Big changes, new features, and more coming to Xaviant’s spooky roguelike!

2020 is shaping up to be a very exciting year for Don’t Die, Minerva! To keep the celebratory atmosphere alive, we have not one, but two big announcements today.

First of all, we’re pleased to announce that our third content update is coming on Tuesday, February 4th for Steam and Xbox One.

The big items in this update include the following:

• New features added to the dynamic dungeon generator, allowing for our procedurally generated levels to be more distinct from each other. Our focus for this update is on the Mansion biome and making each floor of the Mansion have its own visual theme. We will continue to expand on this throughout the remainder of Early Access.
• The Spread Ghost has been replaced with The Hollowed – a wicked pumpkin with a ravenous appetite. We will be expanding and improving his behavior in future updates.
• The Sprinkler Ghost has been replaced with the Headmaster, an amalgam of nasty spirits that roams the dungeon spitting projectiles.

Along with those big changes we’ve also made lots of bug fixes and improvements, so stay tuned for the full patch notes when the update launches next week, which will include all the details.

This update won’t be quite as large as the first two, and that’s because we’ve begun the heavy lifting for some of the new features that we have on our roadmap. 

Speaking of the roadmap, we’re finally ready to announce our plans for how we’ll be growing and improving Minerva for the rest of Early Access and Game Preview.So without further ado, here are our plans for the coming months. Nothing is set in stone, but we think we will have everything wrapped up before the end of the summer!

As you can see, our roadmap includes improvements and expansion of existing game features, as well as several new features. Here’s an overview of what we have planned:

New Features

Abilities

Abilities are a new category of offensive and defensive actions that Minerva can perform. These are designed to work in concert with Flashlights to create combos that make combat more varied and challenging. Categories include: Melee Attacks, Shields, and Friendly Buffs.

Charms

Charms are potions the player finds in the dungeons that offer permanent or temporary bonuses when consumed. They could be as simple as a boost to your base crit chance or as powerful as growing to 3X your normal size and being immune to touch damage for a brief time.

Curses

When you are cursed, you are given an objective that you must accomplish or face the consequences. Successfully removing a curse grants a reward. Some curses give you a disability, such as reducing stats or paralyzing one of your weapons until the curse is lifted. Objectives can be simple enough to accomplish in a single room or broad enough to cover multiple floors.

Fragments

Fragments are the gateway to unlocking new loot. As we introduce new items and affixes into the game, the player must find them in the dungeon and bring them to an NPC to have them deciphered and unlocked.

Achievements

Unlock a wide array of Achievements for Steam and Xbox Live.

Improvements

Enemies / Combat

• Significantly improved and diversified behavior to provide interesting, challenging, and varied combat scenarios across the game.
• New enemies to replace simple color-shifted visual variants.
• Improvement passes on existing Flashlights and Friendlies

Dungeons

• Creating sub-biomes so that each level of the dungeon is visually distinct.
• Expanded procedural dungeon generation systems to further increase visual variety on each run.

Loot

• More legendary variety, including legendary items that impart new effects, attacks, and abilities.
• Improved synergy opportunities, allowing you to create more distinct and compelling builds.

More, More, More!

We’ll be adding more variety of just about everything that makes Minerva fun.

• Flashlights
• Friendlies
• Legendary affixes and Loot
• Enemies