This month I've focused on creating a lot of content to fill out the gameplay loop in Survival mode. Mostly temporary visuals here, the time has been spent on design and implementing the features rather than making things look pretty (that comes next). There's a lot of new stuff so let's get into it!
Survival Mode Temples
Temples are a new type of island in Survival mode where legendary ancient crab ancestors are worshipped and powerful rewards can be found. A random temple from the list below is chosen when entering a temple portal (entering a temple portal requires a key):
- Temple Of Light: Spawns an epic or legendary chest
- Temple Of Greed: Spawns a greed chest
- Temple Of Evil: Interacting with the altar gives you random pickups for 25% of your health
- Temple Of Doom: Spawns elite enemies and locks the doors when the player opens the spawned chest
- Temple Of Joy: Spawns a penguin companion perk
- Temple Of Fortune: A large amount of crystal pickups randomly spawn around the temple when entering and the player can try to pick up as many as possible before they disappear
- Temple Of Time: Interacting with the altar sends the player back in time, starting a new run but retaining all weapons, weapon mods and perks
- Temple Of Chance: Interacting with the altar takes one of your weapon mods or perks, with a 60% chance to duplicate it and a 40% chance to consume it
- Temple Of Health: Spawns a gold heart
- Temple Of Wisdom: Interacting with the altar levels up 3 random perks by 1 tier each
- Temple Of Identity: Interacting with the altar randomizes weapons, weapon mods and perks
- Temple Of Strength: Spawns 3 random damage based weapon mods / perks
- Temple Of Sacrifice: Interacting with the altar takes 3 random weapon mods (of the lowest rarity possible) and spawns a legendary weapon mod in return
- Temple Of Wealth: Interacting with the altar costs crystals but has a high chance to drop a random pickup (costs double each time)
- Temple Of Keys: Interacting with the altar costs a key but has a high chance to drop an epic or legendary pickup
- Temple Of Peril: The temple is filled with hazards but contains a random legendary pickup in the center of the temple: most players will take damage in order to get the pickup
- Temple Of Arms: Spawns 3 random weapons
- Temple Of Love: Spawns a random companion perk
- Temple Of Purity: Interacting with the altar removes all negative effects of greed perks
- Temple Of Protection: Spawns a gold armor pickup
- Temple Of Hope: Spawns a Lil Roller companion perk (a tiny pufferfish friend that rolls around and deals melee damage to enemies, growing larger over time)
Survival Mode Defense Islands
Many of the island types in Survival mode are focused on clearing out the enemies as quickly as possible with an offensive playstyle, but I wanted to balance this out with an island type that is focused on defending an area from incoming enemies, switching things up for a nice challenge and requiring new strategies to consistently clear. At least one player on the team must be in the defense area for 60 seconds to clear: enemies will continuously spawn during that time and if the player leaves the defense area at any time, the countdown will pause until they re-enter.
At around the 45 second mark things usually start getting intense, with enemies almost becoming overwhelming, leading to a tense final few seconds before the timer runs out. Defense islands are a great way to make use of snipers and other long range weapons + AOE weapon mods as there is usually a line of enemies slowly approaching from a distance.
With the addition of Temple and Defense island types, there are now the following potential island types per biome:
- Shop: Purchase loot from Tony the shopkeeper
- Temple (requires a key to enter): Get a reward matching the temple type
- Wave (Common Reward): Clear a wave of standard enemies
- Horde (Rare Reward): Clear 2 hordes of enemies (each horde being a big wave of a single enemy type)
- Defense (Rare Reward): Defend an area against incoming enemies for 60 seconds
- Challenge (Epic Reward): Clear 3 waves of enemies with a random challenge modifier active
- Elite (Epic Reward): Defeat an elite enemy
- Boss (Legendary Reward): Defeat the boss to move to the next biome
Survival Mode Perks
As mentioned last month with the new weapon mod system, I have overhauled many of the perks and added a lot of new ones: there are now over 60 perks in the game, and that's just for the beta- many more will be added in the future.
Common Perks
- Fortitude: Max health increased after clearing each island
- Endurance: Heal after clearing each island
- Scavenger: Heal when collecting crystals
- Valued Customer: Heal when entering shops
- Potent Potions: Heal more from potions
- Vitality: Damage increased when at full health
- Second Wind: Damage increased when at low health
- Collector: Damage increased for each perk that you have
- Autoloader: Chance to instantly reload when swapping weapons
- Adrenaline: Fire rate increased for a short time after eliminating an enemy
- Haste: Grenade and ability cooldown times reduced
- Lockpick: Chance for keys to not be consumed when using temple portals
- Time Is Money: Gain crystals over time
- Paycheck: Gain crystals after clearing each island
- Charged Crystals: Crystal pickups take longer to disappear
- Tony's Black Card: Shop prices are discounted
- Special Delivery: Shops contain more items for sale
- Shark Fin: Chance for enemies to retreat when spawning
- First Impressions: Chance for the first enemies on each island to have 1 health
Rare Perks
- Personal Space: Max health increased after each close range elimination
- Medic: Max health increased after each one shot elimination
- Grim Reaper: Heal after eliminating enemies
- Hard Target: Incoming damage reduced
- Sharp Wings: Damage increased when airborne
- Checklist: Damage increased after every 10 eliminations
- Assassin: Damage increased after each one shot elimination
- Life Savings: Damage increased when collecting crystals
- Money Is Power: Damage increased for every 100 crystals you have
- Tasty Orange: Damage increased for each enemy eliminated in an island (resets for each island)
- Speed Demon: Movement speed and jump height increased
- Stopwatch: Chance to reset grenade cooldowns after every elimination
- Reroll: Reroll chest loot (up to 3 times per island if the perk is Tier 3)
- Blood Money: Gain crystals when healing
- Scary Mask: Elites and bosses have less health
Epic Perks
- Big Hearts: Gain more max health from hearts
- Grave Dodger: Invulnerable for a short time when at 1 health
- Bulletproof: Chance to block incoming damage
- Torn Safety Net: Chance to cheat death and get 25% health back
- Gemstone: Damage increased after clearing each island
- Grenadier: Gain extra uses of your grenade
- Strength In Numbers: Gain extra uses of your ability
- Green Dice: Luck increased
- Good Omen: Chance to not be affected negatively by Greed totems while retaining the benefit
- Restock: Reroll the contents of the entire shop (up to 3 times per shop if the perk is Tier 3)
- Repelling Flip: Flipping repels nearby enemy projectiles
- Bonus Crystals: More crystals drop when eliminating enemies
- Bonus Loot: A random consumable drops after every island (mainly potions or armor, a very low chance for others)
- Bargain Hunter: Random pickups in the shop are free
- Gold Coupon: Chance for a purchase in the shop to be free
- Snatcher: Enemies eliminated at close range drop more crystals
- Rare Treasure: Enemies have a small chance to drop a random pickup when eliminated
Legendary Perks
- Divine Blessing: Damage and health substantially increased
- Ground Slam: Gain a large speed boost when flipping in mid air, dealing AOE damage and knocking back any nearby enemies if connecting with the ground during this time
- Powerslide: Sliding shoots out fiery sparks that damage and ignite nearby enemies
- Ice Flip: Flipping freezes and knocks back nearby enemies
- Level Up: Duplicate weapon mods spawn nearby after every boss fight
- Duplicator: Chance for pickups to drop twice
- Faulty Chests: Chance for unchosen chest loot to not disappear
- Care Package: An asteroid containing bonus loot drops after clearing each island
- Storm Cloud: A lightning bolt periodically strikes low health enemies, dealing AOE shock damage
Survival Mode Roguelike Elements
As you can probably tell from the info above, I'm trying to add as much content as possible to allow for varied runs and support emergent gameplay, ensuring that the game has a good amount of replay value. The goal is for it to be possible to experience different scenarios on each run since Survival mode has some roguelike elements:
- Permadeath: The run ends when you die and you lose any loot collected in that run
- Semi Randomly Generated Levels: The order of levels, types of enemies that spawn, loot rewards, hazards that spawn and more are randomized so you can never predict what will happen next
- No Permanent Upgrades: Other than unlocking new types of loot that can drop in future runs (of equal quality to the base set of loot that is unlocked when first playing), a player who has played the game for 500 hours will have no health or strength advantages over a player that is starting their first run. This ensures that the difficulty stays consistent and the player earns a victory by improving, not by the game getting easier over time due to persistent strength upgrades
The beauty of roguelike elements in general is that you get the fun and satisfying build up in power of a looter shooter or RPG condensed into a play session that takes less than an hour. Personally with the amount of games coming out these days, I don't have the patience to grind through an 12+ hour game to slowly level up my character: it just doesn't appeal to me anymore. It's way more fun to jump into a game with roguelike elements and blast through a session, sometimes becoming overpowered and getting a sweet victory or sometimes being handed a hard defeat due to a mistake. While I'm aiming for a core Survival run to take about 45 minutes if just going straight for the boss, much longer runs are supported by being able to loop back as many times as you want to the first biome instead of facing the boss. In the future when more content is added, there'll be unique paths to take when looping before seeing the first biomes again. Difficulty starts to exponentially increase when looping so if going for the highest islands survived record, it will start getting really tough to survive after the first or second loop.
I believe a good game with roguelike elements requires a number of things to be done right in order to be successful:
- Fast + Satisfying Combat / Looting: Makes progressing through the earlier biomes not feel like a chore
- RNG Done Right: Randomness in games can feel unfair in many cases, so it's important to ensure that there's always the possibility for powerful loot to drop at any time in the run
- POWER: Upgrades should dramatically increase your power, getting a 5% boost to something is unnoticeable and boring in most cases
- Emergent Gameplay: Every run should have a memorable story with unexpected moments, tough decisions and close calls that are only possible through creating a truly dynamic system that combines levels, enemies, loot and hazards together in ways that naturally create interesting scenarios
- Depth: Easy to learn, hard to master. By providing the player with a deep set of build options (weapons, weapon mods and perks in the case of Crab Champions) while also having a fairly difficult gameplay loop, there's a lot of fun improving and figuring out powerful combinations and strategies. Too easy and the game no longer is fun and runs don't hold value, too hard and each run ends frustratingly early before the player has a chance to get a good build going
- Plentiful Content: Stops things getting repetitive and boring (duh)
I'm focusing heavily on all of these goals and will work hard until I'm happy that they have all been met.
Survival Mode Difficulty Changes
While playtesting on Hard difficulty, I had gotten the game balance to a really fun point where each run felt challenging but winnable (there was always something that I could have done differently to prevent my death, enemies were never bullet sponges but also never too weak etc.) and playing for several hours trying to get to the final boss (and failing) was actually really enjoyable. I then playtested on the Easy difficulty and blazed through the entire game first try. Even though this was my goal all along, it of course felt hollow and not fun due to how easy it was.
The fun in any games with roguelike elements isn't the act of completing them, it's the challenge, self improvement and knowledge in the journey towards mastery that is. Enemies that previously scared you become laughable and next level strategies start to form after enough experimentation. Memorable close calls are had and each run towards your first victory feels like "this'll be the one".
For this reason, I'm removing the Easy difficulty as I believe that there is far more value and enjoyment to be had working through a game with a baseline difficulty as long as it always feels fair: earning victory is far more rewarding this way. The main design goal here for me is that with experience it WILL be still possible to blaze through the game, when you have mastered the core mechanics.
I understand that this change isn't for everyone but I'm ok with that and the more I think about it, the less I want to offer a watered down easy mode at all: the intent is for Survival mode to be challenging and for anyone completing it to have experienced and overcome the same obstacles. So as it stands the game will be carefully balanced for the new "Normal" difficulty. The much harder "Nightmare" difficulty will still unlock when completing the game once, for players that like an extreme challenge.
Thanks for reading these long lists and listening to my random thoughts on design this month, it's not for everyone but I thought it was worth explaining what my goals are and the reasoning behind them!
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