Hello everyone.
It’s Tea from the Archmage Team again, typing this on August 6th, 2024 in our second dev blog hoping to keep everyone up to date on the progress here at Archmage Studios!
First, I want to address our last dev blog! Specifically, I want to thank everyone for their support and suggestions for the summon system! I have compiled the suggestions and brought them up with our devs and other designers for consideration! Additionally, there is one comment I think should be directly addressed!
RottingGem is right! Seal/Banish and other RNG manipulation tools have been all hotly requested features since our big update that vastly expanded our item pool! I just forgot about them since they’re mostly in a polishing state instead of active tweaking!
I’ll talk about what we have in a future update (maybe the next one?) but for now have some teasers before we go into today's topic?
Our art team goes hard, as always!
Anyway, let's move on to another hotly requested feature that has been in development for a long time!
Infinite Mode!
The logic and concept behind infinite mode is simple. Usually, if you do reach the peak of brokenness, it’s usually around level 16ish if you’re lucky. By then, you have precious little time to enjoy your power before it’s all over. Sometimes, we want to take a victory lap.
The idea behind infinite mode is simple: once you win, we’ll give you the option to keep playing. Once you step into Infinite mode, you’ll keep playing forever until you die!
So, what’s the hold-up?
The problem with infinity!
Testing takes forever!
Compared to a lot of the features we’re working on, testing infinite mode legitimately takes a really long time. You’ll have to run through the whole level 1-20 hoping you’re strong enough, then you go into infinite mode and just keep going until you die.
We do have dev tools, of course. We can revive ourselves, add specific items, and even skip to floor 20 if we want. The problem with doing all that is we risk losing touch with the actual player experience. We still need to balance infinite mode to be a fun experience for the player, and if we just skip to floor 20 and console in our perfect broken build, we are risking balancing it against console-wielding devs and not actual players.
It’s balanced. I think?
God of Weapons used a quadratic formula to control the difficulty between floors 1 to 20. Said formula stopped being reasonable past floor 20. We want to give you time to enjoy your victory lap before we drown you in enemies, and that means playing with an entirely new formula and hoping it feels good. And if it doesn’t, it’s back to doing voodoo in a spreadsheet.
On top of that, we only have so much spawn pattern from which to pull. It’s good enough for 20 floors, but one of our biggest concerns is that it will get stale by floor 30. So that means adding new patterns and making sure everything is scalable and fun.
Infinite arms race!
Right now, we’re testing infinite mode mostly against weapons and systems the player already has access to in the main game. There are new monsters, and we can banish items, but it’s overall identical to what you have access to right now.
That’s not going to be what Infinite Mode looks like when we release it.
You’ll have new weapons and accessories. You’ll have the summon system to play with! You’ll have Gem to amp your favorite weapons up even further (that’ll be a fun blog)! You’ll have a whole new DoT System. All of these are in parallel development, so we can’t just test what they’ll do right now and how they interact with each other in normal play and in Infinite mode.
And so, it’s back to more testing!