Early Trinket Implementation | Patreon Weekly #249
Added 2024-03-11 15:00:12 +0000 UTCHey Patrons! In this weekly I’m going to go over some of the implementation I’ve done for the player acquiring trinkets.
There’s also a new poll this week! In this poll there are some options for potential side content in v2.4.0!
Trinket Catalysts
Creating a trinket starts with finding a trinket catalyst, which spawns somewhere on floors 1-3. The catalyst uses the game’s existing prize item system, which means the game will try to place the catalyst in a special room, but can also place it on the floor. If the catalyst does spawn on the ground, it will always be in a locked chest. For the moment catalysts are using the arcane resin sprite, but I do plan to give them unique visuals.

Once you have a catalyst, you can bring it to any alchemy pot, but the one that spawns on floor 3 or 4 is the obvious choice. Catalysts are placed in the pot like any other item, but once you choose to craft with them, you’ll get a popup window instead of the recipe being processed as normal. This window lets you pick between one of three trinket items for your run. No actual trinkets have been implemented, so for the moment the window just contains random items.

The nuts and bolts for this process are all in place, but I don’t think things are exactly intuitive atm. This whole process is an excellent opportunity to showcase how alchemy and alchemical energy work, so I’m going to spend some time thinking on tutorialization. At the very least I think this is a great opportunity to add a guidebook page for alchemy and possibly streamline the alchemy guide itself a bit too. There are also probably more alchemy UI improvements I could make, such as having the ‘add energy’ button glow if the player has insufficient energy for a recipe.
Comments
That's actually already addressed. Pots will now always spawn on floor 3 or 4 of a region, like you mentioned. It probably works better that way anyway, floor 2 is a bit early for the player to get an alchemy pot.
Shattered Pixel
2024-03-11 19:13:13 +0000 UTCOnly pain point I see is finding the alchemy pot early on (like floor 2) but the catalyst later. Perhaps some logic could be added that forces the catalyst to spawn before or on the floor with the pot? Or I suppose that the pot only appears on floor 3/4 since I see you want the catalyst to appear on 1/2/3.
Veek
2024-03-11 19:05:47 +0000 UTCNever been more excited about new ways to mess up in a game than now 🩵
Little Trans Punk
2024-03-11 16:33:00 +0000 UTC