Reforging and More | Patreon Weekly #219

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going to share a quick update on caves quest terrain and give some more info on blacksmith rewards!

Firstly though, here are the results from Patreon Poll #44:
Soften the Penalty:                        77%
Make Shopkeepers Invulnerable: 46%
Change Nothing:                           14%
I’m quite happy with result, although I am a little surprised that softening the penalty got so much more support than outright removing it. I’ll consider a few options here and have some change to shopkeepers made in v2.2.0. They’ll either warn first before fleeing, or penalize the player in some other way for attacking them.

Quest Progress

I’ve been making a bunch of technical progress on the quest this week, but it’s unfortunately not the sort of thing I can easily show off. Things like starting and ending the quest are now working properly, and I’m currently in the middle of building out all the various little terrain pieces and hazards that will be in the quest itself.

Here’s a small teaser GIF of that though, showing off two new terrain types with WIP visuals: fragile crystal spikes, and more tough dropped boulders.

(If you're having trouble viewing this GIF, here's a direct link)

Blacksmith Rewards

One thing that’s changed since the previous blog posts is that I’ve decided to simplify scoring for the quest somewhat. In my early testing it is not difficulty at all to find a majority of gold, and that plus the extra points for defeating a boss makes the sliding scale of gold value rather pointless. Gold now grants 50 points each, to a cap of 2000 at 40 gold (this can easily be re-scaled if I want the player to find more/less gold), and defeating the boss grants an extra 1000 points.

These points, or ‘favor’, can then be traded in with the blacksmith for a variety of rewards. Here’s what that’s looking like at the moment. Please keep in mind that these are all still WIP.

• The blacksmith will let you keep his pickaxe for just 250 favor. It’s still not a great weapon and isn’t useful for mining outside of the quest area, but perhaps you like it anyway. If you manage to hit 3000 favor, this option becomes free.
• Reforge is the first real option, costing 500 favor and doing exactly what it does currently in v2.1.4.
• Harden reinforces a single item, making it more resistant to losing an enchantment or glyph when upgraded. This costs 500 favor.
• Upgrade is a more powerful and expensive option that grants a boost to a single item that is currently +2 or lower. It costs 1000 favor.
• Reforge, Harden, and Upgrade can all also be chosen a second time, for 1000, 1000, or 2000 more favor respectively.
• Forge is the most expensive single option. For 2000 favor the blacksmith will smith something for you. You’ll get a choice between 1 random armor and 2 random weapons, which are likely to be upgraded.
• Cash Out is the final option, and pretty self-explanatory. The Blacksmith will give you 1 gold for ever spare point of favor you have left.

The standard reward of ‘choose an upgraded item’, is now present with the blacksmith if you choose a combo of forge and upgrade, but there are lots of other ways to use the rewards too, especially if you already have an item you’d like to make stronger.