Six Years and a Secrets Double Feature! | Patreon Weekly #310

Hey Patrons, somehow the patreon has now been around for six years! In this extra-long weekly I’ve got some info to share from two recent Shattered Secrets posts, and a new poll relating to them!

Also, while it’s not ready juuust yet, I expect there’s bee another Patreon alpha for v3.1 very soon, as that update is gearing up for a beta release this week!

Six Years!

It’s that time of year again, on this exact day back in 2019 the Patreon first opened! We’ve hit the very strange threshold of the Patreon being around for longer than half of Shattered’s existence. Back when the Patreon first opened we were at v0.7.3. The passage of time is terrifying...

I don’t have anything more to share in terms of retrospectives unfortunately, anything I could whip up is sort of made irrelevant by the 10 years of Shattered Pixel Dungeon blog post, so take a look at that if you’d like a little trip down memory lane. Although I suppose with the new logo even that post is a little out of date now.

In the meantime though, I do have some exciting things to announce! Recent Shattered Secrets #46 and #47 contained some loose ideas I had for changes to existing armor and thrown weapons, and the more I think about these changes the more I want to do them sooner rather than later. So go ahead and take a look at both these ideas, then head over to this month’s Patreon Poll to share how exciting they are for you vs. the existing content I had planned.

Armor Changes

I’ve attempted to concept new armors a few times before, and it always feels like complexity for complexity’s sake. Other item types (weapons, wands, etc.) are much less passive, and so it’s easy to create different effects that have varied gameplay. As a simple example, just giving a weapon double speed and half damage changes up game interactions substantially without feeling forced or arbitrary. Armor has no such easy levers to change, and I’ve half-concepted and scrapped armor expansions several times. Despite this, I still get suggestions for new armors all the time, so it’s something I keep wanting to try and make work.

Like in previous attempts, I started looking into various effects, mainly taking inspiration from weapons and glyphs. This time around I’ve tried to push through some of my design worries, and also put more emphasis on varied themeing instead of getting too hung up on the gameplay.

Firstly, like with weapons, we need a simple set of alternate armors that can work in any build. Weapons have a simple -DMG/+ACC, so trying something similar for armor gives us +DEF/-ACC. I’ve decided to theme these armors around animal hides, so as the tiers go up we might see: animal furs (T2), Spinner hide (T3), Dragon scale (T4), Scorpio carapace (T5). These armors would offer more defense, but their bulky or rigid nature would make fast movements hard, reducing accuracy a bit.

Then there’s opportunity for more exotic armors of varying degrees, here’s a few loose ideas on that, which are subject to change:

• A set of mage’s robes at T2/T3, and a set of crystal robes at T4/T5, which offer less defense against physical attacks but block some magical damage.

• A ‘spiked armor’ at T4 or T5, which offers less defense but rebounds damage to attackers.

• A ‘monks robe’ armor at T2/T3, perhaps with another variant at T4/T5, offering less defense but boosting evasion.

• A ‘ranger armor’ with a built-in arm crossbow might work well at T3. This would grant the player the crossbow’s dart bonus but applied to an armor instead, in exchange for less damage blocking.

• A ‘stone armor’ would work well at T5. This would be similar to the greataxe, offering superior protection but requiring 20 strength at base instead of 18.

• A ‘runic armor’ around T4, offering less base blocking but scaling more strongly with upgrades.

I’m still a bit unhappy about this from a pure gameplay perspective. All of these armors are either minor stat reshuffles or only interesting because they’re stealing their design from a glyph or a weapon. However, it’s undeniable that this would improve the themeing of armors a whole lot, and perhaps ‘game feel’ is the real player desire here, not so much actual gameplay variance. Some weapons even do this too, all the -DMG/+ACC weapons are statistically almost identical to the base swords.

Thrown Weapon Changes

Thrown weapons and wands both exist in a sort of weird half-equipment half-consumable design space, but wands undoubtedly do it better. Currently thrown weapons, while doing a lot better than in vanilla, don’t really get used very often, and especially don’t get upgraded.

I think the best solution is to make thrown weapons behave a bit more like wands from the outset, and a bit less like stackable consumables. They could spawn as part of a ‘set’, with each set not mixing with another. Quantities and durability would be rebalanced around this, and by default each set would perhaps have three items with six uses each. Of course some thrown weapons types might have different durability or quantity limits, providing another way to differentiate the various thrown weapons from one another.

Instead of spawning in random quantities of 2-4, sets would always drop with the same quantity, but with a low chance to be +1 or +2, and maybe even enchanted or cursed. Sets would then be upgradable and enchantable as a unit. Sets would not disappear when they run out (via breaking), and upgrading the set would repair any existing broken items. Probably upgrades would provide a much smaller direct durability boost, but it would still be possible to upgrade a set to infinite uses. Perhaps at high levels upgrades might even let a set gain additional ammo.

This would solve the variable quantity problem and make thrown weapons behave a little bit more like equipment, but still keep their more consumable nature. The balance of ‘more uptime overall but less uptime right this moment’ is also retained, keeping them distinct from wands. Hopefully this would make them much more compelling to upgrade, as I can balance the upgrades around a predefined ‘set’, rather than having to force them to always work on a single item. Finally, it’s worth noting that all of this probably wouldn’t affect darts, which work well enough already in their own little niche.