Hi honorable gamers!
Last (and incidentally first) devblog was just over 4 weeks ago, and we’ve been at it every day since then, as you’d expect. Let's go over these weeks' development highlights before we dive into today’s gameplay topic!
Remnants of War
We’ve designed and integrated the 1st few enemies from our new Remnants of War faction. They’re broken incarnations of a war long forgotten, or maybe of every conflict ever ignited..? Their theme is ranged damage-dealing & debuff. More on these guys in a dedicated “Enemy factions” devblog!
The tech side of things
We’ve implemented a save versioning system to handle data compatibility between our builds & saves. Helps us test internally and spot surprise bugs that emerge from playing a new build with an old save.
We’ve also optimized the most frequently used underperforming parts of the code (a grid operation to get all tiles in a certain range was made approximately 800x faster!).
Quality of life improvements
We’ve added an [alt] modifier that lets you display detailed information about effects attached to your enemies.
Enemies now break destructibles if they can’t reach their target, even when it’s not a great idea...you could brain your way to a friendly-fire fest if you’re that kind of mastermind!
We’ve also improved on enemy AI & skills so their turn isn’t as lengthy when they have a lot of Action Points at their disposal. Basically they'll favor using 1 costly skill rather than 3 cheap ones when that's possible.
Onto the bigger chunks that took the bulk of our time.
We’ve started adding VFX!
It’s just the beginning, but we now have VFX for a bunch of situations that really lacked feedback. Dealing damage, healing, looting, blowing things up, dying, it’s all much better with an appropriate level of juice. We still have dozens of these to implement & polish!
Patient traits, room and enemy modifiers
To really make every single patient a unique experience, we’ve added a modifier mechanic that alters gameplay at multiple levels.
Patients now spawn with a rarity parameter ranging from normal to legendary, and have a number of attached personality traits (rarer patients have more traits). For example, a Generous patient rewards you with more items, while a Toxic one has every enemy in their mind maze inflict Poison on hit.
Rooms inside your patient’s mind maze also range from normal to legendary, and their modifiers are a crucial decision-making parameter when you’re choosing which path to take.
All the way down to enemies themselves, they too will spawn with a rarity level and have a bunch of associated stats, modifiers and rewards!
[Visual feedback on these modifiers is still WIP]
We believe this will lead to a lot of decision-making fun, and a constantly renewed challenge. Your own unique build will probably find its preferred challenges too!
Now onto our deep-dive topic: Patients, part 1!
Some more context
There’s a reason why the bleak future is bleak, and that’s Transposition - a neurological procedure that lets a professional Transposer (that’s you, as Eiris) navigate a materialized version of a patient’s mind, and remove (destroy) something that’s unwelcome. That could be anything ranging from fears to consciousness itself, and it all materializes as very unfriendly creatures.
Transposition was designed to help people, and it did. So much so that most of humanity became addicted to it, unable to deal with the slightest frustration without assistance. And that’s just those who could still bear to remain conscious after realizing how dysfunctional they were.
Wantless’ gameplay loop starts with you greeting these suffering patients on your floating Transposition lab, the Alterthought.
Men and women of all ages and backgrounds, with all sorts of afflictions, coming to you to get something abcised.
Mind mazes
Patients are distinguished by a set of characteristics, but most importantly every patient has a unique Mind maze.
Mind mazes are where gameplay happens. They’re dungeons structured as a succession of floors, each with a number of rooms you can choose to go through. These rooms are often hostile encounters for you to overcome in turn-based tactical combat, but they can also hold rewards, or just be eventless passages for you to chill in for a second.
Each room connects to one or more rooms on the next floor, letting you carve your own path to the final floor, where the patient’s main affliction is. Beat this boss to succeed.
4 patient characteristics impact your experience in a mind maze:
- Difficulty: each patient has a difficulty value, which determines the creatures you can find and how powerful they are. A Dreg in a Tier 1 mind maze won’t be as strong as a Dreg in Tier 2, and you won’t ever find a Horror anywhere below Tier 3.
- Biome: that’s the maze’s environment. We won’t detail them here as we’re still focusing on the Dead slums biome at this point, but different biomes look and feel different, and are home to different enemy factions.
- Size: mind mazes can be small, medium or large, and that impacts the number of floors therein.
- Traits: as we’ve briefly mentioned above, patients have personality traits that alter gameplay in the maze. This is material for part 2 of this devblog, but here are some example traits for the sake of clarity:
- Bully: enemies push you 1 tile away on hit
- Harsh: you’re afflicted with Fracture. Fracture causes you to take a small extra amount of damage every time you take damage from other sources.
- Jealous: enemies inflict Slow on hit. Slow increases the Action Point cost of every movement.
- Pompous: the mind maze contains a higher amount of Elite rooms. Elite rooms are home to stronger enemies.
- Hoplophobic: the mind maze is haunted by Remnants of War.
Most patients in Wantless are procedurally generated. What kind of patient you’ll encounter depends on the area your ship is docked in, and your reputation in these lands. Reputation is increased through successful transposition.
We’ll refrain from throwing more detail here, lest this devblog becomes a book, but we’re bound to write a devblog about Areas & Reputation before long!
The UI
Now here’s a peek at the patient UI as it’s currently implemented (polish and visual iterations are obviously in order):
- Waiting room: the number and rarity of patients you greet depends on the Alterthought’s current capacity and your reputation in the current area. Patients are listed here as toggles you can click.
- Selected patient editorial information: portrait, designation and a short trivia description. They have no impact on gameplay.
- Rarity: colors and shapes let you know if your patient is of normal, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary, or unique rarity (more on “unique” in a minute).
- Traits: the gameplay-impacting personality traits. More part 2.
- Mind maze difficulty: the indication here depends on your current progression vs the patient’s actual difficulty value.
- Mind maze size: small, medium or large, with a matching number of floors.
- Mind maze biome: the maze’s environment as briefly described in the “Mind mazes” section above.
- Currency & experience rewards: how much currency & xp you’ll earn by succeeding. They’re proportional to difficulty, patient rarity and maze size.
- Item rewards: you can usually choose a number of rewards out of a greater number of options. These numbers, along with item quality and rarity, depend on patient rarity, difficulty and maze size.
- Transpose button: when you’re ready, brace yourself, and dive in.
Patients are also displayed on the Alterthought’s hub as silhouettes. These are currently placeholders and will be replaced soon.
Unique patients
We’ve covered procedurally generated patients, but there’s another, arguably more important kind of patient: unique patients.
These are patients with hand-made characteristics, often hand-made mind mazes, unique traits, and more importantly written stories that progress through multiple areas. You’ll encounter a unique patient multiple times before you reach the end of their story, and their difficulty evolves with your own capacity.
They may reward you with unique items, and some of them are fundamental to progress through the main storyline. They’re part of how we tell this world’s story.
We’ll cover unique patients in fine detail in part 2, alongside traits.
You did it!
That’s it for Patients part 1, hopefully it’s enough to get the big picture!
Thank you for making it all the way down here, we’ll see you in a few weeks, and in the meantime we’d be happy to have you on the Discord server!
Stay safe, hydrate, take care of yourself and your own ♥