Quick Update on the Powerups Stuff (Patreon)

So we hashed it out between us and we came up with the following for a template for powerups and such;

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How the powerups function:

- Talia will have three slots to put powerups in

- The powerups cannot be stacked; you can't have more than one of any given powerup

- Powerups will be active for as long as Talia keeps them on her, and their benefits are constant, and passive.

- Powerups are grouped into four categories; Offensive, Defensive, Utility, and Negative (more on the latter later on in this post)

- Note that the bosses for the game are almost entirely unaffected by Talia having more damage or more defense, but they WILL be slightly easier to beat if you have higher utility/mobility. In that sense, Utility powerups are somewhat aiding a "speedrunner mode" (but they're still good even if you're not speedrunning!), in that they make the regular game a bit harder unless you're a skillful player, but they'll make bosses slightly easier, again allowing faster completion of the game if you know how to utilize them correctly.

 - Powerups can be dropped/swapped with other powerups nearby

- Powerups will give a brief description of their benefits/alterations to things in the on-screen UI when you're deciding to pick them up or not; this will be unobtrusive and will not cover up gameplay.

- You can also check your in-game menu/database to get a fleshed out, full description of the powerup's abilities, as well as a listing of what powerups you've ran into on your playthrough. 

- Some powerups will also link together in a set of three to form "Set Boosts", which I'll talk about later too.

- None of these items will give Talia completely new abilities, but they WILL modify her pre-existing abilities in varying amounts, from as little as giving her a 10% boost in damage, to giving her the ability to gain power off of each enemy she kills, to giving her the ability to increase her movement speed gradually the longer she holds right or left without breaking it or getting hit, to... well, we've got some neat stuff planned.

- We'll be testing these powerups extensively to make sure none of them break the game, though. 

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Where you can pick up the powerups:

- Enemies: they will have a very low drop rate, and will only drop a powerup once even if you respawn them by leaving the room and coming back, and it'll be only tier 4 powerups (more on that later)

- Additionally, the powerup that a specific type of enemy drops will be pre-set, so certain enemies will drop certain powerups, but again, this is a really low rate, and what enemies have powerups will be pre-set as well, so farming in a room won't really help.

- Some "off the beaten path" side rooms will contain a random powerup, affected by the "player play-style RNG modification" we talked about in an earlier post. These powerups can range from tier 4 to tier 1.

- Finally, some fake databanks will be booby trapped or require a small minigame to get the data from them; if you are successful at dodging the trap through a QTE or beating the minigame, you'll get a "player play-style RNG modification" powerup, but these will generally be at least tier 3, if not tier 2, but none of them will be tier 1.

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How many powerups we're planning on making:

 

- 50 total powerups

- 15 offensive, 15 utility, 15 defensive, 5 "negative" (i'll explain more on this below)

- 6 "standalone" offensive, utility, and defensive powerups each that aren't in a set at all- The rest, besides the "negative" ones, are in "sets", which is described below;

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Powerup "Set Boosts"

- A "Set Boost" is activated when the player collects a specific set of three powerups.

- If the player collects one of these sets (the database will indicate if the powerup you have is in a set), they'll get an additional, fourth boost that will generally be something interesting; for instance, Talia might be able to poison enemies over time with her damaging shots, or her enemies might take damage if they touch her, or something of that sort.

- Out of the powerups, there's 2 full offensive, full defensive, and full utility "sets" each (all three powerups being of the same type to form those sets)

- There's also 3 "mixed" sets (one offensive, one utility, and one defensive powerup per set here)

- The order you pick up the powerups in doesn't matter; so long as you have all three, the "Set Boost" will activate. 

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Apperance/Themes of Powerups

- The powerups will be small trinkets that Talia can pick up, usually thematically based around objects present prior to the WORM takeover of the world (generally from the 18th-28th centuries, but primarily from the 19th-21st centuries)

- So things like playing cards, dice, perfume, a bell, so forth.

- None of these items will change Talia's appearance or give her new costumes, simply because the amount of work that would require would set the game back another year and a half at minimum as everything in the game is illustrated by hand.

- There is a storyline reason we're going with this aesthetically; this doesn't break lore, heck, it bolsters it :P

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​Distribution of "tiers"

- Tiers are really for the internal programming of the game only, as they're how often/rare a powerup might show up in the game, RNG-wise

- It's also how used for what things drop what powerups; for example, enemies always drop tier 4 (the lowest tier), databank traps drop tiers 2-3, random discovery of powerups in rooms can go from 1-4

- 26 powerups in rank 4

- 13 powerups in rank 3

- 8 powerups in rank 2

- 3 powerups in rank 1

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​Finally, "negative" powerups

- These powerups would HEAVILY penalize the player in return for something that would be able to be utilized by an expert player only

- When dropped, they disintegrate and cannot be picked back up again, to prevent the player from abusing dropping them to regain normal functionality, clear out an area, re-pick it up etc.

- For example, one could be "Talia is permanently at 0 HP health and cannot regain health by any means, and her charge shot is disabled,  and her regular shot travels twice as slow, but her normal attacks do 1,000% damage"

- Additionally, having one of these powerups would be one of the three requirements to unlock a somewhat different playthrough of the game; "Egomaniac" mode, which is a name-in-progress, and I'll have more info on that in the next post. All I'll say for now is that if you like difficulty, well, you'll like this mode, haha.

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Now, for everyone worried that this is a ton of work and is going to derail us, etc.

Note that all of these powerups will likely be integrated into the game initially with graphical placeholders, and will be given unique art when Triangulate is waiting on Cheshire or myself to complete our respective duties, so he'll be updating them over the course of the game.

As for Cheshire's side of programming them, he's shown me already and assured me that the programming for these is quite simple to integrate per powerup, given that none of the game's "core" physics/programming is going to be harmed (and that he already integrated programming way back when for things like status changes and so forth, apparently).

And now, back to work :D