tl;dr QOL changes to the turns and player clicking, game is now number of turns to survive, number balancing, minor tweaks/bug fixes.
Note from Developer
This patch was aimed at smoothing out the player’s turn. Previously the enemy actions occurred mid turn which created a giant information spike. This resulted in the turn feeling too quick since the player didn’t have enough time to process the new information. The new turns should smooth that out and allow the player to play at their own pace, while also keeping them from taking too much time. Now that the game loop is feeling a lot better I’m planning on tackling the relic system which will give powerful global buffs to the player. I think the game is starting to feel really good, and I’m excited to keep iterating and improving it.
Cheers,
Aarimous
Detailed Notes:
- Updated turn timer. The goal here was to smooth out the turn without removing the fun challenge that a quick turn timer brings to the game
- Turn is now broken into 4 phases:
- Player Select: 70% of the turn where the player can select a tile, selected a tile ends this phase
- Player Move: 5% of the turn where the player character moves
- Ability: 12.5% of the turn where the player abilities fire and resolve themselves
- Enemy Turn: 12.5% of the turn where the enemies move or attack
- Turn length set to 3 seconds. Although in practice the turns are much shorter as the player will end
he turn early most of the time. - Players end the “Player Select” phase upon selecting a tile. The goal here was to keep the game feeling snappy instead of making the player wait around for the next turn. I also wanted to make each click matter.
- Players can end turns early by pressing the spacebar. In some cases the player might not want to move so this will allow them to pass the turn in that case without needing to wait too long.
- The old on select indicator now shows when a player hovers the piece. This is to bring visual clarity to the tile the player is going to click on. I’m hoping this prevents a few miss clicks as the clicks now cause an action to happen.
- XP Value Tweeks. With the smoothing out of the turn the game felt a lot easier to compensate, the amount of XP needed for levels had been increased.
- Base XP needed for first level set to 5 (previously 4)
- XP per level growth up to 4 (previously 3)
- Player health has been increased to 50 (previously 15) and enemy attack damage has been increased. With the addition of melee kills healing 1 health, enemy damage felt too easy to heal from and the player could easily finish the demo. The old number also didn’t give a lot of wiggle room for balancing.
- Pawn damage 2 (previously 1)
- Knight damage 3 (previously 1)
- Rook damage 5 (previously 1)
- Bishop damage 5 (previously 1)
- Game clock was refactored to now allow for scaling the game faster/slower and the game will adjust accordingly. This also means that I had to rework some of the ways the abilities fire (cribbage, playing card, yoyo).
- Game length is set to be 600 turns
- Demo is set to be 200 turns
- Added a run clock to show the player how long the current run has been for. This should create a speed run for those interested.
- Movement Powerups change. The old power ups would override your movement pattern which was interesting, but felt bad. So the aim here was to make them feel more useful. Clarity and scaling will be addressed in future patches.
- Now append their power ups to the current set.
- Movement Power ups color matches XP gems
- Movement power ups now spawn less frequently
- Miscellaneous:
- Movement Powerups now
- Player now has red damage text when taking damage from enemies
- Cleaned up some unused signals
- Reorganized the games folder structure
- Added buttons that link to a google form for feedback
- Tuned the difficulty curve slightly
- Random Bug Fixes:
- Fixed a bug where the end screen's main menu button was redirecting to steam page
- Fixed a bug where the health could be negative on the UI
- Probably some other bugs I’ve forgotten about
- Fixed a bug with Jack Trap where it wasn’t getting removed from the tile when an enemy trigger it