idols Actually fixed poison sting range upgrade, really for real for real this time. Added fast forward feature: Press backspace to set the game speed to xturbo until the end of the current turn. (I added this because I usually prefer to play on normal speed, but sometimes get into annoying situations especially with conjuration builds, and end up toggling back and forth which is awkward. Curious to hear how others feel about this feature, and game speed in general.) -Dylan
- Beta Update 20220304 - 4 March 2022
Many updates this week to the beta, patchnotes follow. Spells and skills: New skill: Purple Flame Battery Gain charge when you cast fire spells, which can be used to cast arcane spells for free. New spell: Essence Flux Swaps around all the resistances of a group of enemies Nightmare Poison -> Megavenom Now deals an extra 4 poison damage instead of 2 dark and 2 arcane (I'd rather have this skill be useful with other poison skills than feed back into the already crowded universe of cracklevoid/stormcaller tricks) Touch of Death Level 3->2 Reaper no longer gets 2x minion bonuses Death Cleave Cares about cascade range again (I vastly underestimated the potential for shenanigans with oculus and mystic vision here) Shows the chain of cleaving graphically now Melting Armor now has the metallic tag as well Hunger range 2->3 damage 5->7 Venom Spit Now works on both nature units and living units…
- Beta Update 20220225 - 25 February 2022
Another small beta update, these will ramp up a bit next week. For now: 1) Death Cleave reworked a bit: Now simply recasts the spell on another random valid enemy target, rather than doing a weird pseudo bounce thing. No longer has any independent concept of cascade range- just uses the spell's range and the caster's location. Now gives off a little dark cosmetic effect around where it fizzles out Death Cleave was the source of much player confusion, and also sometimes ridiculously overpowered. Its also one of the coolest pieces of content in the game. Hopefully these changes make it easier to understand, and less ridiculous with Death Touch. 2) If the game crashes while saving, the previous save file will not be overwritten with garbage The most notorious crash on save bug- which seems to have something to do with mercurial vengeance + Xturbo- is still unfixed, but this should mitigate…
- Beta Update 20220211 - 11 February 2022
Just one change for this beta update: Megavenom is gone, replaced by Dream Poison. Dream Poison is a level 4 Nature Dark Arcane passive skill that deals 2 arcane damage and 2 dark damage to each poisoned enemy unit each turn. (Megavenom was a bit extreme, and putting percent health on poison damage is fun earlygame but gets way out of control in the lategame)
- Beta Branch Returns - 4 February 2022
Greetings Wizards! Whilst I've begun to devote more and more of my development energies to my next project, I there are still a few changes and additions I'd like to try for RW. A new beta patch with some of those things has been posted. Currently it contains: New Skill: Megavenom. Causes poison to deal 1/4th the enemy's current hp each turn as poison damage in addition to the fixed 1 per turn. New Skill: Acid Fumes. Causes a random unacidified enemy to become acidified (-100 poison resist) each turn. Amplify Poison: removed. It wasn't very effective at doing anything except baiting new players into wasting SP, hopefully the 2 new skills do a much better job of fulfilling its role. New Spell Upgrade for Bone Barrage: Shambler Assembly. Summons a Bone Shambler instead of dealing damage when an empty tile is targeted (with hp equal to the damage it would have dealt). The wizard now starts…
- Small Patch - 10 January 2022
A few minor fixes today: - Fixed a bug that made the game freeze upon dying on XTurbo speed - Fixed a bug where XTurbo could not be selected using mouseclicks - Fixed a UI bug involving the Oculus buff tooltip - Clarified a couple tooltips related to spells that cannot heal the player (Idol of Beauty and Choir of Angels) - Fixed a bug that was preventing aelf lightning artists from using their spells - Fixed a bug that made Odin's chain lightning not arc as far as it should - Reincarnation can no longer stack with itself. In future patches I may explore ways for it to stack, but the previous behavior was to crash, of which doing nothing is a strict upgrade.
- Metal Magic - 17 December 2021
The new patch is here! The focus is on a new school of magic and the modding system- read on for full details. New school of magic: Metal! Metal magic is a small school, comparable in size to chaos or words. Most Metal spells have other tags and can be slotted into builds revolving around fire, lightning, or minions, but there are a few skills that specifically encourage heavy metal investment. Tooltips for all the metal spells and skills: Added modding system. See the RiftWizard/mods/ExampleMod directory for details. The modding system works by running the modders code as the game loads, which in python, allows them to change basically anything. The emphasis is on being able to add new spells, skills, shrines and monsters- but in theory anything is possible. Some players have already posted some very impressive mods on the official discord's #post-your-mod channel. Added launch option:…
- Beta Update 20211210 - 10 December 2021
The other half of this weeks changes are all bug and crash fixes as we move towards pushing modding and metal magic to the masses: Fixed a bug where tags were just totally broken and caused all sorts of mayhem especially when a game was reloaded, including but not limited to tag filters not having colors Fixed a siege golem crash Fixed slime drake not having flying Fixed firefly swarm shrine desc implying that it would not trigger on killing friendly units Fixed a typo in the name of an enchantment which lengthens the duration of various things, whose name I will no longer attempt to spell And lastly, not strictly a bugfix, but: Houndlord now always summons a number of hounds equal to the number of empty squares around the point a player deploys into the level, even if other summon skills fill them up in the meantime (enemy units still block summoning). Thanks to all who helped playtest…
- Beta Update 20211203 - 3 December 2021
Added new animation speed: TurboX. This is the fastest speed I can think of: the game will attempt to stuff everything that happens between each player turn into 1 frame. May cause framerate dips. Potentially useful for very slow moving conjuration spam playstyles though. Added new cmd line option: native_res. Will make the game run at its optimal resolution (1600 x 900) and resize the display automatically when in the game is in focus. Intended to be useful for players whose monitors support 1600x900, but whose desktops are for various reasons set to different sizes. There will be a steam launch option for this when the beta moves to live. Modding: Can now use custom spell effects (see blue fireball example). Can now use custom spell icons. Fixed a bug where if you bound direction keys to something other than the default you could no longer hold them down.
- Beta Update 20211126 - 26 November 2021
A few fixes and one highly requested feature, getting close to a launchable patch now: New hotkeys: PGUP/PGDN now show descriptions of a highlighted spells upgrades Lightning Spire now uses radius instead of minion range (it was a grey area initially and the mystic vision combo is cute, but it also completely overshadows anything else the spell can do). It also now has a radius upgrade. Fixed a bug where mercurial vengeance upgrade of mercurize applied a mercurize which did not use other upgrades Fixed sealed fate spreading to player when it ended up on berserked minions Fixed spider queen description being slightly inaccurate Added icons for metal spells and skills
- Beta Update 20211120 - 20 November 2021
Just two changes really: 1) Lightning Spire reworked- No longer arcs lightning at metallic units. Instead, now shoots lightning at up to 4 nearby enemies each turn (upgradable to shoot at more of course- and also upgradable to shoot through walls and/or debuff lightning resist on hit). 2) Fixed a bug involving shrine compatibility- specifically, shrines labelled as not for conjuration spells now require a sorcery OR an enchantment tag, rather than requiring a sorcery tag.
- Beta Update 20211112 - 12 November 2021
A few small balance and modding changes to the beta: Modding: Game now checks that all elements of the spell list are actually spells before launch (ah typ) A few balance changes: Mercurize Initial max charges 8->6 Lightnign Spire Now the arcs hit cells adjacent to the targets as well as along the beam (hopefully less awkward to actually deal damage with this now) Other balance: Gold Drake Dragon Mage upgrade cost 6->4 cooldown 15->8
- Beta Update 20211105 - 5 November 2021
Main project this week was the modding system. Rift Wizard now loads and executes all mods in the mods folder- see the example for details. To run a mod, there must be a folder with a python script whos name is the same as the folder containing it- aka, mods/ExampleMod/ExampleMod.py.disabled will not be run, but if you rename ExampleMod.py.disabled to ExampleMod.py, it will be run. The modding system is still in beta, and I cant guarantee that I wont make huge backwards incompatible changes until it ships in December. Rift Wizards game directory now also contains the source code for the game. I mainly did this for a few reasons: 1) To make it easier for modders to figure out how to do anything 2) To allow users with non windows systems to run the game, albeit in a non supported way. 3) To let interested players scrape data for tools guides fansites ect. Outside of modding and source ava…
