After receiving feedback from playtesters, two main points became clear:

1. The Game Is Too Easy

It seems that in version b8, the game is still too easy—especially when using upgrades. To address this, I’ve made the levels a bit smaller and increased the power level scaling. This means enemies now grow stronger with each level more significantly than before. While I suspect the balance is still not perfect, I hope to gather more feedback on this in the future!

2. The Merge-o-Mat Is Too Unpredictable

Previously, the stronger your unit, the riskier it was to use the Merge-o-Mat because you could lose a lot of stats in the worst-case scenario. The old implementation could really punish players. To fix this, I’ve introduced some changes:

• Now, the Merge-o-Mat has a “Main” slot and a “Sacrifice” slot.
• The monster in the “Main” slot cannot get worse.
• If both monsters share an ability, the “Main” monster will receive a boost proportional to the “Sacrifice” monster’s values.
• If the “Sacrifice” monster has abilities the “Main” monster doesn’t, there is a 15% chance to inherit them.

With these changes, there’s no longer a significant downside to using the Merge-o-Mat. However, this raises the question: should monster strength scale even faster, given that players now have a more consistent way to improve their monsters?

Additionally: Highscore Board

Gloamvault now has a website with a highscore board! If you die in-game, you’ll be prompted to enter a username to submit your score. This is, of course, completely optional. I think this feature will provide valuable statistics on how far players are progressing in the dungeon. The leaderboard also displays rough information about the party at the time of death.

Check it out: https://gloamvault.xyz/

Some Refactoring

I’ve done a major internal code refactoring to make adding new abilities less of a headache. Since I originally didn’t plan to continue development after the MVP, there were definitely some rough edges (and there still are).

Do you have any suggestions for new abilities you’d like to see in the game? Let me know!

Some smaller stuff

• Different algorithm to merge two monster sprites together
• Fixed crit ability
• Changed the status effect layout in the minion creation a bit

Big Thanks

A huge thank you to everyone who has played the game so far, and especially to those who provided such awesome feedback. Based on the stats, there have been around 150 browser plays and 40 downloads!

Have fun with version b9, and don’t forget to join the Discord: https://discord.com/invite/XpDvfvVuB2