Hit and Miss Icons | Patreon Weekly #320

Hey Patrons, in this early weekly I’m going to go over a change I’m making to make sources of accuracy and evasion more visible.

I'm posting this one early as you can expect an alpha very soon that contains what I'm sharing here.

There will be a shattered secrets a bit later too! Keep an eye out for that, which will contain a teaser of some new title screen visuals...

Also, it’s a bit early but I’m calling Patreon Poll #67 on Warrior impressions now and sharing results, as they're pretty clear:
00% Much Worse
42% Somewhat Worse
12% The Same / No Opinion
42% Somewhat Better
04% Much Better
Unfortunately this mirrors the general feedback I’ve gotten pretty much exactly. There is a slight positive angle to it, but the majority of dedicated players are indifferent to the change. The poll also got about 1/2 the interest that Patreon polls normally do. I still don’t think the Warrior changes were a failure, but things like subclass designs or new armor are more likely to get people excited.

Hit & Miss Icons

(Note that this post is partly recycled from Shattered Secrets #50, which was written when I had a concept for this change but hadn’t implemented it yet)

After the addition of the Ferret Tuft in v3.1, with the little icon that shows you when the tuft is the reason a dodge happened, people have been asking if I plan to expand that system. The answer is yes! But it’s a bit more complicated than you might think.

Firstly, there is thinking on all of the reasons why an attack may miss. There are lots and lots of potential sources! After some fussing around, I think I’ve made icons for all the major cases:

In order, these are: weapon fx (-acc), armor fx, bless, hex, daze, RoAcc (cursed), RoEva, Liquid Agility, Defensive Stance, Ferret Tuft, Freerunning.

With a single icon that can appear things are pretty simple, the game just has to compare for one thing and assign the icon accordingly. Adding more sources of evasion to the system complicates this. The player can have multiple bonus evasion sources at once, and so the game now needs to track how much each boost contributed to hit/miss outcome. I ended up making a pretty messy solution that essentially just re-checks for these various buffs and de-applies them to the final roll until we get a hit (if we do at all). Once that happens the game knows the reason the attack missed, and the appropriate icon is applied. If the attack would have missed anyway, no icon is applied.

Of course, if I’m adding icons for misses, what about hits? There are lots of +acc and -eva boosts too. Thankfully they can all fall under the standard ‘attack’ icon, but there still lots of variants, and not a lot of pixels to work with if I want to include the usual red sword. I think I’ve made it work though:

In order, these are: weapon fx, armor fx, bless, hex, daze, RoAcc, RoEva (cursed), Liquid Agility, Sword Dance, Surprise Attacks, Precise Assault, Projectile Momentum.

All the complexities I discussed for misses apply to hits as well. I think I’ve gotten everything working, but I’m sure it’s going to be slightly off in some cases. Regardless, these icons are coming in v3.2.0, and should massively improve the visibility of various sources of evasion and accuracy.