Hello, since the last one was well received, I’m doing another development log on what's coming up. Last time I talked about some of the gameplay changes and teased some mechanics so this time it's going a bit more meta.
Story
It’s nice if every major patch has a headliner and for this one it’s that we are adding more story. Or, to be less charitable, adding story. It’s probably a stronger angle than "I added some Spells to those characters you don’t have unlocked" but more on that later, too.
While I really like the characters in Witching Stone, their personality is conveyed only through their visual designs and Spells. I think, on the whole, they feel like vectors for gameplay mechanics rather than real people with thoughts in their heads. This isn’t because I am a mechanics purist who doesn’t want the story getting in the way of the gameplay! It’s because I cannot good write.
I dropped a “we” above and that’s because, although this is largely a solo project, I have asked the talented npckc to help with the writing. And by help I mean she did all of it while I made a rudimentary dialogue system.
I would definitely recommend checking out her games if you like to occasionally play something more narrative based. Where you don’t have to do the mental maths on killing a Medium Ooze.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2620590/Marrons_Day/
Also, it is all skippable so please don’t be weird about it if you’re just here for the numbers! I’ve also made it so you can skip the floor transitions. That is irrelevant, but good news for fans of skipping things.
Pwca, Blodeuwedd and Arawn Quests
When I first launched this game Pwca, Blodewuedd and Arawn were hidden. And when I say hidden, I mean not on the character select, not in the quest screen, and never mentioned by me once on cohost - where I used to post development updates.
But I realised I wasn’t going to hit a critical mass and nobody was going to post a big YouTube video on how to unlock Blodeuwedd after looking up a pronunciation guide. So the next update I added them into those screens, but with cryptic clues instead. This may have ruined the magic a little, but at this point I started looking at unlock rates and they were super low.
However, the thing about cryptic clues is they are cryptic. And these only really make sense retroactively. So, I have decided to add a new mechanic to these quests. Once you have 2/3/4 full clears with different characters (not “victory?” clears, I hope getting those is not a mystery!) it’ll… just tell you. I don’t really like this limbo between a secret and an unlock but I’ve kind of painted myself into a corner.
Modifier Rerolls
In my head these are going to be some massively controversial changes. But the old design is preserved and improved, so I don’t know why I’m sweating about it so much. I’m not trying to tell anyone they’re “playing the game wrong.” I just want to reward certain behaviours and discourage others. You know, that game design stuff.
One of the design pillars of Witching Stone is the player scraping together a build from decisions and mechanical knowledge. Sometimes this will be a sweat and sometimes the stars will align and you’ll cackle as a slime is reduced to atoms.
This journey should start right here on the modifier screen! However, since you can just restart to reroll the modifiers again, what can actually start here is a series of tedious resets until a nice combination comes up. Which feels very much like a certain Sid Meier quote about players optimising. This is ultimately annoying for players: a boring start that makes losing more painful.
Although this game isn’t in Early Access, something people don’t really talk about is how editing a live game puts a lot of, for lack of a better word, restrictions on development. As a developer you cannot make sweeping changes as you can internally, as these can upset players who are accustomed to how things work already and have put in a lot of time and effort. And why piss them them off when they are, you know, your players?
So, you now have infinite rerolls! Also, when pressing the reroll button it will cycle through all the available modifiers and then shuffle them, so you will always see a specific modifier come up each rotation. Sounds good? Great! But this is an option you can toggle on. The new default behaviour is rerolls reset only when defeating a boss to encourage players to roll with it, so to speak, rather than hitting the button until something they’re familiar with comes around. Maybe it won’t be so bad? Except 5 second turns. That one will always be bad.
Per-Character Modifier Completion Tracking
In the collection screen currently, modifiers are tracked per character. And this means if you decide to max out your collection for some reason, it becomes an insane sisyphean task where you reroll repeatedly (pun intended, sorry). I have written about this before, but I regret the way this collection screen works. I wanted the completion banners to encourage players to pick new things on subsequent runs, and I think the track on spells and badges is okay, but giving gamers a big checklist and expecting them not to max it out was incredibly naive, and modifiers needing six completions each was, with the benefit of hindsight, bad.
So, another option you can toggle is tracking modifier completion by character, and the default behaviour is modifiers only have one completion state and one big banner. Under the hood it’s still tracking per character, it’s just a visual flip.
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Thanks for reading these. I think the modifier and collection systems are things I could tweak endlessly but it's hard to do in a live environment. It's this complicated mix of wanting to give people agency, but not make the tedious option the best, but also people have already invested tens of hours. I hope it all being optional means there's no animosity.