In the coming weeks, we'll be deploying an update which contains a couple of gameplay changes. After the early access went live on Steam, we’ve been watching many streams of Puzzle Forge Dungeon and there were two main things that caught our attention.
Today's news post explains what will change and why:
1. The game mechanics appear to be a bit too complexe for beginners. Even though a tutorial could help, we think we should improve the whole approach of how to apprehend the game. To do so, we’re going to introduce specific goals that should help players focus on certain actions and thus quickly learn and enjoy the basics.
2. We’ve realized there could be too many repetitive actions. We’re going to rework the pace of the many actions you can do on the board.
This will lead us to develop something that is familiar to Puzzle Forge 2 players. We will remove the action points. Instead, each enemy will wait a specific number of action turns from the player before they can attack. We had tried this system a year ago during the prototyping phase, but by that time it wasn’t that convincing. We believe it was because the enemies were not as developed as they are now, and it would not allow elaborate strategies interesting enough.
We’ve already been testing out this zero action point system in the past few days and here is how it looks like :
1. Some battles get very intense, particularly when the enemy wait only very few action turns to attack (20 turns for instance)
2. Players identify immediately what they need to do to get through the first level. It seems that the best to begin is to have 3 or 4 different goals.
3. The game pace is faster, which is better for the roguelike experience.
4. The game is easier to understand. Having no more action points, players don’t get stuck on the board without knowing what they have to do... an enemy will take action soon enough to remind you that you should better attack before they do.
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There seems to be a lot of changes, but it's more about adapting content/texts/UI and it will be rather easy to implement.
Thanks for reading! You can still give us your feedback on our Discord server ⇒ https://discord.gg/kFRa9Kr