Hi all!
Next next patch will bring a tech change that will prevent the remaining cheesing/save scam opportunities that are readily available inside of the game on the world map. I want to take a bit of time to explain how it happened and why we’re only fixing it now.
When we initially added encounters to the game, they were pretty tightly coupled to their presentation within the game. Specifically, the way we presented the encounters (the book) was directly in control of advancing the encounter state forward, and just was the encounter state. We would inspect the encounters for a page, prepare all the UI widgets and show them. Clicking on a button that advances to the next page would look directly into the read-only encounter resource, change the text of the page, change the buttons and that was about it.
Later, when we added randomness to encounters, we had the issue of pages changing something that should be perceived as a “fixed” value, like the amount of gold to grant or the required hero to use an option. This was fixed by finalizing the encounters, which essentially means making a copy of the encounter resource and pre-rolling all random value ranges to fixed values.
After that, we wanted a tool that would make sure the encounters are not busted, like having dead ends, or a page having no clickable options and the like. The encounters are just text files, after all, and it's easy to make mistakes. To make this possible, we had to change how we present the encounters, and it could no longer be tied to the presentation. While the tool is not perfect because the encounters are very complicated, it at least finds most of the issues.
At this point, we pretty much had the capability of driving the encounter state forward without having a UI for it. This was the final piece of the puzzle needed to even be able to make no cheesing possible.
I consider cheesing anything that makes it possible (and easy) to abuse the games’ save system to gain resources infinitely or retry choices. This could be abused by getting resources from an encounter, closing the game or returning to lobby, then continuing the game. The result would be that the previously gained resources were still there and you’d restart from the beginning of the encounter. Not good. This is pretty much the reason why the game was never saved during encounters, and why you could restart them by the quit+continue combo.
My latest change fixes all of these issues. Any time you do anything that one would expect to have a permanent effect (picking new skills, upgrading them, spending resources, advancing through encounters, etc), we save the game, which now contains your current encounter state. This means if you leave the world map for any reason then continue your game, you will be set to the same page you were on when you closed it.
There are two main reasons I wanted to do this.
The first one is the reroll ability cards button we added to hard mode. Until the patch hits, the button is disabled during active encounters because of the aforementioned tech reasons: you could in theory reroll your ability cards, see ones you don’t like and decide you don’t actually want to spend the essence on it. All you’d have to do was leave the game, then continue and you’d be reset back to the start of the encounter with no changes to your resources or your party in case you leveled them and picked skills. This is obviously bad on many levels.
The second reason was the remaining few cheese/scams that were possible. You could advance through an encounter, reach the random card choice (which was always fully randomized to account for the quit+continue cheese), pick one, and if you didn’t like the outcome, quit+continue and you’d be back at the start of the encounter with another chance to get a better outcome.
The change done here solves both issues and will make all of your choices during the world map fully permanent in your current run.
The other improvement I’m making is one that’s been bugging me for a while, and now I have time to devote to fixing it. I’ll likely write another blog post on the topic once the fix is up, but in case I don’t, here’s the short of it: for some player characters, their movement during fights isn’t undoable (Tariq specifically, if not a few others as well). The issue has the same cause as being unable to undo movement for a Mystic character that has the Hallow aura active.
Thanks for reading, I hope you don’t mind the little glimpse in the technology part of the game. If you wanna ask stuff, or suggest stuff, join us on our Discord server or post here on Steam. Till next time!
MarkoP