With Dome Keeper celebrating its one year anniversary, we really wanted to make something special. So instead of just adding a new dome, we decided to double up and add two! In this dev diary, we are going to take a deeper look at both the Artillery Dome and the Tesla Dome as well as the new Dome Supplement mechanic, all coming in the Double Dome update on October 5th!
Like with the keepers, we want every dome to feel really different, to set them apart from each other and offer more variety in gameplay. The goal is to have them offer new challenges and make you as a player approach battle differently with each dome.
The Artillery Dome
The Artillery Dome is the only dome that actually comes with two weapons: the mortar and the anti air gun. The slow-firing mortar stands out amongst the existing dome weapons, because you have to plan with the travel time of each shot. When you fire the mortar, a few seconds will pass before the shell arrives at its destination and explodes. In combination with the slow rotation, you have to plan ahead and predict where the monsters will be at the time of impact. While this poses a challenge, you can also really use this to your advantage and make good use of indirect fire as well. If you manage to directly hit a monster, you’ll always get some bonus damage.
While the mortar is excellent for obliterating ground based monsters, the anti air gun is more useful for flying enemies. Riddle the sky with bullets and hope for the best! However, there is an upgrade in the tech tree for the Anti Air Gun that allows you to aim at ground based enemies as well. Double the trouble, all around. Especially since you can also, technically, use the mortar for flying enemies too. Ultimately the success you’ll have with the dome is all about how nifty you can be in combining the power of these two weapons.
Speaking of upgrades, let’s talk a bit about the tech tree for the Artillery Dome! The mortar has two different lines of upgrades: one is focused on making direct hits with the mortar shells. With this upgrade any direct hits deal massive amounts of damage and if you follow this track you’ll end up with a dome that can easily deal with even the most high level monsters in no time. Did you ever wish to one-shot a Driller? If so, then this might be your path. However, weaker monsters that attack from both sides will be more of an issue, because of your limited rate of fire and area of effect.
The other upgrade track is all about area damage. It lets you expand on the mortar's explosion radius and adds additional shells per shot. Following this track you can pretty much cover the entire ground in exploding mortar shells with just one shot and easily deal with whole packs of attacking monsters.
There’s also some choices you can make when it comes to upgrading the Anti Air Gun. One track is centered around drastically improving the rate of fire, and the other on homing rockets that will detect monsters and change their course to find their target.
The Tesla Dome
While the Artillery Dome is in its essence based on ballistic explosions, the Tesla Dome is built around the power of electricity. It also just happens to be the first dome that allows for two dimensional aiming.
You aim by moving your reticle in any direction across the screen. When you’ve found a suitable target you hold down the shoot button to charge your weapon. Once you are fully charged you then release the button to shoot. This means that when you release, you really need to be in the right spot, as otherwise you have to charge again from zero. This is very different from, for example, playing with the laser, where you can easily adjust your aim while firing. You can of course charge as you move, but as movement speed is decreased while charging, you need to plan your moves carefully to be in the right spot at the right time.
Another useful upgrade worth mentioning is Perfect Timing. A perfectly timed shot will happen if you charge your weapon and release it right when it’s fully charged. This is indicated by visual cues on the reticle, and as a result your shot will be a lot stronger.
Where it really gets interesting however, is with the Electro Orb upgrades. With this, every shot creates an Electro Orb that remains in place for some time, stunning and damaging any enemy that passes it. So let’s say you see a horde of ticks coming towards your dome. Instead of shooting right at them, you can place an Electro Orb in their path and move your attention elsewhere, while the orb deals with them.
You can, of course, also upgrade these orbs! The obvious one is to increase their longevity with the Persistent Orbs upgrades. Another very useful thing is the Nurture Electro Orbs upgrade. With nurturing, you can boost an already placed Electro Orb by shooting it again to both increase its size and how long it stays.
The Electro Orbs challenge you with a brand new way of thinking about how to work with the space around your dome for defense. You could, for example, place two orbs on one side of the Dome to block off that space from enemies, while you focus on bigger targets Or, knowing that a diver is incoming, you can simply place a sphere where it’s most likely to attack and not worry about keeping an eye on them. You can even start placing a few orbs before the battle starts, to better prepare for the first enemies.
The Electro Orbs also work together with Perfect Timing to create stronger orbs. if you also have upgraded your Shot Power, then your orbs can end up dealing quite a lot of damage. You can also upgrade the stun power of the orbs, to make sure the monsters slow down and take as much damage as possible.
All in all, the Tesla dome is an interesting dome to play in, as it requires a lot of planning and gives you new ways to think strategically about the space around you.
Dome Supplements
Besides the two brand new domes, this update will also come with an exciting new feature: Dome Supplements. Previously, each dome came with its own basic branch in the tech tree where you had the various health upgrades, repairs and so on. Each dome also had their own specializations like how the Laser Dome had the hardening ability, and the Sword dome had combat repair.
With the Double Dome update, we are changing that. The domes will not come with this predefined upgrade branch, but instead you will be able to unlock Dome Supplements as you play. Once you bring a Dome Supplement back to the dome you can choose between 6 different kinds of supplements to add to your already existing upgrade track:
- Reduce melee damage (also buffed with this update)
- Reduce projectile damage
- Combat repair (also buffed with this update)
- Electrified hull that hurts melee monsters(basically thorn damage if you know you hack and slash games)
- Dome resurrection, where instead of being destroyed, the dome fully restores and even gains additional max health
- Scrap repair, with which you can repair your dome for iron, but lose max hp when doing this (max hp can be restored once)
We’ll add more supplements in the future, and are curious to hear your feedback and ideas.
This change will bring more variety to each run, letting you form more intricate strategies and making the game more challenging and enjoyable!
The one year anniversary of Dome Keeper
Time sure swooshes by when you’re having fun. The one year anniversary for Dome Keeper is coming up next week! To celebrate, we are going to have a livestream with René and your friendly neighborhood Community Manager Sanna.
We’ll be playing Dome Keeper using one of the new domes of course, and talk about what’s happened with Dome Keeper over this past year, what the future holds AND we’ll be answering your questions about Dome Keeper. The stream will take place on Tuesday, September 26th, at 21:00 CEST on the Bippinbits twitch channel, so make sure to join us then!
We hope you’re as excited about the Double Dome update as we are, keepers! That’s all from us this time. As always, we really appreciate hearing from you so please let us know what you think in the comments below, and join us to discuss all things Dome Keeper on our official Discord server: Bippinbits Dome Keeper Discord Server.
