After spending a year in Early Access, we're very excited to transition to version 0.9 of Keeper's Toll. This major update brings the final character class to the game: the Blood Maiden.
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We've spent a tremendous amount of time designing and building her and we can't wait for you all dive in and play. Here's a few things that makes her unique:
1. Animated Ultimate Attacks. We gave her some slick animations, such as Crimson Fury, the attack shown above. These ultimates are the final two talents in her talent tree, and thus must be unlocked. They have a cooldown timer and you must manually activate them during gameplay by holding the action button for 2 seconds (a prompt will be shown on screen when the ultimate is ready).
2. Build Variety: The Blood Maiden has the most build variety out of any class in the game. We spent a lot of time designing unique ways to build her with various synergies across talents, actives and passives. For instance, you could go with a straight poleblade build and utilize passives to strengthen poleblade attacks. Or you can choose a blood based build and choose passives to support that build type. Or, perhaps, you want to get deeper and choose the corruption passive, which places a small but permanent penalty on you, but strengthens your power. You could then gain additional passives to boost benefits of becoming corrupted. This is just the tip of the iceberg, for as we continue in version 0.9 of KT, we have more plans for the Blood Maiden. Some cool surprises and additions will be coming, just like we created the Black Flame for the Pyromancer.
Along with the new character class comes a new Perks System. Class XP now serves a greater purpose beyond just upgrading talents. As long as you have enough XP to buy a perk, the new perks merchant will arrive at the beginning of a round.
You can choose to purchase one of 3 available perks for a variable amount of XP, providing yet another way to boost your character during a run.
Build Notes (0.9.0)
- New Character Class: The Blood Maiden
- New Perks System: When beginning a run, you can talk to the Perks Merchant to buy a perk. The merchant will only show up if you have enough XP to purchase a perk. 3 unique perks will be on offer and they will only be applied for the current round.
- New Tome of Knowledge: Spend more than 1,000 XP in the Perks Menu
- New Tome of Knowledge: Reach level 50 in a single run
- New Achievement: Max All talents for the Blood Maiden
- Merchant Indicator icon will remain active when player runs out of range. Will now only disable when the merchant is disabled. This way the player can return to the merchant and not struggle to find him if they so desire
- Adjusted specific enemy spawn rates
- Sacrifice Altar: added a glowing red light to illuminate the altar
- Dozens of Bug Fixes
- Lots of code refactoring
- Game Engine updated to latest version
Coming Soon
As we continue development through version 0.9 of Keeper's Toll, we will be adding the following:
- Revisions/Improvements to all character classes
- New Events
- Tomes of Knowledge
- Additional language support. Over the coming months we will be adding support for German, Japanese, Turkish and Hungarian. We're currently looking for a translator to assist with French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Russian. If anyone is interested in assisting with this (paid work) or knows someone that might be interested, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. We'd love to chat.
- Various other improvements/fixes/additions to the game based on player feedback
The Future of Keeper's Toll
There will likely be less build updates moving forward, as we are pushing hard towards our 1.0 release, and with the full version of the game there will be a lot of new content. We will be releasing 1.0 of KT on both Steam and Nintendo Switch, and we plan to port to other platforms in the future. We will be maintaining multiple versions of the game moving forward and it will be a bit more challenging having to maintain 3 versions of the game while simultaneously porting and testing on Nintendo Switch, so this is why updates will likely be less frequent than they have been, but rest assured we will keep you updated on progress as we move towards the finish line. Things can, of course, change as time goes on and we'll continue to keep everyone in the loop on any developments as often as possible.
Here's some important things to look forward to once we exit early access:
- Final level and boss fights. Some big surprises await unlike anything you've seen before in the game. We want the final content and gameplay to evolve and elevate the experience.
- Level tiers: Do you find the game too easy? Has it gotten easier throughout Early Access? Do you want more of a challenge? Do you want more meta/progression? If you answer yes to any of these questions then rest assured, because a secondary level tier for each world will be unlockable, which will increase the challenge, offer new threats and twists on the worlds, and elevate the game to a new level. More on this to come the closer we get to 1.0.
Conclusion
We can't wait to see what you all think of the new content and we look forward to delivering more in the future. As always, if anyone has any feedback, bug reports, suggestions etc, please do not hesitate to reach out. We read everything and will do our best to respond as soon as possible.
Thank you,
Stingbot Games
