Squished Buffs | Patreon Weekly #176

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going to give a little update on Roguelike Celebration and smaller work on v1.4.2.

Here are the results from the recent Patreon Poll:
Tormented Spirits:    67%
Phantom Piranhas:   67%
Crystalized Fortune: 40%
Tar Trap:                     40%
FrostFire Brew:          37%
Sprouting Trap:         17%
A very clear preference for the enemy variants here! I’ll see about adding both of them in v2.0.0.

Also, there’s a new Shattered Secrets this week! Secrets #18 shows off some more progress that’s been made for upcoming region-specific splash arts!

Roguelike Celebration Work

Most of my time this week has been spent on the Roguelike Celebration presentation. Last year’s presentation was actually a bit easier to make, despite being twice as long, because it was a topic I had spent a lot more time communicating to other people over the last few years. This time around the topic is a bit more technical and contains a lot of info that previously only existed in my head.

Currently I’m planning for the presentation to have three main topics:

• Numerical ranges (e.g. weapon dealing 2-10 damage) and how they can use a bunch of different probability distributions. Uniform distribution is the default (same chance for each number), but a pyramid or bell (middle values more likely) can lead to more consistent and reliable results.
• Deck Systems, and how they help insulate against random changes occasionally producing extreme outcomes. Shattered uses decks for loads of things, like special rooms, enemy spawning, and item spawning. They ensure that the ‘average’ result happens much more consistently.
• Player Control and perception. One of the best ways to make RNG feel better is to gamify it a bit and give the player ways to fight back against being unlucky. Shattered does this with surprise attacks, but I’m also going to talk about Darkest Dungeon 2 a bit, as I think its combat system is a great example of this when compared to Darkest Dungeon 1.

Upcoming v1.4.2 Changes

In v1.4.0 I changed the hero buff bar to have a max width, preventing it from sometimes going all the way off the screen. The max number of visible buffs became 7 on mobile and 8 on desktop. I’ve gotten a few complaints about this from players who stack buffs vs. Yog though, so in v1.4.2 I’m letting the visible buffs ‘squish’ together a bit, which raises the limit to 15 on both display types.

Here’s an example of how things look at ‘maximum squish’, there should be just enough space to still see each buff’s status:

In terms of balance, I’m making a few targeted tweaks to the things changed in v1.4.0, but things are already performing well overall:

• The ring of Arcana is a bit weak on average, so I’m going to bump it up to giving 17.5% power per level, instead of 15%.
• The Sandals of nature are doing well overall, but I’m going to pull down the charge costs of most seed effects by about 20%, to give their new power a little more uptime.
• Blocking is performing quite well, so I’m going to scale back either its power or proc rate.
• Bounty Hunter and Empowered Strike are getting some mild buffs as well, as they’re just a bit weaker than I intended.

EDIT: On further analysis I may not be implementing the arcana and bounty hunter buffs. Gameplay data is always a little chaotic right after an update and it seems arcana and bounty hunter are doing better than the initial numbers indicated.