Paperboard Mailers | Patreon Weekly #143

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, there’s some audio in this weekly! This time around there were seven questions, though the last few had a lot of details I could get into.

Patreon Poll #26 also just finished, here are the results:
Re-used Buff Icons:          77%
Overhead Spell Effects: 68%
Spell Item Sprites:            55%
Chalice of Blood:               32%
Shield Sprites:                    18%
People pretty heavily favored UI elements and effects over sprites! I’ll look into improving some of the re-used buff icons, and adding a couple of new spell effects. I might also see if I can make one more spell sprite type.

We’ve got a longer than usual weekly this week, as I’ve got some info to share on Next Fest, Pins, and Alchemy.

Next Fest Wrapup

Next Fest has now concluded, and as it turns out the Roguelike Celebration event from October ended up being much more significant for wishlists! I think this is due to Next Fest just having more games in it, and many of the top games running a week long pre-recorded ‘livestream’ in order to eat up more of the exposure from the event.

Regardless, the Steam version of Shattered is still in good shape! If half the wishlists turn into opening week sales, the game will end up with a few times the initial sales that the iOS version had. I also intend to keep the demo updated as v1.2.0 hits beta. In fact, I just releasing one more demo patch to fix a few remaining bugs.

Pin Shipping Adjustments

I’ve now heard back from more Patrons and it seems those shipping issues I mentioned aren’t as widespread as I feared, though a couple mailings were seriously damaged. To help reduce the risk of this happening again, I’m switching to rigid paperboard mailers and I’m going to start sending smaller batches of pins every 2 weeks until we’re caught up.

I’m waiting on the new mailers to arrive, so expect the next round of pins to go out around mid March. The plan is for there to be two mailing rounds in March, the first of which will cover Patrons who signed up before July 2020, and the second to Patrons who signed up before December 2020. At that pace we’ll be all caught up by the end of April.

Alchemy Analysis

I’ve been running a bunch of  numbers for alchemy in the last few days. Here are some of my thoughts on that and some of the adjustments I’m planning:

• Darts are getting a variety of targeted buffs. Ally affecting darts and rot darts in particular are getting sizeable buffs.
• Exotics were greatly improved by v1.0; their usage is considerably up, and almost every buff or rework has had strongly positive results. All I’m doing is handing out some targeted buffs to the weakest performers: dread, foresight, and shrouding fog.
• Bombs were hit quite hard by the energy changes, so I’m slashing their energy costs across the board, with the most emphasis given to the less expensive ones.
• Brews and Spells have also seen reduced usage, so I’m handing a bunch of buffs ranging from energy cost reductions to notable power increases.
• Elixirs have had some usage reduction, but are still doing quite well compared to spells and brews. I am mulling over limiting the player’s ability to stack multiple elixir buffs      (especially the imbue effects), but otherwise don’t have many changes planned here.

If you’re curious about a particular item, feel free to ask in the comments or on Discord!

The success of the exotic changes is also making me consider whether I might want to try and simplify higher tier alchemy as well. There isn’t really a reason why catalysts need to be in all these recipes now that one set of ingredients can give multiple outputs. Such a change is outside of the scope of v1.2.0, but I am considering it for the future.