Weekly Update/Preview Sept 4-11 (Patreon)

Another week of work. This one also included a new version release, so I can talk a bit about that and how it went and whatnot first, then we can get on with the tweets and talking about those.

Alpha 15 Release

I'm reasonably happy with it. To be completely honest I wanted to have a couple more camp scenes slipped in but I ran out of time to actually write them and go through the whole process of putting all the portraits and sound effects and everything else together. Maybe I could have snuck one in, but instead I ended up having to take an extra day to focus on bug testing and fixing. There were a number of things that I encountered during playtesting, and by the time we reached my planned release day, I didn't have the confidence that I should release.

And I'm okay with that. Ideally it wouldn't happen, but it did. As a result, when Alpha 15 did come out, there weren't any major bugs that required me to scramble out another version and upload it to all the sites and fix all the links and so on. That kind of thing happened in most of the releases prior, and it made things quite stressful and unsatisfying. Having a relatively smooth release by comparison was much nicer.

Of course, Alpha 15 isn't perfect. There is a fairly major bug in terms of game balance where disarming doesn't cause exhaustion gain. Somehow I didn't notice it while playtesting, and nobody playing 15 noticed it (or at least reported it) either. Not gamebreaking at all, but definitely makes the game easier by a fair amount.

It did randomly make me consider if I should drop disarm exhaustion to 2 though, just because  it seems like the actual act of disarming a trap would be less physically taxing than combat with a monster. I don't think that actually needs to happen in terms of balance, but it was more just a random logic thought. Probably won't act on it.

Aside from that there may be a small smattering of other issues I still have to look into, but I don't think there's a strongly compelling reason to push out a 15.1 version (yet). As a result, I haven't been planning/working on doing so. Instead, I've been doing some (mostly) UI work.

Autoturn

I've said this in various places but I don't know if I've said it here or not. The entire autoturn mechanic was not something I originally thought of at all when making the game. It came out of player feedback. While some part of me doesn't like the whole idea of it, much more of me totally understands why people want it. I barely ever use it myself, and I wouldn't really suggest that you use it all the time, but I guess it's up to you.

But I guess the point here is that, as a feature that was created due to player feedback, it also makes sense to add to it based on player feedback. Almost all of these options for automatically stopping the autoturn timer have been requested somewhere by someone. They're not hard to implement at all, so I might as well. I doubt that anyone would actually want to turn ALL of them on at once, but that's not really the point, is it? The point is for people to take whatever use case they want out of it, and I'm not going to stop them.

(ps this is also a reminder of how feedback helps a lot. shoutouts to Graeme Cracker who keeps posting stuff on patreon and also all the people who talk about/suggest things on discord/other sites)

Rare drop dopamine

This one actually hasn't had anyone commenting on it beforehand, which is moderately surprising? Basically, there are various tiers of skill scroll rarity that can be found in chests, but aside from the rarity being listed in the event list, there's not been any indication when you find something rare vs something common. That makes it pretty underwhelming when you open a chest, regardless of what you actually get out of it. At least, that was my feeling on things. So now there are at least some nice little sparklies and sounds depending on what you pull out of the lootbox. It doesn't change anything mechanically, although I have been having some more of a think about that as well.

Chest reward rarity still feels a little weird presently, for a couple of different reasons.

The actual degree of difference between the number of common scrolls and higher rarity scrolls spawning may or may not be extreme enough. Hard to get a feel for this one.

The level of rarity on a skill is assigned manually by me, so what turns out to be rare may not end up being appropriately powerful

Spell scrolls don't have rarity

A chest with nothing in it still seems more common than it should be, even though it is the rarest option on the list

Because the game first decides rarity and then picks from a list of skills with that rarity, it can lead to the weird situation where it feels like getting a specific common scroll is harder to do than getting a specific super rare scroll.

Not sure what, if any, of these things are going to be changed in the future, but they are all thoughts that I've had. Maybe I'll need to sit down and run some numbers and probabilities and stuff, or maybe I'll have to do a lot more playtests and see how things feel now that there is a more obvious indicator of rarity. It's to be continued I guess.

Oh, and one other thing very observant people might notice is the tiny little triangle that switches between the knights. That is a "whose turn is it" indicator, another UI thing which functions as a good lead in for the next part.

Technology

I'm gonna be maybe a bit strange here and say shout outs to 4chan (/d/ games general). Some people still have the weird "internet boogeyman" idea of 4chan as a site, but it's really not that at all. I've been there for well over a decade now and really it's just another place you can go on the internet. Yeah, it has people who have anonymity and therefore say whatever they want, but honestly there is value in that too. It's not like people's opinions just magically go away when they don't have anywhere to express them.

All that to say that I do go there. I do post about my game. I do get people who tell me very clearly what they don't like about the game. Even if they throw in mean words or are needlessly hostile, there's still often a useful sentiment underneath it that I can examine and decide if and how to respond to. One recent discussion/criticism I got was over UI stuff. While I don't think I'll be working in 100% of the things people talked about/suggested, some concepts are definitely worth looking into and iterating on. This is one of those. The turn indicator was another. There will be some more as well.

So far I do rather like these things. The health/combat counter bars being present on the map really does change the amount of information you have access to without having to click on and read anything. It doesn't make the game any easier, since it's all the same information you'd already have, it just makes things a bit smoother. Pretty nice.

What's not pretty nice is the actual implementation here. In the screenshot and in game it looks... Okay-ish, I guess. I'm not super happy with it. There is some difficulty though, since any extra elements to pretty it up might end up having the unintended side effect of making a given room look visually very busy, which isn't nice to look at. I don't think the end result is going to look exactly like this, but I'm still iterating on the idea (as in I literally took a break from working on changing the look of these bars to write this devlog preview thing). I'm sure I'll figure out something soon enough.

Edit: Here's another iteration a couple hours after the rest of this was written

But that's where I'm at with things this week. As far as the next update goes, I don't THINK it will be as mechanically intensive as some other previous updates. Hopefully that will mean I'll end up with more time for content writing (and that I'll use that time well), though I guess we'll see.

Thanks for the support and such. See you next week or sooner!