Originally Posted on Kickstarter on April 20th, 2023 by Dennis at Deck13 Spotlight.
So yeah, the “minor update” ballooned into a fully-featured major update that brings A TON of improvements, additions and completely new content to the game – especially to the early game as well, where we improved player guidance a whole lot thanks to introducing an early version for a proper main quest.
Still, even after all these updates, keep in mind that all of the new systems might still be prone to some bugs or issues, so please, as always, leave us your feedback on what you think about all the new stuff on our Community Discord! Without your input, Holomento would not be where it is right now. You’re all fantastic! 💖
Well. Let’s go through all of the new stuff then! As always, you can go through the full changelog on Steam right here: https://steamcommunity.com/games/721700/announcements/detail/3644009824648267799
New Central Valley
We completely overhauled the Central Valley area! Since this is the first really big area players will see, we finally gave it the attention it deserved. This also includes a complete redesign of the town of Evenfall, which now much better represents it’s role as the central hub for the game.
While Evenfall was completely ravaged by monsters, during your travels you will work on rebuilding the town step by step to help it return to its’ former glory! Thanks to the new and improved town upgrade system you can now upgrade all kinds of shops and buildings with your collected materials and money, which, for now, gives you access to better shops and bonuses.
This new upgrade system will be expanded and used for the other smaller towns you find in other areas as well in future content updates!
The Traveler’s Guild
The Traveler’s Guild finally opened its’ gates! Well… kinda. It’s actually on lockdown right now thanks to an infestation of enemies!
When entering Central Valley for the first time, you will meed Guild Master Jerrick, who will send you on a quest to liberate the Traveler’s Guild from evil! The ascent to the main guild building is a new mini-dungeon we’re introducing with this update, where you have to fight and puzzle your way through several gate houses to make it to the top!
Unlocking the guild also allows you to collect Guild Reputation! Killing enemies, collecting items, beating dungeons and completing journeys now awards you with Guild XP which will improve your Guild Level globally over the course of multiple runs! For this update we implemented the first 15 Guild Levels, which unlock helpful shortcuts, access to contract boards, a new armor set and much more!
This system was introduced, not only to reinforce the theme of rebuilding the world, but also to give players a more compelling reason to finish runs besides “just get to the goal”. We hope you’re looking forward to seeing what we have in store for future Guild upgrades!
Camps, Forts, NPCs
With the Evenfall update also comes the introduction of our new NPC system! This will be expanded bit by bit in future content updates to make the rebuilt Eventide Hollow more lively. These new NPCs come with passive and active dialogue that provides a lot more info and lore about the Hollow and the world in general!
With the introduction of NPCs also comes the new quest system! In addition to contracts, which you can do at any time, NPCs can give you quests that will award you with more meaningful upgrades. For this update you’ll find camps and forts hidden throughout Central Valley with NPCs just waiting to move back into Evenfall. Though maybe you should clean out all the enemies still ravaging the town first!
With this system we should be able to more easily implement more NPCs and quests in future content updates and we can’t wait to show you what we’ve come up with!
New Enemy System
And the final very big change you will notice is a completely overhaul to how we handle enemies! We not only completely reworked how enemies work under the hood, allowing us to implement new and, more importantly, more interesting enemies more easily, but also how they’re spawned.
Starting with this update you will now see enemies at a distance – no more enemies spawning right on top of you! Enemy spawns are still semi-randomized, to keep multiple runs a bit more interesting, but now you’ll always be able to tell from a distance which kind of danger you’re heading into.
We’re still planning to improve and expand the new enemy features for upcoming updates and also include the new enemy spawning in all areas (due to the way the area was built, the desert dungeon still uses old enemy spawners, which will be fixed in an upcoming update).
This will also give more meaning to collecting and using far-distance weapons (like rifles) more meaning, since now you’ll be able to snipe skellies from far away!
We also took the opportunity to introduce a bunch of new enemies! One of our favorites is the giant plant and its’ roots, which can keep you quite on your toes.
But wait, there’s more!
…in the changelog on Steam! There’s still a whole bunch of improvements, fixes and additions that would completely obliterate the scope of this update post, which is already really long (sorry for that). This includes, but is not limited to: new items, weapons and armor, new weapon effects, UI improvements, a bunch of new SFX, new music, new animations for most enemies and so much more!
The main additional change I’d like to inform you about though is an upcoming overhaul to the very first dungeon of the game, the sewer dungeon.
During the course of this and the last few content updates, it became quite clear that the sewer dungeon can’t reach the quality of later dungeons at all and we also decided that the whole procedural aspect of said dungeon was overall just not a good fit for Holomento and what we envisioned.
As such, we have blocked access to the procedural part of the dungeon, though for now, you can still enter the big lobby area, collect keys and fight the boss to complete the dungeon that way. Meanwhile we do have some really cool ideas on how to bring the sewers up to standard with the rest of the games’ content, though it might take a while until we can include the dungeon redesign in a future update. Definitely stay tuned!
…aaaand that’s it! For now!
I think! This update became so much bigger than we anticipated, but we’re all incredibly happy with how it turned out and we hope that you take the opportunity to check out the new and improved Central Valley and all the new features we worked very hard on these last few months. It definitely wasn’t a “minor update” and it took 4 months instead of 2-3 weeks, but I’m incredibly proud of the work Sean, Paul, Wilfried, Adeel and Cem have put into this!
And of course, there’s also some more generally informational stuff from my side as well!
First of all, I have to apologize that the custom NPC rewards still have to wait a little while. This update did finally set-up the baseline we need to start working and planning for custom NPCs though, so hopefully you won’t have to wait much longer until we can finally implement your NPC ideas into the game! I’ll update you here and on the Community Discord as soon as I have more information!
Second, I still heard there are some reports of backers still missing access to the game. While I was able to reach some backers to give them the access they backed for, I was unfortunately out of luck with some others. So as before, if you backed for game access and still haven’t received your keys yet, please let me know! Please contact me at dkroener@deck13.com with your Kickstarter username (or KS e-mail address). This way I can make sure that the message doesn’t get lost anywhere in Kickstarter’s systems. Thank you!
I’d like to thank you very much for your time and especially your patience with this update! We all think it’ll be worth your while and we can’t wait to see what you think about all the changes and additions! 💖
~Dennis