Hello!
I'm Tony back once again. Not with the ill behaviour, as fans of 90's hip hip or dance music might expect, but with another update on what we've been doing this month on Into the Restless Ruins.
Watching People Play the Demo
As I mentioned in last month's dev update the demo came out in early August, so a big chunk of our work recently has been watching folks play. We've been really blown away by the response to it, it's been much better than we expected!
Thousands of you have played, and we've been really enjoying seeing the layouts you've created and the extra challenges you've set for yourselves as we've watched Youtube and Twitch streams.
A big shout out to the folks who joined our Discord and chatted tactics while sharing their crazy builds. Honestly, we would never have imagined that someone would play for this long and aim to fill in the entire map!
And in particular, Discord user Pink Dragon who amongst other feats managed to complete a run while only using single-space rooms!
Feedback Fixes!
It's not all been fun and games though, getting player feedback has been very useful for us to see where we need to focus our efforts. We sat down and went through everything mentioned and prioritised it all based on how many times it was reported and how quick it would be to fix. Believe me, that was a long meeting.
Without seeing how people play the game "in the wild" we would never have thought that we should add "mega crit" for times when you've managed to get your Critical Chance above 100%!
We also realised that people weren't keeping track of their health between nights, and the health regeneration was pretty much invisible as a result, so we added the health bar to the building phase (well re-added, since it used to be there but we took it out at some point). That also meant we needed to change the colour of the Corruption bar - since we couldn't really have two different red bars at the same time!
Another "wouldn't have realised we needed it" change was swapping the side of some card information so that in a busy hand it's easier to see the cost and more of the name, which make it easier to pick out the card you're after.
By far the most consistent bit of feedback we received was that the Redraw mechanic was confusing. This was down to a combination of factors, but mainly that players didn't realise how it was triggered - that once you clicked on the Redraw button you had to choose a card to Discard.
We've addressed this now, both in making the interface much clearer around what it's waiting for you to do, but also in adding a brief tutorial explaining the mechanic.
We've also made redraw more deeply involved in some of the cards, by adding "on redraw" effects. This means that some cards don't behave in a standard way. As two quick examples, the Graveyard will draw two cards rather than one when redrawn, and the Toadstool Patch+ doesn't leave your hand when redrawn and instead rerolls the Charm that you'll be given if you play it.
We've also been adding lots of new cards (boosts and rooms) to make runs less reliant on Camp Fires and Portal Gates by giving players more variety in how they can affect their torch, and a few extra travel options. Now you have a small chance of finding extra Exit Portals behind the fog late in a run!
Run Modifiers
But we haven't just been working on this that came from feedback, we've been moving our own plans forward as well.
Run modifiers are a key bit of our design for hugely adding to the variety and replayability of the game, and also work as a player-customisable difficulty level.
Modifiers (which we call "Cantrips" - a Scottish word for spell or mischievous trick) are small numbers tweaks like “enemies are higher level”, but can also be things that fundamentally change your approach and tactics in a level such as “you have infinite build points”, “draw your whole deck every turn”, or "all cards have purge" (better hope you get a lot of Favours in that run!)
Each Cantrip has a "dread" value that fills up a bar and is translated in to a score multiplier, which you can roughly equate to a difficulty level. This also adds a bit of a meta-game in figuring out more achievable combinations of Cantrips that get high multipliers.
They are all locked behind goals to achieve during play. For example “have 20 build points in a night” would unlock the infinite build point modifier. So to unlock more Cantrips to try out you will have a lot of targets to aim for in a run, which also gives more variety than just each run being about trying to defeat the Warden (and also gives hints at what is achievable in the game!).
The number of Cantrips you can apply at a time is limited by your player level, giving more need to level up to achieve the largest combinations, and we also save “mastery” of a Cantrip if you complete a level with it on – which gives even more replayability to folks who want to aim for 100% completion!
Phew, that's a lot of stuff! Before I sign off, I just wanted to quickly shout out another game that Ant Workshop folks have been working on - Ice Cream Wars. If you're a fan of silly arcade driving games such as Crazy Taxi, you might find this right up your alley!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2917900/Ice_Cream_Wars/
As always, if you'd like to chat more, you can use the Steam forums here, or join us on our Discord!
We'll be back next month with more updates (maybe new levels and bosses?)
Cheers,
James, Rachel & Tony.