Dungeon Updates
In Planetora, the initial dungeon works a bit differently to what most may be expecting. Unlike other areas, the dungeon doesn’t have enemies randomly spawning with some loot sprinkled in. Upon entering the dungeon you will be locked in. The only way to leave is to die or fight your way to the exit.
The layout of the dungeon is designed in terms of rooms and corridors. Some rooms contain parkour challenges, some contain enemy waves, others contain loot, some contain a mixture. The dungeon is necessary for progression and will challenge the player’s loadout as a softer test before a real boss.
Worms
It can’t be an underground biome without some worms harassing you. This is the first kind of enemy that relies on pure contact damage and unlike other enemies, this one can go through the ground, making it quite a difficult enemy to kill.
Basic Minimap
We have a basic minimap now showing in the game. This is not currently zoomable and we don’t have a full map just yet, but it helps navigating the world and see where we’ve explored.
Combat
Buffs
To aid in some gear item’s implementation as well as some new spells we now have buffs implemented with a basic view in the UI.
Buffs and debuffs come from multiple places. Some gear items will trigger buffs under certain conditions, some enemies will apply debuffs to you, and there are even spells that will apply short but powerful buffs. Spell buffs are very different to things like potion buffs from other games. To buff yourself with a spell, it must be in a spell slot and it will go on cooldown, this makes buff spells if you choose to use them, take up a spell slot in your loadout and become an integral part of your loadout. But this equally means their buffs can be a lot more noticeable.
Buff Spells
For example, the burning rage spell gives you the burning rage buff. This massively increases the speed of any basic spells.
Compare the below:
Normal Basic Spell:
Buffed Basic Spell:
As you can see, this turns a rather simple spell into a machine gun of melee hits for a short duration, but as a result one spell slot becomes simply an amplifier for an existing spell.
Gear Cooldowns
Gear Items can now have cooldowns. For example:
This gear item will apply temporary defense after taking damage. But once this temporary defense expires, the gear item will be on cooldown before it can activate again. Gear cooldowns enable another dimension of gear design because they allow short bursts of power that would be too OP if they were permanent.
Elements
Each spell and gear item has an element or element pair. For example the gear above is a nature type gear. The elemental type of spells and gear matters when deciding your loadout as certain effects only trigger under certain circumstances and in some cases some gear simply won’t work without meeting its requirement.
Spell Element Requirements
This is a gear item that only works if you have at least 5 fire spells equipped in spell slots. There are 6 hotbar spell slots and 1 dash spell slot. This means 5/7 spells must be a fire spell for this gear item to work. But in return you get to use the fire element debuff.
Loadout Considerations
In many games you get to choose between classes such as Melee / Ranged / Summon. Planetora introduces an extra dimension with elements.
This means you get:
Types: Melee / Ranged / Summon / Buff
and Elements: Fire / Water / Earth
How a Fire Summoner and Earth Summoner play may be quite different. This is because the Element aspect is not purely an aesthetic choice. The feeling and pacing of each element is different, and this contributes towards how you engage enemies.