Hello everyone, time for the monthly dev blog!
This blog post will be focused on the advancements made in the last few weeks toward update 0.10.
As some may know, the beta for update 0.10 started about 2 weeks ago, so let's see what's already done:
Weapon modifiers
This is one of the main features for 0.10.
Weapon modifiers are cards you can equip on weapons.
Weapons have unlimited slots for modifiers, but a modifier can only be attached to a single weapon (there are ways to increase this limit).
This feature was already half-coded into the game, so adding the missing stuff was quick, which is the reason it's the first thing added in this beta.
However, attaching all the modifiers to a single "god" weapon is not the most optimal way.
Some modifiers like Thunder Spirit would be better equipped on slow but heavy-hitting weapons,
while Ice Spirit would be better on AoE or high attack speed weapons.
Weapon modifiers can be equipped in the Weapon tab in the pause menu.
The game will try to automatically equip newly obtained modifiers on the most optimal weapon.
In addition, card now display what type of card, whether it's "Stats", "Weapon", "Effect" or "Weapon Modifier"
Many already existing cards got changed to become weapon modifiers and a few new cards got added.
I plan to slowly increase the pool of weapon modifiers during the beta.
Any suggestions for new cards are welcome.
RogNGesus
This started as a semi-joke avatar I thought of, but I ended up really liking the concept.
RogNGesus is a direct reference to RNGesus, which is the meme personification of luck in video games and role-playing games.
The main gimmick of this character is that each stage, a random effect will be rolled, there is 20 different results, each having either positive or negative results
In Survivor's mode, the stage roll is instead rolled every minute (affected by the player time).
In addition, his card tag drop chance is randomized from -50% to +100% at the start of a run.
Amber dune alternative zone, "Behemoth Graveyard"
A new alternative zone has been added to the game, a western-themed zone.
This zone also introduces more impactful terrain generation, with the addition of cliffs that prevent grounded enemies from spawning there (and walking over the void).
This pushed forward 2 problems that didn't exist before and that were required to be fixed to properly start working on the second zone. I'll come back to these in the next section.
Next Zone - Manor
This is likely the most awaited addition and the main subject of this Dev-blog.
The 5th zone (and by extension B-rank world) is currently in development and is the most unique zone in the game.
Let's talk about the 2 problems that appeared previously.
Terrain Generation rules
The first issue was to handle more complex terrain generation.
The terrain generation was created following a "Wave function collapse" algorithm, which is basically picking a first random (or non-random) module of terrain, and then for the next surrounding module, pick a compatible one and repeat the process until all the pieces of terrain required were generated.
Each module size is 100 meters by 100 meters and the game generates a 3x3 grid around the players, which is enough to handle every case in the game.
In 0.9.1, the terrain generation only handled and checked 4 borders, South/West/North/East.
It was good enough for what was used (basically generating some variant of the same terrain or simple path generation),
but it wasn't enough for situations where the northwest was different from the west and south-west; it wasn't possible to convey the 3 stages of an entire side this way.
An example being the cliff with 1 third of "hole" and 2 thirds of desert terrain.
There was still the possibility of creating some special border that basically said "Cliff/Desert/Desert," but it would mean a ton of additional complexity and lack of flexibility, especially if I added more types of terrain later on.
This led to me reworking the system deeply to handle the 4 borders and the 4 corners, but also handle varied sizes of grid in case I want to reduce the size of terrain for some zone to be 20x20 or anything I would want.
Valid Spawn Position
With the addition of holes (and walls), this led to many positions in the game where enemies shouldn't be allowed to spawn,
like a grounded enemy being spawned over a hole, or any enemies being spawned in a wall, but also to avoid spawning enemies on the other side of a hole/wall as proper pathfinding would be too expensive with the amount of enemies in the game.
Thanks to a friend of mine who found the following solution:
Each hole/wall has a collision area that is set to them, called "Terrain Collision". Each frame, I check every terrain collision visible on screen and detect angles where no terrain collision exists.
This ensures that enemies always spawn in a direction that doesn't have holes to spawn in, but also that no major obstacle would obstruct them.
The blue sphere is the distance at which new enemies are spawned, in green, the valid angle generated
As you can see, the detection of valid angles is not perfect, but it's good enough to prevent...
The new varied terrain required handling things that weren't planned at all, like collectibles dropped from flying monsters in inaccessible areas or shrines spawning in walls/holes.
For the former case, the solution was simple: slowly move the collectible toward the player until it reaches a valid position.
For the latter, the same solution wasn't viable. I didn't want generation to vary depending on how the player would approach the terrain spot, so the final solution was to use "safe spots" in the terrain generation.
These are positions that are known to be in the playable area that I manually set.
When the shrine is generated in an invalid position, trace a line from the original position to one of the safe spots, and take the first valid position on this line.
I preferred this solution over a "socket" one since it allows for a lot of different objects to use the same safe spot as a reference and still have different final valid positions.
Other Minor Things
Reworked "Game Options" Menu
Something that I have noticed, and that always frustrated me, is how often players would miss the drop-down on the top-left of the menu and then miss out on the multiple tabs of game options that exist.
Some workarounds have been tried to improve on it, like making the drop-down yellow/golden, but it was mere patchwork that wasn't enough.
This was a clear indication that the way it was presented was fundamentally wrong and this led me to redesign the game option menu to make sure players don't miss the tabs.
Similarly, the Mod option menu got the same changes.
Slight Anachronistic Rework
Due to a lot of factors (mainly visual bugs) and upcoming content, I had to refactor how anachronistic was working.
Until now, when anachronistic was activated, it slowed down the timescale of projectiles and enemies, which didn't affect the game speed.
The main issue with this approach is that particle effects weren't affected by this change (and there was no way to manually affect them without a massive overhaul in the game code).
The new approach is to slow down the entire game and speed up the player character accordingly.
This fixed the issues with particles and made the entire process lighter to handle (it's easier to speed up the player than having to slow down every enemy and projectile, even if they were using a global variable).
In addition to that, there is now a small visual transition when activating anachronistic.
Shrines Are Now Affected by Tag Drop Chance
That's it.
I believe it makes tag drop chance have more impact on the game and gives more control to the player.
Artifact Reroll in Reward
This was requested a lot and always pushed back. But I believe it'll become important as more and more artifacts are added into the game.
From now on (and on the condition you have the required Soul-Shop upgrade), you'll be able to reroll any random artifact in the reward screen once (per artifact).
(This only applies to random artifacts and doesn't affect set-artifacts like event rewards).
Content
As usual, a bit of additional content has been added to the game, even if it's not the focus at this phase of the beta:
3 weapon modifiers, 2 passive talents, as well as 1 new artifact.
Beta Roadmap
There is still quite a lot of things planned for this beta, but the biggest chunk of it is mainly the 5th zone, especially as it was quite heavy on the modeling and texturing. Here is a rough idea of what I plan to add:
- Shop-Lock Feature Similarly to many auto-battlers, the ability to lock one or multiple things in the shop for the next shop or reroll. This will only affect shops of the same type (blacksmith to blacksmith, shop to another shop, shopkeeper level-up to another level-up). And it'll only work on cards, consumables, and artifacts (you won't be able to lock a limit break or a card selection). This should be the next thing I work on and should be part of beta update 3.
- Equipment System Test In a few beta updates, I'll implement a rough version of the equipment system to check if it properly fits into the game. This will be an experimental change that may or may not be kept in the game.
- Twitch Integration This is something I want to investigate for a long time, but I think it's time to add Twitch integration into the game. I'm still not sure how I want it to be implemented, but I'll likely open a Community Feedback about it in the upcoming week on the game discord.
Of course, additional content is also planned as usual.
I also expect this update to be (yet again) delayed by the enemies' sprites/animations.