Geomancer Rock Armor | Patreon Weekly #233

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going to share some more progress on the gnoll quest variant, including some early geomancer implementation!

First though, there’s a new Shattered Secrets this week! Shattered Secrets #31 covers my current plans for extending the game’s various holiday items!

Also, here are the results for Patreon Poll #47:
Unique Remains Items: 50%
Damage Text Icons: 50%
More Holiday Items: 43%
Custom Notes: 43%
More Badges: 25%
Some fairly close results this time! Unfortunately, it’s probably not in the cards for me to add four out of five options in v2.3.0. For now, I’m going to try and fully implement the first two options and will try to do a little work on the next two. Things may also vary a bit depending on how difficult these features end up being to implement. For holiday items in particular I may look to add one or two now and then incrementally add more through 2024.

And finally, there will be an audio Q&A next week! Feel free to leave any questions in the comments here, or on the Patreon Discord.

Finishing Sappers and Early Geomancer Work

After some gameplay testing, I think the gnoll sapper fights are working quite well. Things felt a little overtuned initially, but I think they’re in a good spot now after some adjustments. The big change that helped things was tweaking stun duration. If a guard gets hit by a thrown or falling rock, they get a whole 10 turns of stun, whereas the player only gets 3. This means that eating a rock yourself isn’t fatal, but also means that a stunned guard gives you lots of time to go for the sapper.

With that out of the way, I’ve moved on to implementing the gnoll geomancer!

I want the fight to not start until the player is really sure that they’re ready, so I’ve tried to replicate the way the crystal fight starts a little. The geomancer spawns asleep, surrounded by boulders, and with a layer of rock armor protecting it. Like with the spire, you have to mine away at the armor to be able to damage the geomancer directly. This gives a couple of turns for the game to alert the player that they’re starting a boss fight, just like with the spire.

Of course, unlike the spire, the geomancer doesn’t just sit in place, it’s quite mobile indeed!

I expect this fight to go a bit like the Tengu fight, with the player needing to evade rocky attacks as they close in on the geomancer. I initially conceived of the rock armor as a way to time-gate the start of the fight, but it’s also an excellent way to ensure the player has to navigate the rock gauntlet and get close to damage the geomancer.

I’m going to start this week off by implementing the two sapper attacks into the geomancer’s AI, but I suspect something a little more will be needed as well. If all the attacks resolve after one turn then the fight just becomes ‘don’t tap on the red tiles simulator’, which won’t be very fun. Sappers and guards might help with that, but unlike with the spire there’s no guarantee that they’ll be alive.