Greetings folks,
July contained 2 notable features worth mentioning: the interactive tutorial and status pop-stacks.
One of the pieces that I'd been putting off was the onboarding experience. I hoped that having good UX throughout a run would be enough to teach the player how the game works. While I think that can happen in many games, it didn't with Self Recurse. No matter how many tooltips, guidance text popups, etc. that I added, I still got asked for a better way to illustrate the depth of the game starting with fundamentals. If I had to choose the biggest learning point, it'd be the energy system. Even veterans to the Score DBZ/GT card games (a large influence to the energy system) gave the feedback that they didn't understand how it worked in Self Recurse. The other feedback that I saw/heard is that players would bypass the old tutorial because, even though it was a video, they did not like that they could not control its progression. With all that in mind, I decided to buckle down and make an interactive tutorial.
The tutorial ended up being a long endeavor (it took nearly the entire month) and it exposed some bugs with the status effect system. Self Recurse has several keywords on cards and they broken into 2 categories: statuses and action effects. You can think of statuses as being reactive and lasting longer than the item that just played them. The most common example is shields. You play a card and shields will last a turn. Action effects, instead, are instantaneous. A card that heals Phalaen will heal her, then the effect is over with. There is no lingering to see if something reacts.
The status effects were built in a way were they would get iterated through in a way that didn't block phases. For many of them, this wasn't an issue. Shields were though. We ran into what's called a race condition where enemies could potentially take their turn really fast and they would use an action to gain shields before their upkeep truly completed. This resulted in situations where the enemy would use the action to gain the shields and the upkeep would remove them. Now, this didn't happen every time, but when it did, the game was far too easy. Phalaen essentially got a free turn. Due to it not always happening and enemies primarily having action effects, I didn't catch it and it was never reported to me. But I noticed it happening in the tutorial and I grew compelled to fix it. I ruminated on situations where newer players would think they had a grasp on the energy mechanics, but they would be inconsistent with shields. This is pertinent during the tutorial because the player needs to know how they still be effective on turns where the enemy builds up shields (i.e., fighting a Defender). The new system waits until all the statuses have been acted upon before proceeding. This new status system made it into the July features because of its importance.
If you've read all of this, thanks for staying interested. I've got a list of bugs and features I'm focusing on during August. Following that, I'll likely dive into user experience (UX) research mode. I received a good deal of feedback at this point, but there are certain pieces that I have to ask the community about. They just seem too opinionated, which isn't a bad thing, but it makes me more considerate when making choices.
I hope you all stay cool in these hot months and thanks again for following the Self Recurse journey.
Will
Tech updates
> Feature work
- tutorial v3: interactive tutorial
> Bug fixes
- enemies statuses race condition: this is programmer speak for a bug that would occassionally remove the enemy shields. While it could feel good for this happen to the player, that undercuts the challenge of the game that keeps us all engaged.
> Balancing
- n/a