Hey all! Dropping an update on development after a very useful playtest, which quite largely defined and verified the direction the game should take.
Numbers & Playtest
Let's start with some awesome news and numbers: Tuoni has surpassed 4.5k wishlists before any public demo, which is a huge number! Additionally, Playtests have been a huge success. Discord and feedback forms were filled with useful and creative feedback, and I am happy to say that almost every one of them was so spot-on that they ended up directly in my development backlog. On top of that, playtesters seemed to really enjoy the game, which is awesome to see, and numbers show that also: Average Playtime for Playtest-build was 2 hours 1 minute, which is a very good number! So, thank you all for your support, whether it's simply telling your friends about this game, pressing the wishlist button, or even coming to a Discord and contributing to the game's development with your feedback and comments.
Ranged Combat
Initially, when I started development, I set some constraints for myself to manage scope and design. One of them was that combat would consist only of melee combat & spellcasting. That means, arrows could come in the form of casting a spell that shoots an arrow, but no auto-attack, archery, bows, or wands
However, Tuoni focuses heavily on exploration, combat, and crafting different builds. With this (and a couple of playtest comments) in mind, I decided to prototype Archery, and it fit very well into the game. Ranged combat opened up many builds and offered interesting trade-offs for players: Some enemies are easier to kill without taking a hit, but a charging moose or leaping predators are suddenly twice as scary as before.
So, in addition to blades, axes, hammers, and staves, I decided to add two new weapon types: Bows & Wands.
Bows and Wands are essentially quite similar, but geared towards physical & magical playstyles. Naturally, with a vast selection of skills, one can change even that: For example, a warlock that infuses arrows with shadow-energy, creating a magical archer.
Here's said Shadow Archer at work (VFX still in WIP stage)
Ranged attacks do similar damage as melee counterparts, but offer an interesting trade-off. Targets take more damage the further they are, but at a melee range, ranged-weapons damage is halved.
The shape of the grid proposed a unique challenge to the ranged combat and trade-offs mentioned above. As Tuoni is built on a 16x24 pixel rectangular grid, and the viewport is wider horizontally than vertically, the equal-distance to all directions does not quite work: Enemies at the top-edge of the visible area may be only 6 tiles away, while an enemy quite close in horizontal direction may be 7-8 tiles away (illustrated below). This posed a challenge when a 6 tile-range in attacks was plentiful in the vertical direction, but felt very short in the horizontal direction. The issue was fixed by implementing a scaled distance system, where the horizontal line has a slightly larger range than the vertical one. This is similarly balanced in enemies' movement speed when chasing player, averaging slightly faster in horizontal pathing, and detection range being two tiles larger.
Bows and Wands will have their own unique skill trees (perhaps multiple) that offer perks for that combat style. More about those later.
Demo Timeline
Initially, I planned to release Demo on early January. However, I really want to squeeze in coherent and well-thought-out Ranged Combat as well as some content updates to Demo, so a more accurate time is somewhere between the end of February and early March. However, if you are itching to play while reading this, head over to Discord and join the playtest! There is still one update (0.9.0) coming to Playtest, which will include ranged classes & combat, as well as some other new goodies.
Link to Discord.
What do you think about the ranged combat in Roguelikes/Grid-based games? All feedback is very much welcome!
Thanks for reading.
-Old Dog