Hello everyone! Another update, another sub-zone with some additional balancing and tweaking. Was a bit run down and burned out for the first half of this update so didn't get as much done as I'd hoped for (was shooting for two new sub-zones) but I'm feeling much better now and am eager and excited to get onto the next update.
The slow down was definitely totally unrelated to the fact that after 4+ months of working on a tiny laptop after my main PC died I finally finished building a sparkling new gaming rig that's an absolute beast. So I've been catching up on my own gaming a bit :P I'm gonna just assume that any lost time was made up by re-inspiring me in my work and move on...
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DESIGN NOTES:
Balancing:
A quick note on balancing for those who may be unfamiliar with my work process. Balancing for me is an on going progress that tends to be quite experimental and comes more from my 'gut feeling' then any sort of overall plan. I tend to change things around quite a bit as I'm playing and testing, sometimes just to see what happens. Things pretty much always get changed again or else just reverted (sometimes multiple times). So my tweaks and fiddling shouldn't be treated as anything permanent or even part of some grand vision. Its just me poking at the mess of systems and seeing what happens.
Really in my mind, my only goal with balancing throughout development is to keep things basically playable while exploring the interactions of the system. There are so many major changes planned for the game that any attempt to zero in on anything approaching final balance is futile. Final balance is really something to be hammered out in the last few months of development once everything else has settled.
Talent Rework:
More and more I feel that I want to get the Talent Rework implemented soon rather than later. Playing around with the existing talents has become very limiting and I'm really itching to get the new system working. The basic idea will be for each talent to have multiple options for Rank-II only one of which the player can choose.
I'm quite inspired by DRGs overclock system which has stable, balanced and unstable upgrades. Basically a stable upgrade is a small stat boost with no tradeoffs. A balanced upgrade will significantly increase some element but comes with some sort of draw back. An unstable upgrade tends to drastically change the way the ability works. I don't intend to copy the names, or even explicitly identify upgrades as belonging to one of these categories but the general idea I think is solid. I really like the idea that the player can really focus in on what slot a talent is filling in his overall build.
As an example consider a Fire-Ball upgrade that increases the damage, blast radius, or perhaps adds the center damage bonus but decreases the range. Charge could have an upgrade that increases its range but with a longer cool-down making it better for the initial engagement. The opposite could be a shorter range but reduced cool down or more damage or more crunch damage (or some combination), making it more effective as part of your core damage loop. Something like confusion that has a MASSIVE boost when its AoE suddenly lets you target 5x as many enemies could be coupled with a higher mana cost or perhaps a short cool-down.
There are lots of exciting possibilities and honestly I'm getting annoyed at the limitations of the current system. So my current plan is to do one more update focused on sub-zones, hopefully completing the final 2 needed for Palace/Fortress and then take a break from that and do the initial implementation of the new talent system. I'm planning on just adding a ton of upgrades for each talent (will definitely need some suggestions here), and letting us all play with them for awhile. Eventually I will likely narrow it down to something like 2,3 or 4 per talent.
UPDATE 1.8:
Orc Arena
A pretty elaborate, heavily 'scripted' level. I'm not sure yet what the exact ratio will be in the finished game between standard levels and these more 'gimmicky' levels within each run, but I definitely have lots more planned. I think the right balance will come with a large enough number of different gimmick levels and having them not spawn to frequently so that the player does not encounter a specific level type very often. These are intended to be something special, unique and surprising to break up the core gameplay loop rather than replace it.
The player rings a central bell which begins a round of combat. Enemies spawn in around the arena on hatches staggered into 3 waves. So unlike most combat encounters the player is guaranteed to be surrounded, at least initially. After 3 rounds the locked gate will open allowing the player to progress. There are colored flags around the arena that will change color every 10 turns during the fight. Each color provides a different effect to all the enemies.
- Red: increased damage
- Green: regeneration
- Yellow: haste
- White: slow and unstable
Based on my testing this might actually be a bit to much complexity for a single level. It might be worth splitting the flag mechanic into its own level type and leaving The Arena to be simple waves.
Orc Gladiators are a new enemy typing appearing in The Arena that attack with a polearm type attack (technically a trident) and throw a net at the player at short range.
The Minotaur Champion
Renamed the minotaur boss to make him the Champion of The Arena. There's a joke somewhere here about him being the 2nd place champion since of course we all know Yendor is the true GOAT. The Arena will currently generate as the level prior to the Minotaur boss level and the boss level is itself an arena type level though it has only a single hard wave. Added a new ability to the Minotaur Champion which is a fast, instant charge along the orthogonal.
Warrior Rework
Played around quite a bit with reworking the warriors talent set and made some similar adjustments to the Barbarian. I have a number of goals with this reworking.
I generally think the Strength classes are a bit overpowered compared to the other classes while also being more straight forward to play. So some of this is just trying to reign them back a little.
As a general rule for the future, I'd like for Strength based talents to be the weakest talent types since Strength based equipment (heavy armor and melee weapons) are the best class of gear. Because heavy equipment requires a significant investment of strength, it should be the best equipment in the game and all characters should want to wear it if possible. Of course the question of how much they are willing to divert into strength is the balancing act. So Strength focused characters should be getting a lot more of their power from their equipment instead of their talents.
A related rule for the future would be to buff up INT based talents to be the strongest with the same idea that all characters should want to get INT based talents with the question being how much they want to divert to build up a reliable mana pool.
I'm also generally trying to stream line the class and have it be much more focused on pure defense in order to encourage the player to branch out into other talents to fill gaps. At the same time I've removed one active ability to again, encourage the player to find and make use of more.
The current talent set is:
- Power Strike: is now the starting talent as this is a simpler and more widely applicable talent. Its had a pretty big damage reduction as the combination of a decent melee weapon + a bit of ability power was giving it really crazy damage numbers (remember STR based talents are supposed to be the weakest).
- Fortitude (same)
- Shield Block (same
- Shields Up (same but moved to Tier-2 and given an 8T cool-down)
- Shield Wall: now a passive ability that grants 5%,10% Block-Chance for every enemy that is adjacent to the player. This is probably currently overpowered and will need tuning but I think the general idea of encouraging and enabling The Warrior to stand in melee helps to define the class.
- Recovery: now the penultimate Tier-3 ability. On a 10T cool-down the player can heal himself for 50% of the HP of a Healing Shroom. This consumes the nearest Healing Shroom and is not usable if there are no shrooms on the level. The details and numbers might need to be tweaked but I'm quite pleased at this implementation as I'm mostly unconvinced now of the 'once per level' type talents and this is a neat way to still restrict healing.
So The Warrior now has cool-downs of 6,8,10 making his general combat loop slower. Barbarian was adjusted so that his Cyclone-Strike is similarly 8CD and will be getting a similar rework to merge Blood-Lust and Berserk as the Tier-3 Talent (removing the once per level version).
Player Balancing:
- All characters now have +8 base HP. This is part of the ongoing process of making the non-ranked game easier. This is actually a pretty major buff to all non-strength based classes (who never really lack HP). So this is also helping to close that gap mentioned above.
- Mirror-Image Range: 2-3 => 5,7
- Crown of Slime now grants +1INT (it was the worst boss drop imo)
- Dancing-Slippers: 20% Evasion => 10% Evasion and 1DEX. I'm moving in favor of more attributes on late game items with a future reduction in the number of attribute potions/fountains.
- Freeze will no longer make the player unstable as this was making it absurdly overpowered.
- Base number of beneficial shrooms per level 10 => 12
- Blood Portal now allows the player to teleport adjacent to blood rather than only on it.
Monster Balancing:
- Gnoll Warriors now have the NPC-Recovery ability in which they go dormant for 3T and then heal themselves (previously they had no special abilities). Helps to flavor The Ice Caves as the tankier zone.
- NPC Lunge has been split into tiers so that instead of 5 range across all levels its now 4,5,6 depending on the monster level.
- Orc-Drummers haste is now single target (1 at a time).
- Bombombers now ignite from further range and more often.
- Recolored Chameleons to help make them stand out a bit more on the green background (ironic I know).
- Jellys no longer leave slime on Toxic-Waste.
Level Balancing:
I'm tackling these boss levels bit by bit each week. They were all created for RFIII and so are much larger and have more monsters than the current game design is dictating.
- Reduced number of slimes in Slime-Boss levels and tightened them up.
- Reduced number of monsters in Vampire-Boss levels and tightened them up.
- Reduced number of Ice-Giants in the Yendor final boss room from 16 => 12.
CONCLUSION:
That's it for this update! Looking forward to the next step. There's like a 50/50 chance that I'm gonna have one of those uncontrollable design outbursts and be forced to implement the whole talent rework for the next update. I guess we'll see :P Anyways, thank you everyone for all your support and feedback! Thank you everyone for reviewing the game on Steam! Hope you all enjoy the update!