Update - Incursion Events, Mission Rework, Visual Improvements, and More!

Today I’m thrilled to be able to release my biggest update yet to the Heroes of Orn: Darkness Demo. The meat of the update is the Incursion system, which I’ll talk about in just a second, but there are also many, many smaller improvements that I’m glad I finally get to release. So let’s get into it!

Incursions

Incursions are new dangerous events that will trigger periodically. An Incursion will either spawn in enemies or make a pre-existing spawner go into superdrive, causing it to spawn in enemies much faster for a short period of time. 

These spawned enemies will be looking to cause trouble for your Kingdom. They may go after your Kingdom directly, disrupt trading with a Settlement, or block you from being able to run a Dungeon. To make matters worse, Incursions will often spawn in dangerous elite enemies.

Luckily, you and your Heroes will be given a bit of a warning before the Incursion begins, giving them a chance to group up before the danger starts. Heroes will respond to Incursions automatically and they prioritize them highly. However, if too many things are distracting your Heroes, you may need to nudge them in the right direction with a Quest.

Deadly Incursions are a more dangerous variant of Incursions that can spawn in Hard or Nightmare difficulty.

Missions

Missions are an automated system that makes sure your Heroes always have something to do. The Mission system already existed in the game before this update, but it was very bare bones and wasn’t very accessible to the player.

Each of your Heroes will always have a Mission assigned to them. You can see a Hero’s Mission when they are selected in the Details Panel.

Missions may require your Hero to explore an area, kill an enemy, defend a location, defend another character (possibly even another Hero), or retrieve an item. Once your Hero has accomplished the task, they can turn the Mission in at the nearest Tavern or Guild Hall, gaining themselves a nice little reward and a brand new Mission.

Missions are not timed and can be interrupted by other tasks without resetting any progress the Hero may have made. No input from the player is needed for any part of this system.

Elites and Champions

Elite and Champion are new tiers for enemies. These higher tiered enemies are larger, faster, and have much higher health and damage. So an Elite Rat is much stronger than a Rat, and a Champion Rat is much stronger than an Elite Rat.

Elites and Champions only spawn during Incursions or while playing on Hard or Nightmare difficulty.

New Difficulty: Nightmare

This update also adds in a Nightmare difficulty for a little extra challenge and changes how the difficulties work a bit.

Easy:

Enemies have 50% health

No Incursions will spawn

Normal:

No modifiers

Hard:

Enemies have 30% more health

Incursions spawn 15% more often

Incursions have a 15% chance to be deadly

Spawners have a 5% chance to spawn an Elite 

Nightmare:

Enemies have 60% more health

Incursions spawn 30% more often

Incursions have a 25% chance to be deadly

Spawners have a 10% chance to spawn an Elite

Spawners have a 1% chance to spawn a Champion

Mana Mine Changes

The Mana Mine has had its mechanics tweaked a bit. Mana Miners will now visibly mine the Mana on the map. As they mine the Mana Crystal, it will slowly deplete. Once fully depleted, the Mana Miners will wait inside until it has recharged, then resume mining again.

The Event GUI

The Event GUI is a new UI that tracks important Objectives, Dungeons, Guild Quests, and Incursions. It’s an easy way to see most of the important things going on in the world at a single glance. There are also buttons provided that let you quickly jump to the location of any of these events. The menu can be minimized if you want a little more screen room.

New Tutorials

Most Tutorials have been rewritten to be less wordy. Not all Tutorials will pop up during gameplay anymore, many can only be found in the Tutorial Menu (esc->Pause Menu->Tutorial Menu). Tutorial pop ups will mostly stick to the most important aspects that you need to know to survive and thrive. If you want to learn more details, feel free to check out the Tutorial Menu.

Visual Improvements

A number of visual improvements have been made:

Shadows have been added.

Improved post processing, resulting in crisper details.

A number of models have been replaced/tweaked.

Other Improvements

Here are a number of other improvements that have been made:

You can now zoom further in and farther out than before.

Health Bars and Battle Text now dynamically resize depending on how far zoomed in you are.

Battle Text can now be turned off and/or resized in the Settings.

Health Bars have been cleaned up a bit so that they waste less space.

Many A.I. improvements, especially with combat.

Characters do a much better job keeping their distance from their target.

Descriptions of what Heroes and Workers are doing should be more accurate and consistent.

Workers have had their animations extended to better show what they’re doing.

Many Buildings have been changed to stand out better from one another.

Destroyed Buildings are much more obvious.

Performance Improvements

Several things in this update can hurt performance (more enemies, shadows, farther zoom), so many optimizations have been made to help counter this. Overall, performance should be better in this version than before. More optimizations will be added in future demo updates as well.

A couple new Video Options have also been added to Settings:

Shadow Quality

Texture Quality

If performance is poor, turning Building Lights and Shadows off is likely the best way to improve it.

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy the update!