The Plan for 2024 | Patreon Weekly #239

Hey Patrons! Sorry for the holdup on posts for the last week. I’ve been preoccupied with a mix of holidays, a stressful family visit, and getting sick from said visit! I’ve been testing negative for COVID, so I suspect it’s just a head cold. I’m starting to feel better now, so I’ve been getting caught up on emails and Patreon posts.

In this weekly I’m going to share a look at the things I have roughly planned for 2024! These are the main things I’m looking to add in 2024 (hopefully, lol) in the order that I’d like to add them. I expect to write some similar stuff in my usual “Shattered Pixel Dungeon in current year” blog post in another week or so.

I’ve also released that Shattered Secrets I promised last week! This Shattered Secrets contains a little more info on each of the points in this post.

There will also be an audio Q&A next week! You can ask questions here or in the Patreon discord. There will also be a poll later this month, and then we’ll resume the normal schedule of poll -> secrets -> Q&A in February.

Releasing v2.3.0

I’m currently stuck into refinement on the fungi quest, as I mentioned last week. I have made some design progress here, but things still aren’t completely solid, and the last two weeks have given me very little time to work on the design. I’d also really like to release v2.3.0 in January.

Unfortunately, with these delays it’s looking very unlikely that I’ll get the fungal quest finished before the end of this month. I’ll try but will likely opt to shelve the fungal quest for now in favor of getting v2.3.0 released. Rather than spending yet another consecutive update on the caves quest, I’ll probably move on to some other things for now and return here later. I’m not exactly thrilled at this prospect, but I also don’t want the caves quest to keep delaying other content releases, and players already seem very happy with it in its current state.

Trinkets

I’ve vaguely mentioned this item type a few times in past blog posts, but I think it’s finally time to be a bit more concrete! Trinkets will be a sort of ‘modifier’ item which would be more about tweaking gameplay variables than giving direct power or utility. Trinkets are produced and upgraded with alchemical energy, giving more incentive for players to clear out consumables they aren’t interested in using. Here’s one possible trinket example: The rat skull, which makes rare enemies more likely to appear.

More Art

This one’s pretty straightforward, I’d like to deliver on the promise of region splash art that I gave a year ago. While you guys have seen more progress on those splash arts since the start of 2023, things unfortunately ground to a halt for a while due to Aleks needing to prioritize other work. That is hopefully going to end in the next little while, and these splash arts can be finished.

The Cleric

I’d like for 2024 to have a new hero release, just like 2023. The Cleric would likely be the headline release for the year, with abilities based on divine magic, to contrast with the Mage’s more arcane magic. While I don’t plan on releasing the Cleric first, they are easily the thing I most want to release this year.

The Cleric will start with a holy book that takes up an artifact slot. This book will charge up over time and said charges can be expended on a number of more utility or defense focused spells. Much like with the Rogue, I expect this artifact to be very powerful, and it will steadily grow stronger as the cleric uses it.

City Quest

Lastly, with the caves quest sort of almost finished, it would be nice to get moving on the city quest as well! My current concept is to have the Imp ask the player to raid a special dwarven vault. The major catch will be that none of the player’s items can go with them, leading to a little microcosm of gear progression that will only exist within the vault.

After having to reign in the complexity of the caves quest’s design so much though, I am wary of complexity here as well. I suspect that as I get into more detailed concepting the ‘microcosm of gear progression’ may quickly get compressed down heavily in favor of the quest not taking too long. We’ll have to see how things shape up.

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The 2024 blog post will also go over some candidates for smaller changes, and some ideas I have for content farther down the road. Look out for that post in about another week!