In the last news update I revealed that KeeperRL will leave Early Access in the next (major) patch, and that it will bring some big gameplay changes. It’s finally time to share some with you. I’ll only write about features that are already implemented and working.

New world map

Overhauling the world map has been my biggest goal in the past few years. It took a ridiculous amount of effort, especially considering that the end result is so obvious and simple. Here are its main features:

• Bigger: having 40x the area of the old world map, it adds space for much more content and esthetics. It’ll give you an all around better experience when traveling in your conquests.
• Real biomes: the types of tiles on the world map will correspond to the biomes of the actual locations. You’ll find white dragons in snowy areas, lizardmen in the deserts and dwarves in the mountains. Placing your starting position marker will also determine the biome of your home map.
• Fog of war: initially a small area is revealed, where you are free to choose your starting position. As you conquer tribes, more parts will become visible. This is so that players are not overwhelmed with information and all the possible starting locations right at the start of the game. The feeling of exploration and more visual appeal were also big reasons for it.
• Minor villains: in order to make the world feel more alive, the map will contain a lot of minor locations that you can visit that will not be relevant to your progress (or will they???).
• Difficulty increase: since the world will offer way more enemies, their difficulty will scale with the distance from your home map. The most faraway enemies will have their stats increased in the order of +100. This will also require scaling up the player’s strength, which brings me to the next part.

Power scaling

In order to conquer the most difficult villains, the player will need to acquire very powerful units. This will be achieved mainly through two new mechanics:

Uncapped combat experience:

• Minions will become ridiculously powerful as they kill tougher enemies. This is a feature that was once present in KeeperRL, but got removed in the name of balance. Now I say **** balance, as it is immensely fun.
• Ok some balance is still needed. To realize the gains, you will have to provide more and more luxurious quarters to your superhero troops. It will force you to pause your conquest every now and then, and offer the opportunity for some fun dungeon design work.
• To counter the potential scenario of losing a few powerful units and the lack of motivation to continue playing, enemies will now attempt to capture your minions instead of killing them. This always leaves you an option of winning them back in the next attack.
• To keep your regular units from dying in battles of champions, I’ve added the concept of sharing experience between the team, so even a single beefed up team member will make the whole team useful.

Scaling the quality of crafted equipment:

Another avenue for improving your army will be a new ability of crafting high quality items, with up to +100 bonuses. This will require some work: first you’ll have to attract or capture highly skilled craftsmen, and after that provide them with upgraded forges. The highest tier forge will only be possible to build in highly specific, rare and dangerous locations.

Achievements

This is a feature that I’ve left for the end of development. There are currently 31 achievements implemented, ranging from straightforward goals, to finding hidden content and doing tricky challenges. Hopefully they give you some extra fun!

1.0 Release time frame

There are more big features in the plans, but I’ll keep them secret until I have at least working implementations. Besides adding cool stuff, I’m also going to spend a lot of time playtesting and balancing everything. Winning the game now takes dozens of hours, so it’s a pretty daunting task. I regularly update development builds, so you can get an early glimpse if you want. Visit the discord server for details.

All said, the progress has been very good, so I’m hereby committing to the first quarter of 2024. Wish me luck :).