Roguelike Celebration 2021 | Patreon Weekly #121

Hey Patrons!

This weekly has the second audio summary/Q&A attached to it! This one came out a little short, partly because I’m juggling a few things right now and so didn’t have too much time to dedicate to it. For next month I’m going to try and extend the length a bit. I’ve also included some timestamps for questions at the end of the weekly.

For this rest of this weekly, I’ve got some news about an upcoming conference, and some core changes to the alchemy interface!

Roguelike Celebration 2021

In another two weeks, on October 16th, I’m going to be giving a talk at Roguelike Celebration 2021! The talk it titles “Community-Driven Roguelike Development”, and will mainly involve me sharing development insights from Shattered, with an emphasis on how Shattered came from PD, and continues to work with its community.

While I don’t intent to actually release on Steam super soon, because of the signal boost from the conference I am fast-tracking getting a Steam storefront page set up. Expect to see a ‘coming soon’ page there soon if you’re interested in wishlisting the game!

Alchemy UI Changes

In the last few weeklies I’ve been focusing on individual recipe balance, but the big part of v1.1.0 is structural changes to alchemy. As a quick recap from weekly #82, the major structural change I’m planning is mixing up how the alchemical energy system works:

• Initial alchemical energy found in pots will be heavily reduced
• More energy can be generated by sacrificing consumable items
• Exotic potions/scrolls now need energy instead of seeds/stones
• Existing recipe energy costs will be rebalanced based on these changes

The point of this change is to reduce recipe complexity, increase flexibility, and more heavily focus the system on its original goal: recycling consumables you don’t want into fewer consumables that you do want. In particular alchemical energy will stop being a limiter that’s sort of arbitrarily layered on top of the system, and will instead be more integrated into the system itself.

However, while making this change should improve the system overall, it also means that one set of ingredients can have multiple possible recipe outputs. Consider the player putting a scroll into the pot, do they want to scrap it for energy, turn it into stones, or spend some energy and turn it into an exotic? Previously I was considering ways to work around this, but now I’m considering just embracing the idea of multiple potential outputs. Here’s a rough mockup of how that would look for the aforementioned scroll scenario (energy numbers are subject to change):

This interface still needs some work (just as an example, those outputs need info buttons, or a confirmation dialog that experienced players can toggle off), but the core idea is promising I think. Embracing this opens up more recipe flexibility options, such as changing catalysts to also just be scroll/potion plus some energy. I just want to make sure that the interface doesn’t become too visually cumbersome, and doesn’t require significantly more taps than the current one.

Audio Timestamps

• 0:00 Introduction and month summary
• 3:05 “Will you add blacklists for certain champion titles that are too dangerous on certain groups of enemies, like brute having range modifications or tanky enemies being giant?” - Trashbox Bobylev
• 4:25 “What's your favorite animal” - Commander Cupcake & “what's your second favorite animal” - Ivy
• 5:56 “is there anything you would have done differently with shattered, if you had a chance” - Trashbox Bobylev
• 7:20 “i found the rust presentation on youtube, did you end up recording your segment of the gdms as well?” - Ivy
• 8:20 “if pd had never gone open source, how do you think you would have gotten your start in game dev?” - Ivy
• 9:55 “in your opinion, which type of glue tastes the best?” - Ivy
• 10:40 “What's your favorite Pokémon?” - Zrp200
• 11:15 “Any chance the floor warping effect of distortion trap will come back in some form?” - Fcelon
• 12:30 “What do you think was the most busted item in the history of Shattered (before getting nerfed)?” – Fcelon
• 15:50 Conclusion