Hello everyone.
It’s Tea from the Archmage team, reaching out to you in our July 26th development log. The first of many, we hope!
Firstly, I want to address a common issue that has been brought up to us many times and the very thing that has spurred us to write this blog: our silence and lack of progress since our last major update. We here at Archmages are aware that our work pipeline is different from that of our other peers in the indie scene. I just want to assure everyone still watching that God of Weapons is very much not abandonware. The entire team still works hard every day to push out our next major update!
Our pipeline prioritizes larger content drops over smaller and more frequent patches, and unfortunately, that means there will be periods of major content drought like this one. We are discussing the possibility of pushing out smaller hotfix patches in the future. But until then, we hope that these devblogs will improve our transparency and make the community feel more involved!
So, what exactly have we been working on all these times? A lot! But today, I want to discuss an entirely new system that has been a frequent request since our 1.0 release: Summoned minions!
Summon system!
The summon system is one of the many reasons I am convinced that I will wake up one day with a pillow on my face, courtesy of the devs. Turns out, adding friendly minions under your control is a really difficult task in the framework we’ve built. Still, our team of wizards have risen to the challenge, even if the code still mistakes minions and weapons occasionally.
Minions are an entirely different class of items, distinct from the weapons that bop your enemies and the accessories that raise your stat. Normally, each minion is attached to its own item that summon them, though there will be weapons that summon minions. However, there will also be weapons that summon minions as part of their special effects!
Additionally, to help solidify the identity of minions, they will have their own set of unique stats to scale from in addition to normal player stats: Summon Power, Summon Vitality, Quantity, Summon Cooldown, Summon Duration.
- Summon Power: this stat makes your minion better at their function. If it heals, it heals more. If it hurts, it hurts more. Simple, right?
- Summon Vitality: It lets your minion take more damage!
- Summon Quantity: You get more out of your summon items! If it’s 1 minion before, it’s 2 now. This is a volatile one.
- Summon Cooldown: The pause between summoning a new minion.
- Summon Duration: how long a minion will last.
Minions’ jobs are straightforward. Some act as turrets, staying where they are to provide covering fire for you. Others wander around and smash enemies. Simple on paper, right? Well…
Hurdles with minions so far
Minions don’t do their job
Minions are meant to fulfill the same job weapons do: killing enemies and protecting you. Weapons do that by killing enemies really quickly before they can get to you. Minions also try to do that, but they like to wander all over the place.
We’re playing with their aggression and attack/follow logic. If they’re too aggressive, they just walk off to punch people and leave you all by yourself. If they’re not aggressive enough, they just follow you around like lost puppies instead of actually attacking anyone and then they just get torn apart by enemies. Right now, we’re trying to find a good balance between these two extremes.
Minions drop like fly
Unlike the player, who can rely on hitpoint, life steals, dodge, regen, and their own active dash to mitigate enemies’ damage. Minions only have their hit points, and they simply get torn apart. We have considered the idea of minion armor before, but we dislike the idea of adding so many stats for the player to juggle with.
We’re running out of UI space and buttons
To put it simply, a summon item has its own stats that need to be displayed. It also summons a minion that needs to be displayed. Some weapons also summon minion, so they need to display their own stat and the stat of their summoned minions
Some items and weapons summon many different types of units, and we need to display all of them on screen for you to view. You need to be able to flip through the different summons from one item and see how their stats change as yours change.
We are struggling to find an elegant way to display all of this without turning this into a spreadsheet simulator (that’s our next game, actually)
Thank you for your attention and patience,
Best wishes
Dev team