Sewers and Prison Quest Tweaks | Patreon Weekly #218

Hey Patrons! While work continues on the caves quest, I don’t really have anything to show off for it this week. So, in this weekly I’m going to show off some improvements I’m making to the sewers and prison quests!

There also a new Patreon Poll running this week! This poll concerns potential changes to shopkeeper fleeing behaviour.

Sewers Quest

The ghost’s quests are getting no changes directly, but I’m looking to make a few positioning based QoL adjustments. Firstly, the ghost now spawns and wanders within the exit room, rather than wandering through the whole floor. Here’s a little sped-up GIF of that:

This change makes it more convenient to find the ghost and also encourages newer players to start the quest after they have already explored at least some of the floor.

The bosses that the ghost spawns have gotten a similar, but more subtle treatment. They will now be more likely to wander toward the hero, instead of away from them. I’m not looking to make finding these enemies too predictable or convenient, but this should hopefully reduce the amount of times that the player gets stuck looking for the boss.

Prison Quest

The prison quest is getting much more substantial changes by comparison. Unlike the ghost bosses, which are meant to be very simple, the wandmaker quest areas have a bit more room for interesting designs. The existing quests here were also added all the way back in 2015 and are really showing their age. So I took at look at each of the three quests and made some changes:

The Corpse Dust quest is the most lightly touched overall. The room layout and core mechanic are entirely unchanged, but I’ve made some adjustments to the RNG. The corpse dust room is now guaranteed to spawn at least 3 rooms away from the entrance room, wraiths now cannot spawn directly next to the hero, and I fixed a bug that caused wraiths to often spawn far less than intended. The spawn speed randomness has actually been a bug in the game since v0.7.0! These changes should hopefully make the quest’s difficulty more consistent.

The Elemental Embers quest is getting a change focused around its boss. The ritual room is now a bit larger, and the elemental has more HP, less raw offensive stats, and has gained an avoidable ‘fireball’ ability. Once every few turns the elemental will target a 3x3 grid of cells, centered on a cell adjacent to you. Step out of the way in time to avoid getting set ablaze! This should make the fight a little more engaging, and provide counterplay aside from simple bringing a potion of frost (though that still works as well!)

Lastly, the Rotberry quest has gotten the most substantial changes. The quest environment has been totally overhauled with a larger size, random crumbling walls, and much more deadly lashers:

Navigating through the brush will be trickier, but there is also now a guaranteed safe path to get to the heart. Lashers are much tougher, but will also hesitate for one turn before attacking, letting you back up out of the way unscathed if you happen upon one.

Ideally these changes will make these quests more fun and engaging without fundamentally changing their design, or the effort involved in beating them. I’m partly making these changes so that there’s room to add proper scoring to these quests, instead of simply giving the player max points if they complete the quest.