Biweekly is a very strange word. I'm pretty sure I've Googled it at least five times and I’m still not sure whether it’s supposed to mean twice a week or every other week. It seems that it’s allowed to mean both, making it so no sane person will ever use it.
Anyway, our first biweekly update is here, and let’s take a closer look at what’s in there.
New Aspects
Prewarm was in the game before, but I’m showing it here because those three now create a nice 1-2-3 series.
Wake-up Call is a filler. The game probably needs more fillers at the moment.
Doppler’s Shift is much more interesting. It buffs everything that restores Link, makes the Missing Link more useful, and negatively "scales" into the late game, making increasing Link less efficient. It also applies pressure to the player in a way that feels fair. My only concern is that +3 Actions might be too much.
Home Reading is another first-turn aspect. It’s easy to understand and might be very impactful, plus it has some nice synergies (first-action Mirror Copy) and anti-synergies (Clear Mind).
I don’t like that it has the word "Home" in the name, though. There’s no need to use "Home" on an aspect that doesn’t reference the Home node in its effect.
Home Surveillance is supposed to combo with non-Home reboots, which are all a little weak right now.
The last two don’t have the final art yet.
In the case of Pioneer, it’s not only about the artwork but also about the flavor. The effect is clean and interesting, but I have doubts that "Pioneer" matches it well enough. I was thinking along the lines of "exploration" (reboots force you to keep exploring), but it’s a stretch.
Tapped Line is really cool, but it certainly needs some kind of drawback. Even though the game doesn’t have too many ways of generating Callbacks, "doubling" the value on all of them is going to be too strong. It’s an interesting comparison with Stack Overflow.
New Cores
Dr. Godron, Ned, and Bucky
(the artwork is not final)
All three of them are early-game Cores that somehow refer to the concept of Full Memory. Two of them have Data Overflow triggers, and the third one has an "If memory is full" check. I think they turned out at least decent. You’re almost guaranteed to meet at least one of them during a Deep run.
Tetra, Hexa, and Octa
The idea here was to make a reference to Deca from Slay the Spire. It was somewhat obvious that it should have "Set to 10" somewhere in its effect, but setting both Trace and Firewall to 10 felt very strong, so I thought we could create Deca’s smaller brothers. That’s how we got Tetra, Hexa, and Octa.
The problem with this concept is that 3D shapes don’t telegraph the correct numbers. We needed 4-6-8, and those shapes were chosen because they have 4, 6, and 8 sides. But I don’t think it works.
It’s not bad, and by the way, said Deca from Slay the Spire has 8 sides and 6 vertices, which absolutely makes no sense.
I think we'll keep looking here. There should be a much better way to telegraph numbers through artwork (flat polygons would probably be much better).
Ayrton
The idea here is simple—force players to make laps around the level.
It introduces the "restore" keyword, where Checkpoint gets recreated if it was somehow destroyed. I think this is required if we want to have this Core as a late-game boss.
On the other hand the prospect of destroying all the checkpoints and then completing the level in one turn is very tempting. Need to keep an eye on this one.
New Nodes
Nodes are the least important direction for us to work on. We’re long past 100 nodes (it should be more than 150, not counting Cores), and that means that a single node’s impact on the pool is very weak. Of course, we’ll keep adding more, but for now, I think we should slow down and concentrate on more important gameplay systems.
Paradox is very cool, though. It might be the highest skill-ceiling node in the game right now. I certainly have very little idea how to use it.
Golden Lotus
The other cool thing we’ve added is a Golden Lotus location and a loot node with the same name. Alex really outdid himself with the artwork on this one. They both grant +3 Actions when activated/visited.
The one on the location proved that one-time next-level bonuses work and are fun to play with, so we’ll add Link and Memory boost locations in the next update.
Conclusion
This thing is getting long, and I don’t know how many people are going to read it (you can let me know by hitting the Like button or reaching out with feedback), so I better wrap it up.
The past two weeks made me realize how big the game has already gotten and how much more we need to do to make it complete. It will take time. But I think we’ll be able to handle it. Two weeks at a time.
See you then.
Denis