The Assessor is quite a powerful keeper - however, it seems that it just isn’t that much fun to play. So we decided to rework the Assessor into something more enjoyable, so that they don’t remain benched in your next Prestige run.
Something that is very important to us for Dome Keeper is that every element in the game should be different in a meaningful way in comparison to already existing elements of the same type. For example: the laser dome. It shoots a laser beam! While we could just add another dome that moves a gun across its hull and shoots bullets, it would in essence really be the same thing. It might look different, but it would play the same and pose the same challenges when thinking about how to deal with the different monsters.
The same is true when it comes to keepers. Keepers should differentiate themselves on three levels: how they move, how they mine, and how they carry things.
When it comes to movement, the Assessor isn’t really that different to the Engineer. Mining though is quite different. Instead of the drill, the Assessor uses Kinetic Spheres and these have two functions: the rotation mining where you destroy rocks by rotating the spheres in front of you, as well as the ability to bounce the spheres between tiles like pinballs.
The difference in mining technique forces you to think more strategically about how to mine. With the Engineer you could go in any direction without planning ahead, while with the Assessor you must first create the right environment for your spheres to be as effective as possible. That’s the fundamental idea of the Assessor: setting interesting constraints on the mining so you have to be smart on your approach.
Carrying things is also quite different. When you pick things up as the Assessor they float around you in a sort of energy field, and then you can shoot these items out in the general direction of your dome. You can upgrade this ability to make the resources float together in bundles to shoot more items at a time but you can’t upgrade your carrying capacity - which means that you really have to think about how to transport your resources back to the dome.
While it worked on a mechanical level, this was in all honestly quite tedious and clumsy to play. It also ended up having a lot of unfun downtime. If you had shot your Kinetic Spheres, you were basically just waiting around for them to finish bouncing around as you didn’t have any other way to mine in the meantime. In addition to that, the way you shot your resources back towards the dome wasn’t quite accurate enough.
Another important ability for the Assessor is the Sphere Reflection. It enables you to let the kinetic spheres bounce against your keeper, meaning you could in essence use that to mine in one specific direction. While very useful, the way it functioned was entirely timing based.You, as the player, had to hit a button at the exact right time for the sphere to bounce off of you, which made it a very tedious technique in the long run.
All of this led to the Assessor not getting used much by you. We knew that the basic idea could work well, so it was clear that we had to make it much more fun to play!
Enter the Re-Assessor
We have made three major changes to how the Assessor operates, and we do believe it makes it a lot more fun and easier to control.
First, we completely replaced rotational mining. While the concept was right as a secondary, weaker mining ability to help you prepare the rock for spheres, it also meant that if your kinetic spheres were already in use, you could not mine at all. We replaced it with an ability called Contact Mining. With Contact Mining, the Assessor presses firmly against the tile, slowly breaking it down with kinetic energy. In function it is the same as rotational mining, but it does not rely on the kinetic spheres. It’s also a little bit faster than rotational mining but not very efficient.
Then we changed how the kinetic spheres are shot. Previously, you had to hold a button (which would also stop your movement) and then choose a direction. Now the spheres fire instantly, as soon as you press the shoot button. It might take a bit of time to get used to as a seasoned Assessor player, but we find it feels a lot more intuitive and fluent.
Lastly, we also tweaked the carrying mechanic. The shooting of single resources was fun to play around with, but overall an unneeded complication and simply not accurate enough. Instead you start out with the bundles, always shooting stable and precise groups of resources.
We’ve also made some changes to the tech tree of course! You can upgrade to get as many as 6 spheres. The lifetime can be upgraded as much as you want but as usual, the cost for it increases. Increasing the sphere strength does increase the reload slightly, so you might want to keep a nice balance there to make sure you have enough spheres to be efficient.
The main changes however are in a very specific area of the tech tree for the Kinetic Spheres. Here you can choose between 3 abilities, and each has one upgrade to make it more powerful:
Sphere Reflection is still there, but has a fundamental change. Instead of you micro-managing the reflection, you now place a static reflection field in the mine. It stays there, reflecting and powering up any spheres that get in contact with it. This ability has a cooldown, but with the upgrade you can even have multiple fields simultaneously.
The second ability is to explode spheres. Shoot your sphere as usual and then press space to make any spheres near you explode. Previously the Assessor didn’t deal so well when you wanted to unearth a chamber or a large cluster of iron, but with the explode ability, you’ll uncover those gadgets and relics in no time.
The third ability is to split spheres. You shoot a sphere as usual and then you can split it to replace it with two smaller spheres, which you could then also split to get even more even smaller spheres.
We tweaked both the shooting of spheres and bundles in subtle ways, which should generally lead to them always doing what you intend. Previously, spheres would sometimes hit a corner and fly off into the distance.
Finally, we changed the keybindings. With the default bindings, it won’t happen that you can pick a gadget from a chamber that you cannot seem to pick up again after dropping it. It is consistent now and should work intuitively.
All of these changes do mean that you might have to unlearn the old ways a bit, if you were a fan of the Assessor. That being said, we really hope that you will enjoy this coming update, and that you’ll have more fun playing the Assessor. And while you wait for this update to appear, join us on the Bippinbits Dome Keeper Discord Server to talk about Dome Keeper and just to hang out with some nice people! 😊