So I got this fun suggestion from Cpt_Fubar on Twitch to add skill upgrades to the game. I thought it was such a great suggestion, I started implementing skills almost immediately!

So now, player characters can upgrade the following skills:

• Stealthiness - Reduces amount of lights and creates more shadows for players to hide in
• Action Speed - For faster lock-picking, sabotaging traps and knocking out guards
• Sight Distance - Increasing the field of view
• Movement Speed - Sneaking and running faster

If you think stealthiness sounds like a useless skill, you'd be very wrong! The stealth mechanic has been revised too:

• Shadow Invisibility - player characters are really invisible in shadows, guards won't see you in shadows
• Lights are Dangerous - guards can see players in lights from far away and trigger immediate guard alerts
• Floor Sounds Matter - guards are shadow-blind, but they can still hear the player's footsteps, the type of floor matters

Then again, the player can see the guard footsteps in darkness and beyond walls too, so I think that's a fair trade-off. Lights really are dangerous. Don't ignore them. Make your path safe by extinguishing lights whenever you see the opportunity. It will make levels much easier. Ignoring lights makes the game very difficult. Though guards won't see the player when they're off-screen. The player will always know when they're in danger of getting caught and have a little bit of time to react before triggering an alert.

Other than extinguishing lights, a high stealthiness skills helps out too. At high stealthiness skill levels, the lights are reduced to near nothing. Does that make the game too easy? I don't think so! Let me introduce the Guard Skills:

• Alertness - this affects the guard hearing sensitivity, making them aware of sounds faster
• Sight Distance - this increases the light cone in front of the guards, clearly visible to the player
• Action Speed - reduces the amount of waiting time between patrols and reviving other guards
• Movement Speed - speed at which the guard moves when on patrol

The guard skills go up as the game progresses. So at the start of the game, lights are the player character's worst enemy. At the end of the game, the challenge comes more from dodging guard cones and being as quiet as possible around guards. So the beginning of the game is more of an arcade-style Metal Gear Solid kind of stealth. At the end of the game, this is replaced by the more simulation-style Thief kind of stealth. I think this is a pretty interesting stealth progression. Especially because the arcade-style stealth is easy to learn. And the player will slowly get used to the simulation-style stealth.

So is that it? Nope! The old building generator has been replaced by a new one that can easily generate large non-linear buildings. I took advantage of that feature and replaced all levels! Gone are the tiny single-room levels. They're all large buildings now with more interior variation than before. The thieves guild itself also expands with additional rooms and options as the player finishes objectives and increases their thief rank.

And finally, the Custom Game menu option is now available. It allows players to play whatever missions they like. Replay or skip tutorials. Just play the new Challenge Levels or the new Community Levels. Unlock Missions and play them in whatever order you like as they become available. Don't like "kidnap" missions? Just play "steal" missions! The player character will still gain gold and ranks, and have the option to upgrade their skills.

The intro and tutorials are now skippable. The tutorials are now in a separate level and can be played in any order, or still skipped. New character skins can be unlocked, and remain unlocked even when the player plays a new game.

There is even a basic text level editor in the game. Some of the challenge levels and all the community levels are running from a level designed in a simple text editor. The level editor makes a few assumptions to greatly simplify level designs down to a single text representation of the level. I will work on a more advanced version of the level editor for the next version of this game.

So yeah, this update took me a while to release! I will do a few small updates to fix more minor bugs and to increase game performance, while also working on the next big release.

Oh, and one more thing. I started working on Endless Thief exactly a year ago, February 2021. Happy birthday, Endless Thief! I had planned this game as a 2-3 month project, but then I got positive feedback from the Itch community. Since then, the game updates have been guided by player feedback. Thank you for helping me make this game better!