DevLog #23 – The Free Major Content Update is Here!

Hello everyone,

The first free major content update of Destroy The Monoliths is out right now on Steam! There is also a week long deal to celebrate this release, so you can purchase the game with a 20% discount until next Monday!

I’m really excited about this update as it brings quite a lot of new content. I enjoyed working on this and I hope you will have a ton of fun playing! You will find the full changelog at the end of this post. Here is an overview of what the update includes:

• 8 new maps
• 4 new weapons
• 17 new buildings
• 16 new enemies
• 32 new relics, including a doomed relic
• Quality of life improvements
• Bug fixes

I won’t showcase everything in this post because I want to let you discover all that new content by yourself in game. But let’s have a quick look at some of it together!

New maps

With 8 new maps, there is now a total of 24 in the pool. This should make each world more unique. I tried to introduce new interesting mechanics and more special blocks. For instance, in the Botanical garden, we have flower blocks. These repair adjacent buildings when destroyed. So you can take advantage of the existing terrain, but not only. This map also comes with a special building: the flower block generator! So you can create flower blocks in your bases and use them to repair your turrets!

On the Canals map, we can find patches of foundation blocks. Buildings placed on top of these blocks have additional health points. This mechanic is also reused in another map, Ice tunnel, but with a variant. There, you will find Mutated ice blocks that give buildings on top of them more damage power! This encourages you to adapt to the terrain if you want to benefit from these bonuses.

New weapons

I already presented the Detection mines and the Explosive beam. Today, let’s talk about Orbital bullets! They deal single target damage and orbit the player until they hit something. Similarly to the detection mines, you can maintain a limited amount of orbital bullets at once. The corresponding offensive turrets maintain their own set, so you can create like a minefield of orbital bullets.

New buildings

All the new weapons come with at least one offensive turret that uses them, sometimes two. I also added a few support and effect buildings. For instance, we have the Portal traps I already talked about, which allow to teleport enemies. We also have the Decoy parts which act like a Decoy wall and repair nearby buildings each time it takes damage. Or the electromagnetic tower that shoots shielded enemies until their shield goes down.

New enemies

I added shielded variants of existing enemies to be part of the later waves of the game. But we also have some completely new enemies. The Splitter uses the sonic boomerang and will split into two smaller minions when it dies. The latter will also split one more time. Splitters won’t be easy to get rid off!

The Invoker will stay at distance and summon Kamikaze minions. It takes damage each time it does, so it can only spawn a limited number of enemies before dying. Still, it is better to deal with it quickly before your buildings get flooded with suicide bombers!

New doomed relic and assist minions

There are a bunch of new relics. They enhance the new content or sometimes the old content to add more depth to the game and give more use to some weaker technologies.

There is also a new doomed relic you can unlock to increase the difficulty of your worlds. I’m very excited about this one because it adds a feature I had in mind for a while but haven’t implemented on time for the initial release. This doomed relic introduces a new type of enemies that may be spawned alongside the others: the assist minions!

Assist minions are quite weak and have no offensive capabilities. They only exist to buff their peers. For instance, they can give regeneration effects, or boost the attack power. Assist minions can only target one peer at once, and only standard or elite minions. A few new buildings and relics will help you fight the threat they represent! I think these assist minions are a great addition to the bestiary, and I hope you will have fun dealing with them!

Quality of life improvements

I also added a few improvements to the game. Let’s review some of them:

• The algorithm selecting upgrades to propose is now a bit smarter. For instance, it will not show any enemy-shield related technologies until the first shielded minion appears. Or it won’t show the Support recycler building if no upcoming mission contains docks or bridges.
• Most enemies no longer one-shots all blocks. They now have a mining power statistics and may need to hit a block multiple times to go through. I think this will be fairer and was an important change considering some of the new special blocks.
• The world generation is now skewed to favor maps never seen before. As the pool of maps gets bigger, it will be easier for players to explore the new content and complete their journal without being at the mercy of the random generator.
• The relics, buildings and enemies entries in the journal are now grouped by categories to make it clearer and easier to browse.

What is next?

I did my best to play-test the new content, but there might be some remaining bugs or balance issues. So I’m looking forward to hearing your feedback and releasing further patches if necessary. Please don’t hesitate to post on the Steam forums! Fixing issues will be my top priority for the upcoming weeks.

Beyond that, I will also focus my effort on promoting this new content update. I think the game already had a decent amount of content at its initial release. With this major content update, I feel Destroy The Monoliths is now in a good state to appeal to a wider audience. The reviews are very good and encouraging so far, so I can’t wait for more players to learn about its existence and give it a try.

As always, thank you very much for your support. Developing Destroy The Monoliths has been a challenging but satisfying 16 months journey, and I’m really proud how far we have come. Seeing players engage with the game and have fun means a lot to me and motivates me to keep working and doing my best. I hope you will enjoy the new content, and I’ll see you next time!

Full changelog (v1.1)

Added

• 8 new maps
• 4 new weapons
• 17 new buildings
• 16 new enemies (including a new type: assist minions)
• 32 new relics (including a doomed relic)

Changed

• Smarter random upgrade selection to ban some technologies when they are currently not relevant
• Most enemies now longer one-shots blocks and may need multiple hits to go through
• Skewed world generation to favor maps never seen yet
• Relics, buildings and enemies entries are now grouped by categories in the journal
• Reworked the enemy wave composition rules to fit in the different new enemies
• Renamed ‘Mines’ to ‘Instant mines’
• Renamed ‘Beam cannon’ to ‘Beam turret’, as there is now a new building named ‘Beam cannon’
• Renamed many enemies in the journal
• Buffed biobombs (more damage, more poison damage and longer poison duration)
• Buffed the shield cooldown improvements in all the stats relics containing this effect
• Nerfed the Retaliation relic to not work on buildings targeting monoliths

Fixed

• Fixed text width of some biome entries in the journal that could exceed the screen size
• Fixed the reload of repair traps not working properly
• Fixed repair buildings not targeting properly trap buildings
• Fixed top mesh of Kamikaze minions not flashing properly when taking damage
• Fixed some trap effects triggering in building mode when not placed yet
• Fixed structure in sight panel remaining sometimes stuck on the screen when getting the Treasures expertise relic
• Fixed trapped chests already opened reappearing when getting the Treasures expertise relic
• Fixed sound effect playing multiple times when docks auto-place below a building
• Added a safety check at game load to spawn the player back inside the map if out of bounds (will avoid soft locks in case anyone ever manages to do that)