Hey everyone! It's been a couple of weeks since the last progress update, and I have been hard at work buried in Excel spreadsheets because I don't know when to stop tinkering :D My "change log" is up to around 38 pages in Microsoft Word, and rather than blast you all with a wall of text that is largely the same as the previous post, I figured I would just offer a brief run through of what's happening with the development cycle for the Version 10.0 update, affectionately (lol) titled "Epitaph".
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While watching some recent footage of people playing VoltAge:Genesis, I sort of came to the conclusion that heavier armors did not seem to be "worth" the loss in Agility, especially since the game specifically focuses on shorter battles and places a high value on turn order. That led me to reviewing the stat conventions for armors, and I quickly realized that previous "tweaks" I made have, in fact, made armor objectively less useful the heavier it is. Cue me rebalancing every armor type in the game, which in turn led to me rebalancing all of the bonuses for the 24 (!) factions and manufacturers represented in the game. Long story short, essentially every single weapon and armor in the game (as well as a significant percentage of the accessories) have been rebalanced to offer higher stat bonuses in a few core areas, rather than more modest bonuses across a wide range of categories. Most "hidden parameter" bonuses like Hit%, Evasion, and Crit. Rate are much rarer, and there are far fewer examples of gear offering "cross-purpose" stat bonuses (for instance, armor that makes you have a higher crit. rate). Certain manufacturers whose "identity" is linked to unusual bonuses (like increased defense for SBC weapons because they utilize energy shield tech) have been retained. I still want to make more changes to certain areas' encounter rates and am weighing the possibility of removing certain types of enemies from the "standard rotations" entirely. I have continued to address some ongoing glitches and bugs, and I have implemented a "comparison" feature which will give players a much better idea of the bonuses gear grants...I have gotten rid of the (fairly useless) "optimize" function, as well. I had initially though that Steam Achievements were going to be a fail, but some things have changed on the back end, and as such I am going to try and take another stab at implementing them; other than that, I am very nearly to the point where I can start doing a couple of test runs in earnest...I haven't decided yet whether I will livestream those runs through Twitch or YouTube to give a sneak peek at what has changed yet, so keep an eye out for more information on that in the future. As always, if you have particular "pain points" you would like for me to address OR have run into any bugs or glitches, please let me know! I have probably played through the various versions of this game from start to finish around thirty times now, and while I would like to believe I have caught most issues, there is always someone out there who will play the game in a way I hadn't accounted for. I want to make this the best possible game it can be, but it has also been about a decade that I have been working on this, and would like to be able to move onto something new when I finish school in December...that being said, barring some crazy game-breaking bug being uncovered, this is very likely THE LAST update I will entertain for VoltAge:Genesis.
Stay tuned, and more importantly: Stay safe out there! The Deadlands are (and probably always will be) a dangerous place, after all...
-Zach
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