Cards of Gluttony Dev Log #6 [12/05/2023] (Patreon)

It's release week, woo!

It took... *checks calendar* over three months since v0.1.0 released, but it's finally time for an update.

The update has been up and running for a few days now (with so so many issues... sigh) so now it is time for the development log!

Actual Patreon Perks?

First let's get down to the business talk. I finally figured out an in-game benefit to give to Patreon supporters. The only catch is that I've added a second tier valued at $5.

Every time I release a new version, I will also post a password for the supporters of the new tier. This password will be entered in-game to open a menu with various features. Currently the most notable features are:

• A Free Battle Mode, where you can freely fight any opponent. You can load up your card collection and avatar data from your save file. This mode provides a convenient way to repeat battles, or to test out your deck in a closed off environment.
• A Model Viewing Mode, where you can display all the various character models in the game and cycle through all the weight sprites, it even shows the dialogue during battles!

As a fun fact, these are both actually debugging scenes I use to test new stuff!

Now back to the game

Otherwise, it's time for your regularly scheduled (actually it's up early this time) development log! There's a lot to talk about this time, since I've been keeping quite a few things secret for the 0.2.0 release.. so buckle up!

Once again, beware of spoilers: especially since you can actually just go and play the game yourself this time!

More about crafting!

I've talked last time about the very exhilarating rocks I scattered around town, now there's more materials than just random geodes!

As you can see here, this is 'Zest'. Each type of card has its own zest that you need when you want to craft cards of that type. For OFFENSIVE(Red) cards, unsurprisingly, the source of 'Glutton's Zest' is eating! That's the pub right there!

The pub also serves as a place where you're able to craft after eating a sufficient amount of food.

Every. RPG. Has. A. Fishing Minigame!

So of course we must have one as well!

The minigame itself is quite simple, you just go in, catch a few fish and call it a day. The actual fishing is a reaction based test, you have to click as soon as the float sinks! If you're familiar with Animal Crossing, that was mostly the inspiration going into this.

I do love me a good difficulty/accessibility option, so there's already a setting in the options that disables the timeout, so you don't have to worry about missing things if you just want to relax, or have trouble with the current timing windows.

There's a small pool of about 8 or so items in there right now. I'll see what I can do about adding more without making the pool too crowded, maybe a few more fishing spots.

In the future, I might make this a bit more involved, with different rods and bait, but for now, this will suffice.

And with a new minigame comes a new character! There's already a bit of dialogue available for this plotline, so make sure to go spend some quality time with this guy!

It's finally time to talk about the card game

It's been a while since I've touched on the card game itself, I've been very busy implementing the rest of the overworld, after all! First things first...

Mulligans!

This wasn't much of a necessity in v0.1.0, since the player's Deck is mostly quite small with the options that there are.

Not that it's too different in v0.2.0, but as I was designing opponents with bigger decks, I realized that the current design significantly favors smaller decks, since they are able to just consistently draw the same few cards every turn.

And another one of those advantages is a consistent starting hand, which is very difficult to get with a bigger deck, which led me to implement this! Hopefully this'll add a bit more strategic depth to the game.

And now here's the most exciting new addition:

The Status System

Say hello to statuses! These are passive afflictions that can have various effects that activate under a variety of reasons! With this, now cards can have more flexible effects than just "do a thing".

In fact, during testing I found out that this system turned out to be maybe too intricate? These statuses can in fact activate each other, take the above one, for example and let's add another one for posterity:

#1 When you draw a card, gain +1 Wgt.
#2 When you gain Wgt, draw a card.

When you draw a card, effect #1 will activate, which will then in turn activate #2 in the very same move! See the problem here? Normally this would loop indefinitely, but it's coded in a way where a chain stops once it encounters a loop.

There's no doubt in my mind that the current code in place is a little shoddy, so there will probably be cases where the game just loops indefinitely and freezes... Let's just hope I'm a bit of a better programmer than that!

And to correspond with this, we have a new card type: BUFF (White)

Negative statuses that get inflicted your opponent are now part of the existing DEBUFF (Blue) cards. So contrasting that, this new BUFF type will give you helpful statuses!

Phew, that was a lot!

This is pretty much the culmination of what I've been doing these past few months, I just didn't have anything presentable to show you until now! So once again thank you for your support and for reading!