The countdown has started; in ten days it will be the 15th Triangle Wizard Day. 15 years to the day since the first version of Triangle Wizard was released to the public. This means in ten days Triangle Wizard 2 will release. I am currently ironing out the last few bugs, working on a few quality-of-life improvements, and testing the game by playing it a lot. (I have not yet beaten the game. The deepest I got was about 30 floors down; I died to a Skeleton in the Crypts - Level 2.)
However, I wished to talk a bit about a few changes made in the sequel with respect to Triangle Wizard 1:
Becoming an exemplary follower
It has been commented quite a few times that a lot of interesting features were hidden away in the Priest class. The Priest class in TW1 has access to advanced boons from the various deities which can have a major impact on gameplay. It was a bit of a shame that these features were never available to regular classes. In the sequel it is now possible for a deity to become very happy with you. This may happen randomly, but much more likely they will offer you a (dangerous) quest, which if completed will now also grant you the advanced boon.
This rewards loyalty to a singular deity and opens up these advanced gameplay features to all classes. Priests, however, will always have access to the advanced boon of any deity they worship.
Unlocking character options gradually
Having played many roguelikes in the last decade I have become enamored by the unlocking system that these other games tend to have. You start out with a small (manageable) selection of player races and classes to play and gradually unlock more whilst playing the game.
I have come to the conclusion that a similar system would work well in Triangle Wizard. Like the original, Triangle Wizard 2 has a huge amount of character options to choose from. There are 42 classes, 28 races, and 60 deities (this includes being an atheist). This was extremely overwhelming to new players, often leading to them selecting complicated classes which require in-depth knowledge of the game's systems to do well with. In Triangle Wizard 2 you will therefore start with access to only 4 basic classes (Geomancer, Pyromancer, Sunmage, and Energist) and 3 races (Human, Elf, and Dwarf), and no deities (i.e. atheism is the basic option). New options are randomly unlocked whilst playing, gradually opening up the many options the game offers. Two things to note here:
You are able to turn this feature off in the options if you prefer to have everything available to you from the very start.
You can still convert to any deity (even if not unlocked) if you find their altar in the game, you just cannot start the game with any locked deity.
Permadeath with lives
It turns out that permadeath is quite harsh. Of course, you can play without permadeath, meaning you can always reload your game, but then there is less tension, and you will not generate any corpses for future adventurers to find. In Triangle Wizard 2 there is now a third option, inspired by the adventure mode found in ToMe 4. You start the game with 2 lives, and gain 1 additional life each 5 character levels you gain. You die, you lose a life, but get to reload your game. Only if you run out of lives (and found no in-game method of resurrection) your character dies for realsies.
Save game backward compatibility
Remember that for Triangle Wizard 1 there was always that line in the announcement of a new version saying you should finish your current run before upgrading? Well no more! Save games in Triangle Wizard 2 are now backward compatible meaning you can just load your old game in a new version, no problem!