Early Encampment | Patreon Weekly #226

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going to go over how the crystal caves quest has been doing so far, and share some early work on the second caves quest variant!

Early Crystal Caves Feedback

The crystal caves quest has been in beta for about 4 days now, with things being pretty stable after a quick BETA-1.1 release 3 days ago. On a technical front the only major things I want to address right now are some clarity issues with some of the text. In particular people seem to be mistaking ‘cash out’ as a reward that always costs 3,000 favor.

In terms of difficulty/complexity, I think things definitely do need to be scaled back a bit, but I don’t know quite how much just yet. The general feedback I’ve gotten is that the quest is a bit difficulty, but this also comes from beta players who are more likely to be experienced. I’m planning to add some analytics hooks here, and slightly scale back the crystal fight in the meantime.

Lastly, in terms of overall design and ‘feel’ I’m quite happy that feedback seems to be universally positive! Given how rocky the design process was for the caves quest internally, I’m glad that the end result seems to have hit the mark. The quest design has come a long way from early concepting where it basically played like a watered down clone of a totally different game.

Compiling Improvements

As a quick aside, I also spent some time last week making some pretty significant changes to how I compile and release Shattered under the hood. These days Shattered has about 15 different release variants over 6 platforms, which take at least half an hour of focused multitasking to make manually. Over the course of a full update, with betas and patches, that’s 1-2 full workdays of time just spent releasing updates!

During the release of BETA-1.0 and BETA-1.1 I decided to build and try out some new automations to that process. So far things seem to be running smoothly, and the new process now takes about 10 minutes total, with just a couple of minutes of input from me at the start and the end. This is both more time efficient and much less stressful.

Early Unstable Encampment

I’ve also put some work this week into the second quest variant, mainly to the level layout so far:

The major levelgen quirk here is that connections between rooms are fairly rare, and instead the player will be expected to make their own connections via mining. Boulders are much more likely to spawn around adjacent rooms though, which gives the player a lot to go in in terms of where they should dig. The gnolls have also placed wooden barricades and traps around, though their specific mechanics aren’t locked in yet.

As for the gnolls themselves, I don’t have any solid designs just yet, but one thing I’d really like to do is reintroduce a scrapped shaman variant from v0.8.0. I wanted to experiment with supportive shamans that would buddy up with other gnolls, but this was too complex for randomly spawning enemies. The more purposeful enemy spawning in the caves quest looks like the perfect opportunity to give this another try.

Hopefully I’ll have more specifics to share here next week.