Hi folks!
Playtest #3 is only a few days away, and we already talked a bit (in Development Journal #5) about some of the upcoming features. So let's dive in and see a few more.
New Player Experience
(A few) Tutorial texts will now popup at certain places as you play, to guide you on some basic gameplay elements. These tutorial aren't there to replace the Rulebook which is always an F1 key away, but to show you a few basic stuff, you'd probably figure out on your own. Like how to interact with the world map or how to play cards during encounters etc.
These tutorials will only appear once. But if you feel that you need to see them again, there is a button in settings that once clicked it will mark them all as unseen, and they will trigger once more.
First Balance Pass
Balancing 2540 cards and hundreds of archetype combinations in a timely fashion without you is a bit tricky for a solo dev, which I hope we'll be doing it together in Playtest #3.
But I already went ahead and fixed the most glaring balancing issues I could spot.
New Acolyte decks and a new Acolyte Variant
Acolyte variants had a common pool of cards along with these unique to them. Now their whole deck is unique and distinct from each other. There is also a new acolyte variant (Morheliss' Acolyte) which is basically the Necromancer class.
Before that a Revenant/Dark Witch could fill this role unsuccessfully, but after this change Dark Witch shifted her focus in curses, hexes and afflictions.
Ripple Effects
Ripple effects is a new mechanic that basically can associate any card keyword with a bonus effect card. Better explain that with a few examples:
In the screenshot above, the Dark Witch has:
[Festering Ripple Effect]
Whenever you play a card with Festering, up to 2 Random Enemies get Bleed 1.
Some notes on Ripple effects.
- Festering can have a single Ripple effect. So if I get another (Festering Ripple Effect) I am essentially replacing this one.
- The bonus effect caused by the Ripple effect triggers after all the card effects resolve. And by resolve I mean that the card didn't fail due to lack of requirements. Festering itself doesn't have to actually have any result.
- Bonus effect values will benefit by Perks or if it's damage your affinities etc. So you can easily end up inflicting more Bleeding down the road.
Let's see another example:
The Physician has: [Supplies Ripple Effect]
Whenever you play a card that fetches Supplies, you also get -1 Strain.
The Supplies effect doesn't have to yield any results, but as long as it resolves you get Strain -1.
Forsaking Expertises
Each expertise you take can potentially add from a few to hundreds of cards in your card pool that you may not need or feel they aren't exactly suit your RP.
You can click on the 'decrease rank' arrow of an expertise while it has 0 ranks to forsake it.
Forsaken expertises will be removed from your character even if you have free ranks in them, so be careful not to forsake expertises crucial for your starting deck to work.
To undo Forsaking an expertise revert its rank back to 0, by clicking on the 'increase rank' arrow while the expertise is marked as Forsaken.
Compact View
It's quite easy with summoning classes to reach a high summon limit, and lot of allies in the battlefield can translate to lot of scrolling. Compact view changes the ally presentantion from 2x2 to 2x3, and enemy presentation from 2x3 to 2x4.
So even if you do need to scroll it will merely be a scroll up or down once you hit 7-9 allies.
Compact view can be toggled on/off using the 'Z' key.
Minor Location Tooltips
I got to implement a few of the minor locations in time for playtest #3, so all Minor Location now have a tooltip, to display their name, and also a "Point of Interest" tag if there is something interesting to do there.
In such cases if you don't mind/need a spoiler, you can click on them to view what's in there before actually going there, like in the major locations.
Challenges Descriptions
All Challenges now have a different name and a short description to resemble more like quests, give you a little hint on what you'll find there and the vibe if its something that suits your RP to do or not.
Mini Questlines (Chains of Challenges)
It may appear in a first glance that there are less challenges in the world, but there are in fact 25 challenges as we speak, so a few more than in the previous playtest.
Many of them will appear once you complete a different challenge, forming together mini questlines.
If completing a challenge unlocks a new one, you'll get an extra notification in your Rewards summary.
So that's about it for now. You'll be able to see more stuff once Playtest #3 starts. Will be spamming your news once more at that time to let you know.
If Chronicles sounds something you'd be interested in, make sure to wishlist and follow its Steam page, so you'd be informed first when the (Beta) Playtest #3 starts!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1580800/Erannorth_Chronicles/
That's all folks! See you in September!