This update adds a bit more content (including 2 new spells and 7 new emblems) and aims at making melee builds more viable. One area that will receive more attention in future updates is enemy design. I want to include more enemies that encourage the player to get in close range.

Challenge mode is an exciting addition for me personally - I have a lot of ideas for future challenges that will increase gameplay variety. I hope you enjoy the changes and please complete the feedback form to let me know what you think! Also, consider joining my new discord using the button in the ingame pause menu.

- Max (Regal Pigeon)

New Content

Challenges

• After beating a run, you unlock challenge mode. This will be automatically unlocked for players who have already beaten a run in previous versions.
• Once challenge mode has been unlocked, choice altars appear at the start of each run which allow you to increase or decrease the challenge level.
• There is only 1 challenge level for now which promotes some enemies in each wave to elites, gaining increased life, power, and a random elite modifier:
  • Angry elites become unstaggerable and gain +70% movement speed and +100% attack speed after their life is reduced to 50% or less.
    
  • Gembound elites fire a slow homing projectile whenever they take damage. These projectiles are fired at a perpendicular angle to the player to help melee builds.
  • Illusionist elites split into 5 copies upon taking damage. These copies cannot copy themselves and have 30% of the original’s life and 15% of the their power. This effect has a 10 second cooldown.
  • Tough elites are unstaggerable and have +15% damage resistance.

• Future updates will include additional challenge levels with their own unique modifiers. 

Spells

• Lava Chakram (primary): Summons a spinning projectile that orbits you for 7 seconds, dealing 80% of your power as fire damage to enemies it passes through.
• Stone Skin (defensive): Encase yourself in a layer of stone for up to 5 seconds, absorbing damage equal to 40% of your maximum life.

Emblems

•  Battle Hunger: Whenever you slay an enemy, you gain +5% life regeneration and +5% mana regeneration for 3 seconds. This effect stacks.
• Crippling Aura: Enemies within 3.5 tiles have -60% movement speed and -30% attack speed.
  Elemental Assault: Each type of elemental damage dealt to enemies reduces their damage resistance by 10% for5 seconds.
• Heavy Hitter: Your power is increased by 20% but your attack speed is reduced by 12%.
• Invigorating Brew: Healing potions also fully restore your mana.
• Psychic Scream: Whenever you take 35% of your life as damage, destroy all enemy projectiles and stun all enemies within 5 tiles for 3 seconds.
• Reflect: Whenever you are dealt damage, you deal 180% of that amount as arcane damage to all enemies within 3 tiles.

Other

• Added a button that takes you to my new Discord server. (This will be a place to make suggestions, give feedback, report bugs, and generally discuss Neophyte and any future games.)

Changes

Spells

• Equipped spell cooldowns are now reset upon activating the “combat start” button.
• Equipped spell descriptions are now shown when mousing over spell slots without needing to have the spell book opened as long as the player is not in combat.
• Spell descriptions now include tags for elemental damage.
• Spell description tags are now separated by hyphens instead of commas for clarity.
• Crackle: Damage increased from 140% of power to 155%. Maximum jump number increased from 5 to 7. The initial target is no longer overridden by other enemies between itself and the player. (In other words, it is now possible to target a specific enemy with the cursor even if there are other enemies in the way.)
• Ghost Form: Fear is now continuously applied to enemies within range instead of only being applied once.
• Meteor Form: Damage reduced from 440% of power to 300%.
• Power Fist: Damage of regular hits slightly increased from 65% of power to 70%. Damage of third hit increased from 140% to 160%. 
• Solar Beam: Reworked how damage from this spell is handled. (This fixes a specific issue where the damage bonus from the Dynamo emblem now only affects the first tick of damage where previously all ticks of damage received the bonus for as long as the spell was channeled.)
• Soul Armor: Souls are now automatically collected when dropped but do not drop at all while at maximum stacks. Damage reduction per stack reduced from 2% to 1%. Cast no longer restores mana and the healing per stack reduced from 8% of maximum life to 5%. (This spell was by the far the most powerful defensive spell, if not the most power spell in the game. These changes still make the spell useful, especially where the player's build is complete and just want the passive bonus. Future updates will include spells with passive components for this reason.)
• Whirling Death: Damage radius slightly increased from 2.25 tiles to 2.5 tiles. Damage increased from 210% of power to 250%. Now destroys enemy projectiles within the damage radius. Mana cost reduced from 30 to 20.

Emblems

• Improved emblem viability checking. (For example, the Fire Affinity emblem can now appear if the player has an emblem that deals fire damage even if they have not learned a spell that deals fire damage.)
• Added an emblem selection to the level 3 choice altars.
• Ambush: Now also halves overall critical hit chance. (Without a downside, this emblem was much too powerful and worked with any build. Now, it's still powerful but fits builds that utilize hard hitting spells like Meteor Form, Static Discharge, and Crackle.)
• Arc Flash: Description fixed to correctly show a 10% damage bonus per jump instead of 0.1%.
• Arcane/Fire/Lightning Affinity: Damage bonuses from these emblems reduced from 18% to 15%.
• Blur: Evasion bonus reduced from  25% to 20%.
• Boiling Blood: Damage reduced from 500% of amount healed to 400%.
• Essence Shift: Healing reduced from 50% of mana spent to 30%.
• Levitation: The way the movement is handled has been changed, allowing the evasion bonus from the Blur emblem to be applied.
• Potion Master: Healing potion drop rate bonus reduced from 100% to 60%.
• Ruthlessness: Description changed to show that the damage bonus also effects snared enemies.
• Sharpshooter: Maximum damage bonus reduced from 30% to 20%.
• Sticky Bombs: Now also grants a 15% damage bonus to the Burst spell.
• Sumo: Damage bonus reduced from 10% of maximum life to 8%.
• Trail Blazer: Fire trail duration reduced from 5 seconds to 4.

Enemies

•  Slightly reduced total number of enemies per wave.
• Base power for all enemies reduced by approximately 25-30% but power scaling increased from 8% per level to 9.8%. (Effectively, earlier waves deal less damage but the final waves deal more damage.)
• Maximum life scaling slightly increased from 14.5% per level to 15%.
• Beholder: Beam range increased from 10 tiles to 13 tiles, but turn rate has been decreased by about 20%. (These changes make it beneficial to be closer to beholders while they are attacking since the player will be able to more easily outrun the beam as it turns.)
• Ogre: Rock missile number reduced from 16 per attack to 12. Slam attack radius reduced from 2.75 tiles to 2.25 tiles.
• Skeleton Archer: Attack range increased from 7 tiles to 12.

Tomes

• Damage resistance and evasion bonuses from tomes increased from 2.5% to 4% but there are less of them in the pool. (Tomes are not completely chosen at random - a certain number of each tome is added to a pool at the start of each run and they are randomly taken from that pool. This means that taking a tome effectively reduces the likelihood of getting another one for the rest of the run.)
• Evasion bonus from tomes increased from 2.5% to 4%.
• Maximum life bonus from tomes reduced from 30 to 20.
• Movement speed bonus from tomes increased by 100% but there are less of them in the pool. 

Other

• Changed the tile and wall sprites and added more visual variety. (Hopefully the arena looks a little more more interesting now.)
• Game application is now 64-bit (instead of 32-bit) and compiled using native code. (This should significantly improve perfomance on most machines, especially in later waves. For example, the frame rate on my machine has doubled.)
• A red vignette effect appears along the edges of the screen as the player's health gets lower. (It should now be easier to tell when the player is taking significant damage and is close to dying.)

Bug Fixes

• Changed how emblems are handled when restarting runs which should fix a commonly reported bug where the game would crash after several runs without closing the application. (These crashes were able to occur at any time the game tried to select a random emblem, such as when reward chests were opened, when choice altars spawned, etc.)
• Uncollected emblems from reward chests are now destroyed when the combat button is activated. (There are rare situations where the player may not want to collect a chest emblem.)
• Fixed several memory leaks that may affected performance, especially after multiple runs without closing the application.