Fungi Design Work | Patreon Weekly #241

Hey Patrons! In this weekly I’m going to share the current final state of the design for the fungal caves quest variant.

There’s also a new Patreon Poll this week! Seeing as the fungal caves quest is being delayed, I’m curious what your thoughts are on that, and when you might like to see it re-prioritized.

The Current Fungal Design

While the fungal caves quest isn’t coming in v2.3.0 (read the latest public blog post for info on that), I have still made some design progress on it since a few weeks ago.

Firstly, I’ve significantly changed fungal spinners, as their old design really wasn’t working:

• Rather than having them directly spit regrowth, which largely forced the player to stay put, I’ve changed fungal spinners to shoot a sort of ‘creeping growth’ effect, which approaches over several turns. This gives the player time to react and makes moving the better option.
• Instead of dmg resistance next to plantlife, spinners now inflict a ‘fungal poison’, which keeps dealing damage if the player is on plantlife, but expires immediately otherwise. This does a better job of encouraging the player to position away from all the grass in the level.

Sentries also received a lot of adjustments:

• Firstly, I’ve given sentries fungal poison, which works just like it does on spinners.
• I’m considering giving sentries a delayed attack with a warning, to improve interaction. While this does make it possible to dodge around them, it also makes them a much more engaging enemy. It also opens up options for things like sentries blind-firing toward the player in some situations, as the player would be able to react to such an attack.
• I’m also considering changing sentries to inhabit broken down DM-200s. This better explains why the player can’t damage them and adds some visual variety.

The fungal core design is largely unchanged though. I still really like hiding fungal nodes in the level for the player to find, but the core itself needs to do something as well. Some sort of persistent hazard while the player is hunting for the nodes is probably the best option, but I don’t have a solid design at the moment. Ideally this hazard would also interact with the fungal sentries and spinners in some way too.

This is a lot better than a month ago, but these changes aren’t actually implemented, and there’s still more design work to do for the core. I’ll pick this back up again eventually, but for now I’m happy to move on to other things.