LORTers,
Hope you've been well. The team at Big Distraction has been hard at work creating our biggest update yet for LORT. We want to pull back the curtain and give you a look at a big change coming in the v0.8 update - an overhaul to our weapons system called Weapons 2.0. Please take a few minutes to read this in full, don't skim it. It's important to understand all the context before you get to the juicy images and gifs near the end. Let's jump in.
The Current Weapon System
So far in LORT, we’ve had the traditional RPG rarity color system across weapons that progressed with each map. With each new map you visited, you were guaranteed to jump one rarity color, sometimes two if you were lucky. The way it worked meant it wasn’t actually tied to a rarity's chance to drop at all, you would just get the rarity that was assigned to the map you were on. So while the weapon said Rare, or Epic, or Legendary, it didn't necessarily feel that way since you are guaranteed a certain tier color per map. It also shares the same rarity colors as the powerups which is a bit confusing. We've also had a lot of feedback from players not understanding the value of Attributes, how they impact weapons and what is the best way to effectively increase your power during a run.
Introducing: Weapons 2.0
We have created a new system to help resolve the issues above as well as provide other benefits. The new system provides better clarity around weapon and attribute power progression, increases the amount of weapons we can quickly make, and is foundational to the future endless mode.
Behold: the comparison between old and new systems. Me-thinks me-sees some new weapons perchance.
Here is a quick overview of the changes coming in Weapons 2.0:
Weapons 2.0 removes weapon rarity colors and switches to a numbered weapon level system. This makes it much easier to understand what your power level is on a weapon at any moment.
Weapons 2.0 also re-aligns weapon colors to the Attribute(s) they scale with. You will see weapon drops colored red, green, or blue, aligning them clearly with the Strength, Agility, and Intelligence Attributes for easier understanding and power mapping. This system will also work for multi-attribute scaling weapons.
Weapons that have an imbued powerup now have a visual indicator both when looking at the weapon on the ground and viewing the tooltip. You will now see VFX floating around the weapon indicating it has a imbued powerup and the rarity of that powerup.
The left weapon scales with Agility and has no imbued powerups. The middle weapon scales with Strength and has 1 Epic imbued powerup, noted by the single circle and purple line color. The right weapon scales with Intelligence and has 2 stacks of a Legendary imbued powerup, noted by the two circles and gold line color.
Okay well this sounds different. So how does it benefit you the player, LORT the game, and the development process?
More frequent weapon upgrades and loot switching - You’ll have more chances to find more powerful weapons more often on each map instead of just one single upgrade or side-grade. Skilling into Strength? When you see a red weapon drop, you instantly know you want to go up and check it's level.
More Weapons - This change means that we have a lot of weapon models that were used for higher rarities that are no longer being used. We are going to work on turning a lot of those into entirely new weapons, with their own unique feel, attacks and stats.
Faster Weapon Creation Time - Now that we have a weapon level system with less art requirements, we can very quickly design and implement weapons. The development times on weapons is now way shorter, meaning we can ship more weapons with each update. We know y'all want more weapon variety, so do we, and this helps us get there much faster. An example of two new prototype weapons we made very quickly is in the gif at the end of this section.
Clearer Attribute Power Progression - There has been a lot of feedback from players not feeling powerful enough. We believe a lot of this comes down to the game not reinforcing the importance of Attributes. This new system better ties Attributes back to weapons and makes parsing weapon drops a bit easier: when leveling up your Attribute, you will be able to see exactly which attacks and abilities you are upgrading.
Setting up for Endless Mode - By switching to weapon levels instead of rarities, weapons can go to an infinite level number. This is needed for the heavily requested Endless Mode where you will need to acquire more powerful weapons that scale with the enemies, endlessly. This is foundational to the future Endless Mode that we plan to prioritize after we ship the v0.8 update.
New prototype weapon using previous Mace art.
Another new prototype weapon using previous Mace art.
New attribute level up visual effects that also shows you what abilities and weapons the attribute will effect.
We started actively playtesting the update with a small group of players last week. The feedback has been super valuable and we are continuing to make adjustments based on the feedback. Nothing yet to announce on updated release timing for v0.8.
Big Distraction Team Update
If you didn't know, we are a small team here at Big Distraction. We announced last month we brought on a new Environment Artist who has already started adding to the v0.8 update. This month, we are onboarding two new members to our team, all with the goal of bringing you more LORT. That'll bring us to 11 people working on LORT full time. We appreciate everyone's patience as we work to make the v0.8 update as meaningful and meaty as we can.
This is just one big taste of what is in store for v0.8. We've also got new Quests, a new Adventurer, major visual and performance updates, and much more. We'll break down some of those other new features in future posts as we get closer to shipping the v0.8 update to you. Oh and we are happy to announce that by popular request, the update will ship with new Sprint settings that allow for hold, toggle, and auto-Sprint. And finally, one last sneak peak at one of our new Quest enemies:
If I had a penny for everytime I LORTed, I'd have a LORT ton of pennies.