Get Those Bugs is now on Steam!
The last two weeks and especially the last three days were hectic in terms of development and things are not done. Getting straight to the point; what's up next?
Upcoming
Most importantly I will be keeping an eye on feedback to make sure to address game breaking bugs, unintended mechanics, crash to desktops, etc. I simply did not have enough time to get everything I wanted in as well as testing all of it thoroughly. I was fixing major bugs less than 2 hours before release so there are certainly bugs remaining. Expect minor updates as I find and squish them.
Character visuals and other cosmetic rewards. I only added the cosmetics in the latest update, but didn't really add any "real" cosmetics, simply palette swaps. There will be additional character sprites, outfits, cameos and such, but also I need to figure out what I'm going to do for unit attack visual customization. No clear plans at the moment. Also interested in cute simple filler cosmetics like custom cursor, custom cursor trails, just more stuff to dilute the reward pool pretty much!
More content: stages, cards, a few enemies, and a few more mechanics are all planned. Most importantly is more build variance. At the moment a lot of the game is the core gameplay loop of solving the damage, energy, and casts per second for each unit in the party. I want to maintain that core loop while also increasing the amount of unique interactions between units and adding more types of secondary attacks that units can cast.
Linux builds are easy to do with Godot but I don't yet entirely know how to handle different builds on steam, so I'll do some exploration there.
Compatibility builds for people who do not have Vulkan support as well, though that is a little harder since the game does use some Forward+ only visual effects I think.
There have been some queries into an Endless mode as well which I think I can make available relatively soon.
Balance
Moving on, I want to discuss the changes that occurred between 2.1.3 and 2.1.4, namely how many seemingly random things were added out of the blue. About four days before release I was running some tests ensuring things were working as intended and letting my development build autoplay so I could observe different builds and eke out performance issues and such and unfortunately noticed just how bad the power imbalance between playing cards on each party member versus playing all of your cards on one party member had become.
The simplest strategy to beat normal mode was to simply place all your units in the center and play every card on one unit and it was successful just about 100% of the time on The Lovers stage. I felt very strongly in my mind that no matter what I did not want to release the game where you could simply not think about it at all and still win. So what did I do to address that?
The Problem
The actual root of the problem is that unlike classical RPGs there is no "equipment limit" in Get Those Bugs. You're allowed to put 50 "swords" in the unit's hands to keep increasing their damage. Mathematically this results in the most efficient method being to stack all of your damage related stats onto the same unit. I originally intended to mitigate this by having high energy requirements but it turned out that no matter how high I made them it was still most efficient to stack all the energy cards on one unit.
The lack of damage type and attack type specific cards exacerbated this problem since your main DPS could also be the best at applying debuffs as well. I absolutely did not want to limit the amount of cards you can play on a unit though so it was time to determine other mechanics I could use to address this.
Blessings
The Blessing mechanic is straight forward; every turn a weighted random unit is Blessed which gives them an extra play on the next card you play on them. The weighting is 1.0 / Cards Played so units with fewer cards are much more likely to be Blessed than units you stack cards on. The intent is to incentivize taking advantage of this mechanic to get additional power on the units you would otherwise ignore. When I implemented this I thought it worked quite well and moved on.
Energy Recovery
At some point I played some 20 Minutes Til Dawn for inspiration and realized I could also have a kind of reload mechanic in Get Those Bugs. If units have to wait for their energy to fully recover once they run out there will be a period of downtime where even your strongest unit can't attack and that's when it would be really nice to have balanced your cards. So that's how it works now!
Eventually I might be able to use this "reloading" as a trigger for different effects, but for now it's just a small part of the solution.
Damage Limit
The idea to add damage limits came from me thinking about what other ways classic RPGs limited player power. I think case I was thinking about how Final Fantasy limited you to 9999 damage even if you were actually capable of dealing a lot more. Once you hit a damage limit you have to find ways to deal additional _hits_ instead. And that line of thought is what made me realize what I really needed to focus on; creating little problems for the player to solve on each unit.
Micro Puzzles
What I'm actually trying to do is allow players to freely build units in whatever way solves these little puzzles: reaching the damage limit, recovering energy, and generating additional hits. Without a damage limit you can simply keep playing as many damage cards as you have on one unit and there is not much value in playing them on someone else. Now that there is one, you only play as many as you need on one unit and then figure out how to solve the same problem on your other units. This naturally incentivizes players to spread their cards out (the intended gameplay) without disallowing players from simply playing whatever cards they want on whoever even if it leads to failure.
Once you've reached the damage limit if you want to increase the effective DPS of the unit you need to increase the amount of enemies you hit and the frequency at which you hit them. As you do that however you generally increase the energy usage meaning you need to choose what types of energy recovery you're going to give to each unit. With some being much more effective than others on certain units, it comes down to picking the best options out of the cards you are given for the units you've taken into battle.
I would like to implement more little puzzles to solve, but I've got to figure out what they are first!
Enemy Stats
After all of these changes I had the final important decision to make; how hard do we make normal mode? My goal was simply to make it so that placing all four units down and putting all of your cards on a single unit _never worked in my testing_. This excludes Double, Support, and Party plays which is where the strategy is intended to be. So I tweaked the numbers and set up an autoplay that tried over and over with different unit types to win using that logic and once they failed every single time I checked to see how easily I could win the same seed with strategy. When the AI consistently failed at wave 18 and I won handily with very strong characters and only losing around 100 health I knew things were in a better place.
It is possible that the game will be considered too hard and that's something I can tweak going forward, but I'd much rather the game appear too hard before you learn all of the strategies than it be so easy to win that you don't have to think, so for now it is what it is. The balance will absolutely change as I play more and discover more issues or unintended interactions, but I'm much happier knowing that avenue to victory has been severely mitigated.
Stages and Difficulties
I have not done sufficient testing of these new changes on the other stages or the other difficulties. Based on how handily I won the tests I did after making these changes on the simple stage I imagine it's quite possible to win on the other stages though I'm not as confident about Apocalypse difficulty.
I will be playtesting to ensure what I think is true is actually true and pushing adjustments if not.
In the future I am almost certainly going to remove the difficulties between Normal and Apocalypse and have an Endless mode you can toggle on for some type of build pushing gameplay.
For now that's all I have to say. Thank you for reading and being here for the release of Get Those Bugs!