Future Holiday Plans | Patreon Weekly #242

Hey Patrons! Sorry for the slight holdup this week. In this weekly I’m going to share some info on upcoming holiday items that I previously detailed in Shattered Secrets #31.

We’ve also go the results from Patreon Poll #49! In this poll I asked how soon Patrons would like to see a 3rdvariant for the caves quest:
ASAP:                            28.5%
After Trinkets:            25%
After Cleric:               46.5%
After Other Quests: 21.5%
Even Later:                 14.5%
The response was actually a lot more even than I expected, and tilted more towards soon when I suspect it would tilt toward far. Admittedly I’m a little sick of developing the caves quest, but clearly players aren’t feeling that as much when it comes to playing it. Based on this I’ll probably be doing the final variant after the cleric, but will see about finishing up concepting work for it sooner.

v2.3.0 Holidays

As a quick recap, here’s how holiday items that replace pasties work currently as of v2.3.0:

• Lunar New Year (Late Jan to Feb, 7 days): Pasties are replaced with steamed fish, which is eaten over two actions, allowing on-eat effects to trigger twice.
• Easter (Late March to April, 7 days): Pasties are replaced with chocolate easter eggs, which grant 2 turns of artifact recharging.
• Halloween (Oct 24th to 31st. 7 days): Pasties are replaced with pumpkin pie, which heals for 5% of max HP, but no lower than 3.
• Winter Holidays (Dec 15th to 26th. 12 days): Pasties are replaced with Candy Cane, which grants 2 turns of wand recharging. Rat King also gets a festive hat.

v2.3.0 added two holiday items focused on the earlier parts of the year, with the intention of adding more in the next update before future holidays happen. There might also be something extra that happens on a particular day during April…

Halloween and Winter holidays are similar to how they were prior to v2.3.0, but have been shortened so make some room for other holidays, especially around the end of the year. Previously they each lasted about 2-3 weeks, and also varied based on days of the week each year. I also nerfed the healing effect of pumpkin pie, to be a bit more in line with the value of the other items.

Further Holiday Items

My current plan is to only moderately increase the total number of festive days, but also to spread them out over the year a little more. Here’s what I’m hoping to add in future updates (perhaps all in v2.4.0):

• Pride (June 24th to 30th. 7 days): Pasties are replaced with rainbow-colored potions. These will probably grant some sort of brief limited charm effect, perhaps charming one adjacent enemy for 3 turns.
• Shattered’s Birthday (Aug 1st to 7th. 7 days): Pasties are replaced with birthday cake with green trim! This cake will grant 10% of a level worth of EXP when eaten.
• Pixel Dungeon’s Birthday (Dec 1st to 7th. 7 days): Pasties are replaced with birthday cake with blue trim! Just like for Shattered, this cake grants a bit of EXP.
• New Years (Dec 27th to Jan 2nd. 7 days): Pasties are replaced with a ‘sparkling potion’, that grants 10% of max HP in shielding, but no lower than 5.

These holidays were mainly picked to give a fairly even distribution of festive days throughout the year. This gives us a total of 61 festive days each year, 40 of which occur in late October to early February. This does increase the total number of festive days a bit, but mainly by spreading the distribution out to fill in more of the year. From October to January the number of festive days actually goes down a little.

The only thing I’m a bit unhappy about with this setup is that Hannukah (which usually occurs in late November to late December) isn’t super well represented by the December 15-26th winter holiday dates, but having a bespoke holiday for it would often clash with Pixel Dungeon’s birthday.