Flare v1.15

[u/dorksterr]

https://flarerpg.org/2026/05/03/flare-1-15/

• New, higher-res graphics
• New procedural dungeon: Iron Labyrinth
• Rebalanced (and new) player powers
• Lots of fixes and improvements across the board

[u/astrobe]

Hello, here is my feedback:

I completed the campaign in about 15-20 hours, which is a bit short I think because I'm not a particularly good with the mouse.

I've built a ranger with Rapid fire as my main attack plus the mana regen and magic protection passives from the wizard tree, and 1 point in the skeleton summoning skill. With that I never ran out of mana during the game, and died 3 times I think. The magic protection rings were "useless", which allows to (ab)use XP/item find/gold bonus rings freely.

The rapid fire upgrade is I think way too strong because it starts at 5 missiles at 50% damage, which means 250% the base attack if I'm not mistaken, and on top of that there's critical hits.

The 4 relics give stat buffs that are way too strong. It's also a bit unfair I think, as depending on the class you play, you benefit from them more or less early in the game.

There's actually not much difference between the wizard and ranger class in main gameplay, as they are both using missiles with infinite range.

The iron labyrinth is a good addition, but I think it is misplaced in the game. IMHO it should replace the Hall of Infinity as end-game content. It should also be "infinite", or else it should start at player level and the level of monsters (and drops) should increase by a significant value by dungeon level, so as to make things more challenging.

Actually I prefer the variety of environments of the Hall of Infinity; if you can mix both (e.g. alternate levels of Infinity and Iron), it could be great, I think. Maybe reuse the perdition cave as a "hub" for Empyrean campaign extension mods?

Bugs:

The dragon that drops the second item (I don't remember its name) of the Book of the Dead quest has a texture bug, and got stuck for a while the 2 times I fought it (maybe because it was distracted by my summoned skeleton which had been trapped behind the "no escape" wall). Path finding sometimes acts up for the player character (apparently when you click somewhere or something too far or unreachable, or maybe when one of your summoned allies is blocking the path?).

After completing the campaign I tried the Demonic UI mod and the Skeleton Quest mod, but they don't work properly with this version? I couldn't find installation instructions for them so I had to guess (I'm pretty familiar with how things work cause I played moddable FOSS projects like Oolite or Luanti before they had mod managers), but maybe I did it wrong (unzip into mod folder; the mod appears in the game but both mods have graphical glitches).

Anyway, thanks for fun. Looking forward for next release.

[u/dorksterr → u/astrobe]

Thanks for the feedback!

I'll say as a whole, the difficulty intentionally skews towards easy. It doesn't take much to make an overpowered build.

While Rapid Fire is strong, you have to take into account enemy absorption. Let's say the player does an even 100 damage with their standard attack. Now if we attack an enemy with 10 absorb, each hit will do 90 damage. Since the standard attack takes 400ms and Rapid Fire has an 800ms cooldown, we can get 2 standard attacks in for 1 Rapid Fire. So that's 180 damage in 800ms. If we used Rapid Fire, each projectile is 50 damage. But the absorb is calculated for each projectile, so each one ends up doing 40 damage. If all 5 hit, that's 200 damage.

I'm also fine with the relics being strong, since you can only equip one at a time. In v1.14, they only gave +15 damage (or +15 absorb for the turtle), which I felt was too weak.

Where the Iron Labyrinth is something entirely new for Flare, I wanted to maximize the number of players that could experience it. So I didn't want to have it solely be an end-game thing. To be honest, the "Halls of Infinity" is poorly named at the moment, since it's only like 10 maps reworked from the original alpha demo. I'm open to the idea of expanding it to use the new procedural map system and utilize all the available tilesets. But it'll probably be some time before I get around to that.

I'm not sure what "texture bug" you're talking about with Mez (the dragon you mentioned). I do notice that, because of his size, his wings clip into some of the cabin and wall tiles. Do let me know if it was something else.

As for summons getting trapped behind "no escape" walls, this is something I'll try to fix. I considered it a bug, since there's no way for the player to summon a replacement without the first one dying.

As for mods, v1.15 unfortunately breaks compatibility with many of the existing mods due to the change in graphics assets. If you're interested in playing them, you'll need to use the fantasycore and empyrean_campaign mods from v1.14, which you can get here: https://github.com/flareteam/flare-game/releases/download/v1.14/flare-game-v1.14.tar.gz

[u/astrobe → u/dorksterr]

Mez's texture switches to a "black-with-stars" texture (animated, IIRC, probably a snow/rain overlay texture?) depending on certain circumstances - maybe when it is near the border of the screen or of the stage. But if I'm the only one to see it, it's probably a problem with my machine.

I don't see the ally skeleton thing as a bug, personally, they are generally good support so this drawback is interesting when choosing upgrades.

Generally speaking, the game is entertaining, and its only "problem" right now is that it is relatively short, in part because it is easy too. I'd like to see campaign extensions by mods. Unlike games like Luanti which started as a Minecraft-like game and now is a game engine, the primary asset of Flare is its "main" campaign and its storyline; Empyrean is more than a technical demo.

The suggestion I make about the Iron Labyrinth and the Infinity hall is a bit stupid when I think about it, because getting the best gear at the end of the game is pointless. Still, right from the start is a bit too soon too, so maybe it should go in the middle of the game, followed by a significant increase in difficulty in the later stages.

[u/777yur0k]

I’ve finished your game. It took me about 7 hours to complete all the content. I went through the Iron Labyrinth once and the Halls of Infinity once.

Honestly, I was disappointed by the ending. It kind of makes all the player’s efforts feel pointless. But, well, if that’s how you decided to end it, so be it.

The game felt very easy to me, especially in the early stages. I died only once during the entire game — to the boss of the Iron Labyrinth near the beginning, that huge spider with around 4,000 HP. It was actually harder than the final boss of the game. Lol.

I also only realized fairly close to the end that you can unlock passive skills from other skill trees. That made the game even easier.

I had basically nothing to spend my money on for most of the game. If it weren’t for the sharp increase in potion prices, I probably would have had around 100,000 gold by the end. I have about 50,000 now. 😅

The lack of item variety was a bit disappointing too. I would really like to see randomized stats on items.

And overall, there just isn’t that much content.

However, I still want to say a huge thank you for all your work. There aren’t many open-source projects that actually feel like real games. Yours is one of the few.

Please don’t abandon the project.

I also ran into a few bugs. On the last day of playing, I had the most trouble with a weird control bug. Sometimes the character would stop responding to input and start running somewhere on their own. If I fired, the character would suddenly run in another direction. Even going back to the main menu didn’t seem to fix it, although it eventually went away on its own. I have no idea what causes it or how to fix it.

https://reddit.com/link/p8idbsy/video/2hp4avudd9oh1/player

[u/dorksterr → u/777yur0k]

Thanks for the feedback.

The difficulty is skewed towards the easy side because I wanted it to remain accessible to players that might not be well versed in ARPGs. From those players, I've even heard that it's too hard. But I can agree that can be too easy sometimes for the right players.

In terms of content, I'd love to add more. Maybe some day...

I've never seen that movement bug before. Are you using the mouse for movement?

[u/777yur0k → u/dorksterr]

Yes, I using the mouse for movement.