Hi everyone,
Last week was spent on some playtesting, fixing bugs, and the start of addressing some feedback I had gotten about the current progression of the game.
I will start with the interesting part: As some of you will have read in previous posts, two of the big goals of 0.8 were A) to improve on the strategy gameplay, adding new soldiers, tactics, and military goals such as artefact mode, and B) to introduce more of a progression by placing advanced resources further away from the player starting area and adding pirate fortresses for the player to defeat along the way.
One of the biggest gameplay related feedbacks we got from the 0.8 experimental release was that the first fortress was too big of an obstacle. The first fortress in the stone area has about 40 pirates defending it, which requires players to raise a similarly large army of swordsmen, or to sneakily build a base in that area to get stone for pistoleers. In either case, the main military challenge ahead of taking on the fortress are either randomly spawned pirates (which can easily be defeated by the player without soldiers), or attack waves, which are best addressed with watchposts, rather than an army. As a result, attacking the pirate fortress is the first real reason to recruit an army, and then requires a very substantial investment of about 40 soldiers to be successful.
This doesn’t feel particularly intuitive. Rather than having a step by step progression that guides the player to big fights, we have a few big jumps of substantial fights which either slow down the game as the player prepares, or end in a big defeat. I’ve decided to address this in two ways: firstly, I will reduce the number of pirates in the first fortresses. Rather than having to fight 40 soldiers in each fortress (with them getting stronger from fortress to fortress), the first fortresses will be smaller, with maybe 20 pirates in the first, then 30 in the second, and so on.
Secondly, I have started to experiment with smaller pirate camps again (see today’s image). These used to exist before, but were spawned completely at random, had no reward associated with them, and made it difficult to predict the challenge they would pose - so we got rid of them. However, with our improved random spawn system, we can specify how many of them we want to spawn in each part of the map, and make them part of the challenge and progression. Rather than having to fight the fortress as the first step, the player will have to raise a small army to defeat one or two of the camps first. Additionally, the player will find a reward once they have defeated the camp, which makes it worth fighting them and adds to the progression. Overall, these two changes will hopefully lead to a smoother progression across the island - though we’ll need to do lots of balancing to make this enjoyable.
To also mention some to the bug fixes: I managed to fix a few loading issues, such as some defenders (of watchposts) not appearing when loading a game; I added a few additional checks to catch problems with soldiers falling through the world (this used to happen to pirates a lot, but apparently also happened to soldiers very rarely); and I fixed some loading issues with the newer changes to the map. These fixes will be in the next update, which I will upload as soon as Haakon and I have managed to fix one more sound issue.
Until next week!