Hello everyone, time for the monthly dev blog!
Modding Context Extension
Modding contest duration got extended by an additional month.
The reason is that there is simply no one who entered the contest yet.
It is also likely I'll have to extend it further too if necessary.
Silence
As many may have noticed, I was very quiet in the last two months, both in terms of communication (with the missing September Dev Blog) and in terms of updates.
I had to go through a difficult part of my life. I'm not going into details since it's not the place for it.
But since I know there are many developers that eagerly read my dev blog, my best advice would be to not neglect the people around you. It's sure important to work on your game, but there is a time for everything.
Since some people thought it was the case on the discord, it is not about a dead relative
There have also been a few more positive things that took my energy/time, like preparing the marketing for the future 1.0 release, setting up a company for my next game that will be developed with a friend, or the fact that I've recently signed with a Chinese publisher that will take care of their own region.
Chinese Publisher
As many likely know, I just came out of a very bad publishing deal. So I was very careful and reluctant to deal with another publisher.
The new publisher is "GamerSky"; their role is to handle marketing and translation in a part of Asia (notably China, Korea, and Japan).
I know that the marketing and translation in those regions/languages has been a weak point of Rogue: Genesia and something that I simply cannot handle by myself.
Regions/languages outside of that will still be handled by me.
0.10.1 Beta
0.10.1 beta has started a few weeks ago. It won't be a big update, mainly focusing on a few medium-sized features that I wanted to implement before 1.0 or things that I think need to be taken care of now.
Dynamic difficulty
While I believe the overall difficulty of the game is in a right place (accessible for everyone, but can still provide challenges to the most expert of players), the moment-to-moment difficulty is not properly balanced for everyone, and that's especially true due to the exponential nature of player's scales.
I firmly believe the way the game scales is also an important selling point of the game, that the game gives a ton of freedom, and possibilities for the players to break the game in many ways is not something I want to remove.
But ultimately, there are situations where players can get frustrated or bored, where the game quickly becomes too easy or too hard and they weren't able to scale properly.
After a lot of time thinking of a solution, implementing a sort of dynamic difficulty scaling is the best way to solve these situations.
Before I start to explain it, I want to point out what ARE NOT the goals of the dynamic difficulty.
- This is not to make the game harder.
- This is not to nerf the player if they overperform in the game.
- This is not to make the game easier either by allowing any build to perform.
What is the goal of the Dynamic difficulty?
Dynamic difficulty has 2 goals at the moment.
The first one is to prevent boring situations when the player simply doesn't see any enemies on screen (I know it happened a lot to experienced players when B-rank got released), by making sure the game still gives a bit of stimulus to the player.
The second goal is to avoid situations when the player's damage slowly gets out of scale with the enemies' health, and you end up in a sort of soft-lock.
I also want to reassure that dynamic difficulty can be disabled anytime in the game options if players prefer to simply steamroll the game.
As of now, the dynamic difficulty only affects enemies' health in a "naive" way based on how long they stay alive. but there are 2 issues at hand in the current way:
- It simply makes investing in damage not worth it, this could be alleviated by increasing some other stats of the enemies to make sure this is not a viable strategy (by increasing their damage, for example).
- If you outscale the enemies, it also prevents you from overkilling enemies, which is also not the goal of this. For this, I could make the overkill requirement stay at the original enemies' health, or have a lower requirement depending on the health scaling value.
There is still lot of room for improvement and for tweaking, and this will likely be the case for the upcoming weeks.
Achievements improvement
Another aspect I got suggestions on that I wanted to improve is to give a tip to players on what to do next for achievements.
This is particularly the case for Secret and Super secret achievements that simply don't have any hints on how to obtain them.
A change for that is a small list in the main menu that displays the 3 achievements that the player is closest to completing.
This will always display normal achievements first, then secret achievements, and then super secret achievements.
Another change I want to make is to change the description to display a hint instead of the actual description when the achievement is not completed, and make secret/super secret achievements be displayed in the achievements menu in a similar way.
Mass Equipment Recycling
Nothing much, but you can now select multiple equipment items inside the forge to recycle multiple of them.
Mass recycling ignores favorited items.