Shattered Crystals | Patreon Weekly #225

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going to share a bunch of progress on the Crystal caves quest! We’re just about ready for alpha!

This weekly also includes an audio Q&A! Go and give it a listen if you’d like. You can find audio timestamps at the end of this weekly.

Cave Generation

Firstly, I’ve made a bunch of critical improvements to levelgen for the quest. Some changes are obvious, and some are a bit more subtle. Here’s a comparison image showing the cave region from last week’s weekly(left), and this week(right):

Firstly, I’ve added a bunch of chaos to the crystal patterning and increased the overall quantity of crystals in general. This goes a huge way toward making the area feel more natural. Crystal circles are still present in the medium sized rooms, but they’re now pretty effectively obscured.

Gold generation has also gotten some big improvements. Gold is now sprinkled around the level on a per-room basis, which provides some guarantee that gold veins are evenly distributed through the level. Gold will still tend to cluster into small groups as well.

I’ve also tuned in the size of the cave level a bit. We’ve gone from 3-4 medium rooms and 8-10 small rooms to 3 medium and 6-8 small rooms. Giant and secret rooms are unchanged at 1 and 1-2 respectively. I plan to keep a close eye on this, as I want this quest to be more involved, but not too lengthy.

Crystal Spire

I’ve now fully implemented all 3 of the new unique enemies that’ll get in your way, albeit with WIP visuals. Just like the crystals, each comes in 3 different colors:

I’ve already talked about wisps and guardians, so let’s talk a bit about the spire!

The crystal spire is the miniboss for this area, boasting an ultra-hard crystalline body that renders your regular weapons ineffective. You’ll need to steadily break through it with your pickaxe if you want to destroy it, but doing so is likely to provoke all the crystal enemies in the cave, including the spire itself.

I’m still experimenting with the exact tuning of this, but the spire will attack you with progressively stronger waves of crystal spikes. These can both damage you, knock you back, and present new crystal obstacles for you to break through. Toward the end of the fight the crystal spawns can get quite intense.

(If you can't see that GIF, here's a direct link)

I’m trying to find the right balance between bogging the player down with crystals and giving them ways to evade incoming guardians. It’s all shaping up to be a bit complex for a caves area miniboss atm, so I might look for some ways to scale things back a little.

If the refining on the boss goes well, I hope that I’ll be able to share a quick alpha with you guys in another couple of days!

Audio Timestamps

This month there were 13 questions from 8 different Patrons.

• 0:09 "Everyone starts somewhere in programming, so where and how did you start?" - Arclightning
• 2:34 "how does the duelist teleport by holding a dagger?" - radiantchaos
• 3:03 "How old are the heroes?" - Veek
• 4:17 "would the crystal caves be appealing to the folks of breaking bad?" - radiantchaos
• 6:16 "How many of the game's regions live up to the OSHA standards?" - Joshuakiwi
• 7:19 "how was your day?" - depresbian
• 9:26 "How did you decide which badges will get corresponding google play achievements?" - Fcelon
• 12:21 "Ive noticed sometimes that a cursed items can have an enchantment, while this is likely just a rare intended occurance in gameplay, could there be a lore explanation for this weird occurence?" - Arclightning
• 14:04 "Is the cleric going to be human or some other race representation? I mean we've obviously got dwarves and other critters running around." - greenapathy630
• 15:25 "i looked back through the weeklies and saw that its been exactly a year since i showed you my cat. he's grown a lot since then, do you still like him?" - radiantchaos
• 16:00 "How powerful would you say a level 30 hero with endgame gear is according to https://vsbattles.fandom.com/wiki/Tiering_System What fictional characters could they beat?" - Fcelon
• 17:25 "Programming and graphic design seem to be pretty different skill sets. How often do you use free assets/commission artwork vs doing it yourself? Do you enjoy making art?" - 1-800-thewolf
• 19:13 "Is wand and artifact overcharging ever coming back?" - Fcelon