Major Level Update

Hello Sinners! Without further ado, here is the single biggest update I’ve done since release. I was originally planning this for a sequel due to the amount of work involved, but I decided to do what felt right and replace the level generator system I had started over 3 years ago.

I felt limited by the original levels due to their boxy repetitive nature, and the tools were inadequate to do more interesting designs. I felt stuck basically, so I completely reworked this system to include a robust level editing tool that would allow me much more flexibility and consistency in building levels. Now it feels like I can do pretty much anything with this toolset!

Levels are stitched together from various pre-made rooms, and the spawns of traps, enemies and rewards within them are randomized to keep the procedural feel and replayability up between runs. There are 230+ unique rooms in this first batch, with more to be added in future updates thanks to the handy level editing tool which allows levels to be created in as little as just a few minutes depending on its complexity. Here are the full patch notes below:

Content

• Replaced all of the main areas of the game, Dungeon, Cave and Forest with entirely new layouts! The levels are now more distinct, more varied and have more complex designs.

• Added 237 unique handcrafted rooms for the new levels! Gone are the boxy rooms of old, and in their place are multi-tiered layouts and richly decorated environments that invite new and exciting combat scenarios. This includes all new arenas as well.

• Added special treasure rooms off the beaten path with higher quality loot and chance to spawn rare things like portals or statues. The most common treasure rooms are very small but you can also occasionally find some bigger rare rooms with lots of loot.

• Levels will load in all at once now, and can be run from start to finish seamlessly. You can even backtrack between floors now if you’d like.

Balance

• Floor plates now spawn per room rather than per level. The number of floor plates starts at 1, and increases per area up to a max of 3 depending on the room size.

• Floor plate arena battles will now automatically include the enemies in the room in addition to the ones it spawns. There is now a strategic consideration if you want to clear the room first before starting an arena battle or fight all the enemies at once and risk being overwhelmed.

• Increased the overall challenge of the game’s main areas to better match the arena battles. It wasn’t my main objective necessarily, but it is a side effect of increased enemy density. I wanted to keep the overall pace somewhat consistent, whereas before it felt like the levels could just be passing through until the next action heavy arena section.

• Some of the smaller mid level arena battles can spawn two waves of enemies now

• Enemies who shoot projectiles can now aim up and down slopes to better fit the verticality of the new levels

• Far away enemies will now patrol towards the player until they get in their general vicinity (but not necessarily in aggro range). This makes it so the player doesn’t have to hunt down enemies as much in large areas.

• The Immortal Construct pursuer enemy can now chase you through an entire level potentially. Reduced the darkness of this encounter, and made it so he will despawn if you get into an area that is inaccessible to him.

Polish

• Spikes will no longer be visible through the floor underneath in portal rooms

• Reworded some tutorial texts to be more clear

• Level entrances are now portals with a color matching their respective areas to stand out more and be more consistent with the other areas which have portals like Trial of Resolve or Maw of Sin

• Traps in arena rooms start inactive until the arena battle actually begins

• Player interaction checks are more forgiving for items that are partially obstructed by a wall

• Reworked the red floor guide completely to work better with the new levels. Instead of the grid-like path, it will contour to the more complex geometry of the new levels and provide a more accurate shortest path to the next objective.

• The red floor guide will now also point to enemies that are far away from you in arena battles

• There can only be one trap, reward or floor plate spawn per cell so they don’t overlap with each other

• Enemies can no longer spawn on top of traps

• Reworked the dropping of items or anything that tracks to the floor to be more accurate and also sit properly on top of uneven surfaces like rocks.

• Reworked wall and floor blood splatter effect to work much more reliably than before (was missing like 70% of the time). It will also show up and conform to most surfaces, including uneven ones like rocks, pillars and trees.

Optimization

• Greatly optimized audio effects

• Reworked enemy culling so there is a global limit of 20 on screen enemies at any given time. Enemies that are far away or culled will play a spawn effect when they are activated again

• Found unity related optimization that massively improved performance for levels and enemies

• Using static batching for static level geometry to improve performance

• New level room culling system that is way more efficient than the old one. It will show the room you are in and the adjacent rooms, while culling the rooms further away.

• Greatly improved level generation times

• Breakable pots, barrels and crates now have their physics disabled completely when they haven’t been touched to greatly improve performance

• Greatly optimized the combo UI which was doing some expensive checks every frame

• Removed some unnecessary physics raycast that were eating up performance

• Expensive enemy checks like pathfinding or wall checks are now performed on a timer rather than every frame for big performance benefits

Bug Fixes

• Updated unity version to fix a long standing crash bug related to enemy pathing.

• In the rare cases that enemies get stuck somewhere behind a door or elsewhere and can’t reach the player during an arena battle, they will be automatically killed so the event can progress. Removed the auto end arena timer since it’s main purpose was to be a fail safe.

• Fixed an issue with not being able to exit the main menu after rebinding movement keys

This definitely took longer than I expected, but I hope that it is worth the wait. I essentially redid all the levels again halfway through this patch’s development period because I wasn’t happy with the result, and now this third iteration or so is much closer to my original intention. Thank you for your patience, and I hope you enjoy this update I poured my heart and soul into. I understand some might be very used to the old style, and it might be a bit tricky of a transition. If you have any comments or feedback, do not hesitate to let me know through the discord or forums. I am committed to making Mortal Sin the most polished, refined and hard hitting roguelike that I can make leading up to the full release. Thank you all for making this possible!