Spectral Walls | Patreon Weekly #338

Hey Patrons! In this slightly early weekly I’m going to share some new artifact particulars! There’s also an audio Q&A this week, you can find timestamps for all the questions below.

This weekly is coming a little early as v3.3 is alllmost ready for an alpha test! In fact, there’s a decent change the alpha will be up later tonight...

In the meantime though, the skeleton key has been fully implemented and polished! All the functionality I mentioned previously is ready to go, including locking any door and creating temporary spectral walls!

A few technical details ended up taking a while here, so there’s a couple details worth mentioning:

• I’ve decided to have the key level up based on its own usage, no the usage of keys. This is a bit more in-line with other similar artifacts, and creates a nice tradeoff option: you can level the key faster by using it on locks that you would have been able to open with a key anyway.

• To go with the above, I’ve built a little tracker into the game so that excess keys get discarded if you use the skeleton key to make them irrelevant.

• Finally, doors locked by the skeleton key use a different internal ID that regular locked doors. This way you can’t accidentally use iron keys to unlock them, and so the game can let you force the lock open them if you somehow lose the skeleton key.

• Oh, and double lastly, no you cannot use the skeleton key on doors locked by boss fights =)

Audio Timestamps

This month there were 18 questions from 9 different Patrons.

• 0:08 "Has the internet in fact ruined everything, or was that money hungry social media companies?" - Chewyou

• 1:51 "how have you been?" - Depresbian

• 2:45 "Have you played any of the GOTY nominees? Thoughts? What is your personal game of the year if you played anything notable." - DaltonGoesFast

• 4:54 "If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, what would it be? Anything people consider "food"" - Slenderazi

• 6:11 "Would you ever add variation in the game? like something from simply having grey and brown rats to having different regions (like dead cells) that inhabit the same depths?" - DaltonGoesFast

• 7:33 "my rook nudges over to d4, putting you in check! what do you have to say about that?" - radiantchaos

• 8:01 "Kiss, marry, kill? Options: Death-Gaze, King of Dwarves, Troll Blacksmith." - Slenderazi

• 8:32 "Will there ever be a sort of new game+? Finishing a run and then starting it again with all your stuff. (Obviously with difficulty scaling) " - Slenderazi

• 9:32 "I know you want to keep Shattered very close to it's roots as a grandchild to the original Rogue... but if you had your pick, what would be your top 3 or top 5 games you'd like to join you in a crossover?" - Raynuva

• 11:22 "What's life like on the surface? Is Yog Dzewa only terrorizing the surrounding area around the sewers or is it's magic a global issue? How does the society work, handle magic and technology?" - The Shaman

• 13:00 "Would the Rat King mind to be kept as a pet?" - The Shaman

• 13:54 "How would you feel about UI mod that shows exact damage range values, monster HP, chance to hit etc. do you think that obfuscation of stats like that is core to the game? Example: you can examine a rat it shows how much damage it could do to you, how much damage you could do to it, your chance to hit, it's chance to hit you etc" - DaltonGoesFast

• 15:26 "Solve for X: 4X+3X+2X+1X= 20" - Slenderazi

• 15:40 "If you included a high- resolution cut scene in Shattered, where would you put it?" - 1-800-thewolf

• 16:13 "What's your favorite anime opening OST?" - Zrp200

• 19:08 "What have you seriously considered removing from the game? A mechanic, item, monster, etc?" - 1-800-thewolf

• 19:45 "Is slop going to be the 2025 word of the year 👀" - DaltonGoesFast

• 21:50 "How do you balance challenges with each other? I imagine the data might be difficult to process as some challenges (Champions?) kill players early and others ( Badder Bosses?) kill later in a run." - 1-800-thewolf