Crystal Doors | Patreon Weekly #142

Hey Patrons! Sorry for the delay in this weekly

A few things first:

• There’s a new Patron Poll! This one covers some smaller visual improvements to be made to the game’s various sprites.
• Next week’s weekly will also have an audio Q&A segment! Feel free to ask questions either here or on the Patreon discord.

In this weekly, I’m going to share some early results from Steam Next Fest, and some design plans for alchemy and special rooms!

Early Next Fest

Next Fest started on Monday, and early data is quite positive! So far Shattered is getting about 5x the demo players, 5x the store page visits, and 10x the number of wishlists compared to the days before the event. It’s very hard to know exactly how this will all convert to release sales, but thanks to Next Fest and the Roguelike Celebration event there’s a very real possibility that the game will sell more copies on Steam than on iOS, at least to start.

As for further desktop improvements, I’m mainly shifting my focus to v1.2.0 content now, but I will try to make a few more fixes and tweaks before releasing on Steam. In particular radial menus for controller input would be a huge improvement and shouldn’t be too tricky to implement.

Some Special Room Concepting

I’ve started looking into what sort of additions and improvements I can make to special rooms as well. At the moment this has been mostly focused on additions.

When considering what special rooms to add, I first thought a bit on challenge rooms that could take advantage of some of the consumables that currently aren’t needed in any. One easy option is a room that’s perpetually filled with toxic or corrosive gas, such that a potion of purity is needed to enter it and collect any treasure. I’d also like to think up a room that works with potions of haste, but so far all the ideas have been either too complex or solvable with other items like potions of levitation.

I’m also considering adding a new type of locked door to the game: Crystal Doors. These would work very similarly to regular locked doors, except they will permit vision and require a crystal key to open. I’m going to use them in two places: For the game’s existing pit rooms (to help make them more recognizable) and in a new reward special room where the player gets to choose between one sub-room containing some average quality loot, and another sub-room containing a closed chest or two. Do you go for the guaranteed average reward, or take the chance at something better? Naturally only one room that uses crystal keys can spawn per floor.