Hello everyone!
Ranked Mode is finally here! Well at least a very rough and early version of it. Getting all the back end stuff working and the basic UI setup ended up taking a lot longer than I had anticipated so I didn't get the chance to do as much with it as I'd have liked. So expect next week to be a sort of 'part 2' of this update.
Why Ranked Mode?
Ranked-Mode is intended to solve a problem that I feel that game has had pretty much from its inception which is that with only a single base game mode, I have to balance the game to be both accessible to new players while still providing a challenging experience for all levels of players. This has led to a game that is somehow both impossibly difficult for first time players while at the same time being increasingly trivial as players gain experience and skill. Ranked-Mode should solve this problem very nicely by allowing me to tone down the challenge in the base game with the expectation that players seeking greater challenges can choose progress through Ranked-Mode.
What is Ranked Mode?
Ranked Mode is an optional game mode in which the players starts with a Skill Rating (SR) of 0 in the Bronze rank and gains/loses SR as they win/lose games. Starting in Bronze rank, when you begin a new game a challenge modifier will be selected from a large pool and applied to the entirety of your next run. These modifiers will make some specific aspect of the game more challenging or restrict the player in some way. At higher ranks, more modifiers will be applied, some modifiers will have their effects increased, and new, more challenging modifiers will be introduced.
This system will raise the stakes of each run since each game your SR is on the line. It will increase the challenge of each run through the modifiers and it will ensure that each run is challenging in a totally new and unpredictable way each time.
What is the Future of Ranked Mode?
Obviously what's launching with this update is just the smallest, most barebones system I could implement given a week of development. A ton of work still needs to be done with this system over the course of development. I'm planning on doing another week focused entirely to hammering out some more of the details and then I'll probably return to it occasionally to tweak, tune or expand. Some of the stuff that needs to be done:
- A lot more modifiers. Like 'a lot a lot' more. Rethlit has provided me with the code for a bunch more that look very interesting, many people have made suggestions and I have a pretty big list myself.
- More challenging modifiers should only start appearing at higher ranks. I don't think there's anything too crazy in there yet, but in the future the really tough ones should be restricted to the upper ranks. This has the added bonus of giving the player something new to see when he achieves a higher rank.
- Many of the modifiers need to scale based on the players rank. I've set many of them to just be extreme for purposes of early testing but in the future they should probably scale across the ranks.
- Race/Class restriction modifiers so that players are forced to actually master the entire scope of the game rather than relying on a single strategy.
- There likely needs to be a whole bunch of logic and restrictions as to how multiple modifiers are chosen together in order to create interesting and fair games. Right now its just doing the simplest random selection from the list.
- Right now I'm using a +100SR for win and -100SR for loss but this could be adjusted in many ways to give increasing bonuses for win streaks, fast win times etc. The SR loss could also be mitigated somewhat based on how far the player got in the run so that dying to Yendor does not result in the full 100SR loss.
- Obviously the entire UI and menus are total placeholders and the final version should have a lot more polish, flash and sparkles.
- For the higher ranks I'm considering a system in which Yendor himself is more active throughout the actual run. I'm thinking each time you level he could curse one of your items or talents, basically disabling it. The next time you level up he switch this curse. He could inflict other temporary detrimental status effects on you, or summon monsters at inopportune times etc.
So with all that said, here's what the update actually contains.
RANKED MODIFIERS
These are actually pretty easy to add now that I've got everything working so expect to see a lot more fairly quickly. Also I'd love to hear everyone's suggestions for additional modifiers as we're going to need a lot of these.
- Double Damage Swarmers
- Double Damage Tanks
- Double Damage Archers
- Double Damage Mages (guys in robes, not counting elementals, imps etc.)
- Double Damage Bosses
- Fast Tanks (actually normal speed, proper fast could be added for the highest ranks)
- Fast Archers
- Faster Swarmers
- Half Cool-Downs on all enemy heals
- Half Cool-downs on all enemy summon abilities
- No Cool-Downs on archer arrows
- No Cool-downs on mage basic staff attacks
- Max range archers
- Double chance to spawn Elites
- Double chance to spawn pit traps
- Enemies have 4 x regen rate
- Bosses regenerate
- Summoned monsters have are x2 Level
- Shrooms decay when the player leaves the level
- Experience rush: base exp rate is 50% but when entering a new level you gain the EXP boost effect for 100T (numbers likely need to be adjusted)
Monster Balance:
There's going to be a pretty significant ongoing balancing of the base games difficulty as I work to push more of the challenge into the Ranked-Mode. I'm also trying to reduce the total game length a little bit since I'm planning on expanding the dungeon in the future and want to keep the total play time around one hour.
- Slightly reduced the number of monsters on all levels of The-Upper-Dungeon, Wilderness, and Branch-1.
- Slightly reduced the damage of all enemy attacks (especially in the early to mid game).
- Increased monster base regen rate. I was looking at the numbers while implementing the Ranked regen modifiers and they were absurdly low. 400T to regen to full HP has been dropped to just 200T. This doesn't seem to really effect normal gameplay but it at least helps to discourage really absurd stalling and kiting.
- Worker Bees Size Medium => Small (no idea why they weren't)
- Scarabs HP 8 => 10 (make them a bit tankier than bees and flys)
- Zombie-Bloat Speed: normal => slow (he's supposed to be a tank)
Player Balance:
Mostly just me adjusting things as I playtest. Trying to continue to shift the Fire-Mages power out of Burst-of-Flame and into Flaming-Battle-Sphere to make him more consistent in the absence of sources of fire.
- Lightning-Bolt bonus DMG 50% => 25% (Rank-II is probably still way to useful with its massive range and ability to hit the back line. Having multiple Rank-II options would likely fix this)
- +1MP For Mana Shrooms (consider that melee characters are getting all their cooldowns reset)
- Slightly more non-healing mushrooms per level
- Burst-of-Flame Damage: 20,25 => 16,20 (its still pretty crazy strong with its massive range and AoE)
- Flaming-Battle-Sphere: Cool-Down: 20,15 => 12,8
- Flaming-Battle-Sphere: Range 5 => 7 (the range of the orbs shooting)
- Flaming-Battle-Sphere is now fire resistant.
ITEM AND EQUPIMENT BALANCE:
- All resistance gear +10% resistance (it should be much easier to get high resistance in a single stat)
- Reverted changes that removed some item drops from the game +6 across whole game
- Mushroom Cap Shield 12HP => 8HP (want less raw HP items)
- Gloves of Vampirism 8HP => 0HP but +1Life Tap (want less raw HP items)
- Reduced the damage of higher level staves (casters should be more reliant on abilities + many staves now have abilities)
- Enchantment now effects Magic Power stat
- Put attributes back on the Branch-II equipment
Note on the Branch-II attribute items: I always liked this last chance to adjust your build a bit in the late game and now with the +1 mod restriction it doesn't feel quite so extreme to have some more items with attributes on them. Also with all the new items being added with all the new effects and stats, I think its fine to slowly start reintroducing attribute items since they won't be quite as prominent as they were before.
RFIII GAME BUILD
Though the game does not officially support Linux I've heard from many players that RFIIIs Windows build was working fine using Proton and now RFIV doesn't. So I've switched back to using the exact same wrapper as RFIII was using and have not being able to notice any differences as a Windows user. If this works fine for everyone on Windows and allows our friends on Linux to enjoy the game then I'll just carry on with it. If we start to get conflicts obviously I'm completely prioritizing Windows players since, as mentioned, the game is not officially supported on Linux. Hope this will work for everyone!
There's an odd thing with nwjs (the wrapper for the game), that causes a popup to appear for a split second when the game launches. I had to literally screen record and do a CSI frame by frame analysis to see what it was even saying. Basically its just complaining that our local save files were made with a different version of nwjs. New players will never see this and I assume if you do a full reinstall it will go away as well but if your like me and these things make you a little crazy you can:
Use your file explorer to open: %LOCALAPPDATA%/
Then go into RogueFableIV\User Data\Default
Delete both Web Data and Web Data-journal.
This fixes the popup.
Anyways that's it for this week. As previously mentioned, I'm planning on getting a lot of actual meaningful stuff done on Ranked-Mode next week now that all the back-end is implemented. Thank you everyone for all your support and feedback! I hope you enjoy the update!
I should also add that if you want to fiddle around with your rank... for testing purposes... open the console and:
gs.globalData.skillRating = 2500;
gs.saveGlobalData();
HOT FIX 1.2.1
There is currently a bug where SR fails to update upon winning the game that I'm still trying to isolate. Random/Scar caught it on his stream and I managed to replicate it once out of about 20 tries. Still not sure what's causing it. For now, if this occurs just use the code above to add 100SR. You may need to reload the game after to get it to display in the menu correctly.
- Fixed crashing with Fast-Tanks
- Fixed Fast-Swarms not working at all
- Fixed crashing with Max-Archer-Range Modifiers and Arrow-Storm and Sniper-Shot