200 New Battles!
Alright, that is a huge exaggeration, but it's also kinda true! I'm going to walk you through what my last 3 weeks was like.
Last update, I added a new burden effect that flips how the safety bubbles work, so that you'd have to stay outside of them instead of inside. The problem is that this only affected about 15 battles in any meaningful way, and I wanted to get more out of this effect. So, I set up a system that can put the bubbles into any battle while this burden effect is active. At first, I was just going to make it place a few bubbles randomly on screen in every battle, but there are just so many unique fights, and it was causing problems with certain monsters. So, as I always do, I put in all the effort to make it unique to every single battle. This variant is now called a Repelling Battle, and all 107 monsters can have it!
While I was at it, I added another burden effect that adds full arena attacks and bubbles that you have to stay inside of just like normal. Of course, these bubbles had to be positioned differently in most battles, but I already had the whole system set up, so I did both variants together as I went through every monster. This variant is called a Wrathful Battle, and it applies to 94 monsters! In the future, I will add some extra effect to the remaining few battles that are already Rage Battles normally.
Now I had about 200 monster variants that would only appear if you had a couple of specific burdens. This kinda seemed like a waste, so I put these both of these effects on new sets of Bounty Gifts. That way they can sometimes appear in story mode too.
Then I was hit with an idea! What if there was a random stage in a story run that forced all the monsters to have one of these bounties? A special stage where every choice was a Wrathful or Repelling Monster. And so a new type of random event was born! These new Stage Events will give specific themes to all the monsters and gifts you have to choose from. Honestly, I can't believe I never thought of doing this before.
Speaking as the scope creeping developer of this seemingly infinitely sprawling game, there are 2 very important things about this new event type, especially for ME!
1) Stage Events are very quick and easy to make. They have no dialog to write, no art to draw, and all they do is arrange pieces of the game that I've already made.
2) I've decided that Stage Events will not have any specific achievement attached to them. Part of the scope creeping problem is that most things I add come with at least one achievement attached to them. Every achievement I add must eventually unlock something else in the future, so I really needed more dead ends for all the unlock chains! (Before anyone calls me out on it, there will be some generic achievements like "Encounter X total stage events" but that is very different than adding one for each event!)
I still had a little more than a week to go, so it was finally time to work on Chionotoh's event... But then Monster Hunter Wilds came out, and I didn't do any work at all last week! So, this is what you get! (If you're one of the few people wondering why this update is a few days late, I actually managed to pull myself away from Monster Hunter long enough release it on time, but as a beta. I needed some people to test and make sure the changes I made to the stage select generation didn't crash the game.)
Early Access updated game version to v8.21
Content Added
- 2 new Events (Total: 63)
- 6 new Bounty Gifts (Total: 43)
- 2 new Bonus Gifts (Total: 68)
- All monster battles that were not already fully rage battles have gained 2 different rage forms that can appear under certain conditions
Updates and tweaks
- Blizzard Veyeral's first phase is now a rage phase
- Changed the frequency of moving spikes in Totaria's 5th and 7th phases
- The Hyperfocus bounty gift is now unlocked from the start
- Scarlet's Burden gained a new effect and duration was reduced from 8 to 3
- Rage Duet's Burden has a new effect and duration was increased from 1 to 2
- Special Monsters and Gem Monsters can now appear with any blessed bounty instead of only the Mote Garden gift
- Updated the card art for Quick Mite, Love Mite, Glow Mite, and Star Mite
- All 3 bonus gifts of the Radiant Tetrid set have new art and now give additional motes of all types. They now add the same amount of score as all the other bonus tetrid gifts of the same ranks.
- The health values of any obstacles that must be broken to avoid taking damage will be scaled down if DPS is lower than expected
- Adjusted the mercy rates of bonus gifts becoming heals and panics. These rates were universal before, but now depend on story difficulty. All other game modes will use the same rates as Heavy Rain, which has a slightly lower rate for heals, but the same rate for panics as before.
Bug Fixes
- Bug Fix: The Gift Dynamo event should have been blocked by the unlikely case of having 0 tetrids available. The event title would play, but the event was still skipped as expected.
Upcoming Stuff
The next main focus is the remaining monster events, but I'll be throwing in new Gifts and Stage Events along the way. Just like with gifts, I have a bunch of ideas for stage events that I've just scrawled out, but no exact number on how many there will be.
9 monster events (not in order)
- Sandrome
- Voladrome
- Shanx
- Dendrohai
- Lavalin
- Chionotoh
- Ventra
- Storm Veyeral
- Blizzard Veyeral
The Quickplay rework beta as mentioned in the previous update notes (Update #96) will probably happen while working on these events, or maybe after they are all done. Then the 6 Tower Bosses will come after all the monster events, and the quickplay beta is done.
The next update will depend on wherever my whimsy takes me, but it will be on March 21st.
Thank you for playing!
ːradiantheartː ːradiantheartː ːradiantheartː