Score Breakdown | Patreon Weekly #155

Hey Patrons!

Next week’s weekly will have an audio Q&A segment! Feel free to ask questions either here or on the Patreon discord.

In this weekly I’m giving a final status update on pins and sharing some of the new curse designs I’ve implemented!

The Pins are all Shipped!

A huge milestone, all outstanding pin shipments have now been sent! Every single Patron who has earned a 1, 2, or 3 year pin (and who has provided their address) should now either have those pins, or have them coming soon in the mail!

Moving forward I’m going to start sending pin shipments every 1-3 months, depending on how many Patrons are earning pins in a given month. I’ll try to err on the side of sending pins a little early instead of a little late. I want to keep shipments at around 10-15 mailing each time, as that strikes a nice balance between effort on my part (easier to do multiple mailings in a row) and minimizing risk.

Score Breakdown

Firstly, one tiny thing that I actually forgot to share on the Patreon itself last week (I did share it on the Pateron discord). I’ve implemented a score breakdown screen for v1.3, here’s a screenshot:

Curse Improvements

The recent Patreon Poll gave me a pretty solid direction to go on in terms of curses, and so over the last week I spent some time implementing a bunch of changes and improvements.

Five curses have received changes overall, ranging from simple numbers tweaks to complete reworks. Here they are, in order of how highly they were voted for in the poll:

• Fragile has been completely replaced with explosive!This new curse has a hidden counter that slowly ticks down as attacks are made with the weapon. The player does get warnings when the counter is getting low, but never knows its exact value. When it hits 0, the weapon explodes and the counter resets. The explosion is normally centered on the hero, but ranged weapons or weapons with reach might make it possible for the hero to be out of the blast zone.
• Wayward has been significantly reworked to offer more counterplay options. Instead of persistently reducing accuracy, the curse now has a (fairly high) chance to apply a ‘wayward’ debuff to the hero for 10 turns. This debuff is a harsher accuracy penalty, but can be waited out, or cleared early if the player does manage to land a hit with the wayward weapon. Just as before, guaranteed hits like surprise attacks are very helpful.
• Anti-Entropy has been made less punishing and been given a bit more gameplay opportunity. The curse now only ignites the player for 4 turns (down from 8) and won’t hurt the player at all if they are in water. Additionally, every cell around the hero now gets frozen, not just the enemy attacking them.
• Sacrificial is getting a relatively minor tweak to the amount of bleed it inflicts. It now more sharply scales with player HP, starting out a little more dangerous near max HP but becoming much less harmful at HP gets low. This way the curse forces the player to play at reduced HP, but doesn’t actually harm them much once they get there.
• Exhausting is also getting replaced! I decided to do this as the new wayward effect fills a very similar role to exhausting, and I thought of a new effect that should work quite well! The new curse is called Dazzling, sound familiar? It’s a more harmful twist on an enchantment that I removed quite a while ago for being overpowered. Dazzling weapons have a chance to flash bright light, briefly blinding the attacker and defender.