Manual Berserking | Patreon Weekly #165

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, here are the results from Patreon Poll #31:
Early Lore Additions:       64%
Item Rework / Addition: 57%
Interface Shops:               36%
A New Challenge:             7%
Lore gets a pretty good lead this time, so I’ll be focusing on that as the primary piece of side content for v1.4.0. I might also run another poll soon to help decide on a specific item to add or rework. There’s also very clearly not much interest in another new challenge atm, and interface shops have consistently gotten about 35% for three polls in a row, so I’ll leave those options out of future side content polls for now.

In this weekly I’m going to talk about the concepting and early development progress I’ve made for v1.4.0 over the last week.

v1.4.0 Progress

Unfortunately I don’t have a whole lot to share about the blacksmith’s quest this week. While I have done some concepting and a bit of prototyping, nothing is sticking too well just yet. I’m sure the basic idea for the quest is solid, so it’s just about coming up with the right arrangement of specific mechanics to make things fun and interesting. I can at least share a very early WIP of how some of the diggable tiles might look though. I’m going for a more solid look so that its easier to see which walls have ores or gems in them.

Following from poll #30, I’ve also been looking into some tweaks to talents and hero mechanics. I’m not going to commit to very specific changes until I get some analytics data from v1.3.2, but I do have a pretty promising concept for a major change to the berserker. I know a lot of experienced players dislike how much of the berserker’s power is tied to automatic rage, but I’ve been hesitant to change this as its also a very helpful safety net for newer players. I’m considering moving automatic berserk to a talent, and letting players manually activate the ability otherwise. This should make the subclass more interactive, keep the safety net for those who want it, and let me shorten the cooldown of berserking significantly.

I’ve also got some promising concepting done for a few tutorialization improvements. Mainly I want to try and improve the clarity of the game’s base control scheme. On mobile things are pretty immediately intuitive, but on desktop the game does a poor job of indication how core game actions are performed, doubly so if the user has a controller. My plan is to add a very short segment at the start of the game that helps guide the player through a few basic controls and game actions, before handing things over to the current guidebook system.

Lastly, I am strongly considering a change in direction for v1.4.0. The last few Shattered updates have all taken a bit more than 3 months to complete, and I can feel that beginning to happen to v1.4.0 too, as I keep coming up with good smaller ideas and keep moving slowly on the main content itself. Rather than letting v1.4.0 keep growing larger, I am considering splitting it into two updates. This way I can take a little more time concepting the new quest out while v1.4.0 becomes all about the smaller side content. This has the benefit of meaning v1.4.0 will release substantially faster than originally planned, possibly in mid to late August even. This would push the blacksmith quest back, but only slightly, as it would also allow me to truly focus exclusively on that quest when working on v1.5.0.