Everything was peaceful until the titans started appearing and harvesting the world. You must delve inside them and overcome their defences from the inside. Why are they here? What are they doing? What is that faint odour of cucumber? Questions to be answered in due course…

This is a huge change from the previous versions of Cave Cards, so it comes with a new game name, Enter the Titan, and a whole bevy of big changes to almost every visual part of the game. The levels look completely different, including all the enemies, the player, shrines and exits. Cards have had a major visual overhaul. Many of the terms in the game have changed to be more in-line with the new theme. If we listed every visual difference it would be a very long list, so the quickest is if you just look at the game itself. There’s still more work on this front, but we hope you like this direction we’re moving in and find it interesting!

A Team has Formed

While Cave Cards was mostly a solo endeavour, Enter the Titan is very much a team effort. We’re happy to have Wes, Zoe, Paul and other collaborators joining Francois to help make this a much better game. This also signals that the project is now a part of the Clockwork Acorn studio. The team is still quite new and gathering momentum, but we’re excited to show you what we’re capable of!

Everything is a Card

There used to be a button to use shrines and exits, but those have been replaced with handy “interaction cards” that’ll automatically appear in your hand when you move onto something interactive. In the future we plan to use these a bit more widely so you can interact with things like NPCs or parts of the terrain.

Health is Just a Number

Previously your player health used to have a hard cap (like 2 out of 3), starting at 3 for the Warrior and 1 for the Frostmancer. That’s been reworked to just be your starting health, and things that previously healed you will now add health to your total, without an upper limit. It should mean that a Shrine of Restoration or a Vitality Scroll is always welcome now, and this opens the door to some future changes we have planned. Any healing now also removes all Poison.

More Cards

You can’t have a new version without some new cards. A new category of cards we’ve added are the “move+attack” cards like Shove, Rook, and Knight Attack. These work like a combination of a move and an attack card (duh!): if you attack something and kill it, then you move there, but if you don’t kill it, then you return back after doing the damage. You can also use these just for movement without doing any damage, making them quite versatile. You should be zipping around the room with a couple of these!

In total, we have 15 new cards for you to play with:

• Strength Boost
• Hop Slash
• Skew Swipe
• Echo
• Echo Strike
• Echo Potion
• Axe
• Rope Potion
• Levitation Potion
• Pawn Attack
• Knight Attack
• Queen Attack
• Jolt
• Shove
• Rook

We also have made a number of tweaks or balance changes to existing cards, including:

• Reduced range of Telepolaris
• Beam card: move the effective range outwards so it’s a bit harder to use
• Rename Quick Step -> Dash
• Remove some downsides/negative of cards, especially movement cards

We’ve used some of these new cards to change the starting decks for each class:

• Warrior:
  • Add Strength Boost
  • Replace 2 Moves with another Dash and Jolt
  • Replace a Hammer with a Shove
• Frostmancer:
  • Add Shatter and Polar Wind
  • Replace Hammer with Shove
  • Replace 2 Moves with 2 Jolts

UI/UX Polish

We’ve done a big restructure of the in-game UI and a bunch of little polish fixes to generally improve the UI/UX and hopefully the overall experience of playing the game, especially with a mouse. The full list of changes includes:

• Hovering over cards previews them
• Make it easier to drag and play cards with single targets
• Added effects when gaining/losing health
• Helper text for basic tutorialization
• Particles to show when an actor is going to fall
• Particles from spawner to spawned
• Polish rewind menu to be easier to understand
• Click on entity status icons for info
• Better help for energy (click on energy icon in HUD)
• Right click on card for card info
• Right click exits sub-menus
• Right click anywhere to deselect card in selection mode
• Mousewheel cycles card selection in hand
• Long tap on mobile does right click actions
• Added option for fullscreen and defaults to true on desktop
• Different icon when no energy left
• Card/entity lists can have more than 3 columns
• Disabled selection mode by default while it’s a bit rough around the edges. Can be enabled in settings menu

Statuses

Statuses form an important part of the game, so they’ve received a bit of love:

• Poison ignores Armor/Iron Skin
• Push damage from collision ignores Armor/Iron Skin
• Rename Armor -> Iron Skin and Plated -> Tough
• Add Reactive status if a unit has instant states and might react
• Add Spawner keyword for unit that can spawn things
• Add Decay status (for cards like Strength Boost)
• Hide status counter if it's one, for most status types
• Fix status counter for Focus
• Show card damage updates for Strength

Other Changes

• Add new Shrine cards to top of draw pile (instead of hand)
• Add Super Shrine of Creation, which has a wider selection to choose from
• Sort Junk to the top of the list for removal
• Polish interaction with shrines that don't require a card removal
• Fix bug when using a shrine after removing all cards from deck
• Colossus (was Grotto) has much smaller rooms in general
• Remove Cube boss and replace with a smaller Titan Core that is like previous final boss, but only first 2 phases
• Fix bug with Exploder, Bomber Ghost and Bomb not targeting entire area
• Better visuals for Stalactite that you can overlap with
• Exploder does damage via new Volatile+ status
• Exploder is more reactive, not only when waiting
• Renamed enemies and their descriptions for new theme
• Deck shuffling system to make it less likely you'll get a "bad RNG" hand
• Add game run stats for: tracking time, shrines used/seen, turns, cards played
• Improve credits to reflect growing team
• Compendium uses LUT to hide hidden entries
• Fix bug that can happen when something tries to fall off bottom edge of grid
• Traps have a keyword and don't need to be killed for portal to appear
• Card views auto-scale to fit on screen vertically
• Fixed bug with Titan Core AoE telegraph if movement fails
• Add darkness to Stubborn and Plated charms

Known Issues

There are a couple known issues in this version. We would have loved to fix them all, but opted to rather release what we have now so we don’t keep you waiting and can get some feedback.

• There are some issues with the game crashing or being slow/laggy. Try play a downloadable build in windowed mode (toggle fullscreen with F, F11 or in the settings menu)
• This is a first pass on the new theme/aesthetic, so lots of rough edges, like menu UI is old and many of the cards have placeholder art
• The meta progression is severely lacking
• Charms and darkness are a bit weird and confusing
• Still no audio: sound effects or music
• Little to no tutorialization/onboarding yet

Feedback

Any feedback or advice is appreciated, but for this version we’re especially interested in:

1. What do you think of the new theme and aesthetic?
2. How does it feel playing cards and moving around the levels?
3. Did you find it interesting enough to play multiple runs?
4. How was the difficulty? Could you beat the bosses?
5. Did you come up with any fun/interesting combos/strategies?
6. General impressions?