Item Distribution | Patreon Weekly #120

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, next week’s weekly is going to have an audio Q&A segment. If you’d like to ask any questions for it, please either comment on this post or ask in the Q&A channel on the discord.

Secondly, there’s a new Shattered Secrets this week, about brainstorming some new badge designs. Shattered Supporters can read Shattered Secrets #5 here.

For this rest of this weekly, I’m going to discuss some subtle item generation tweaks I’m making, and a possible overhaul to the potion of adrenaline surge.

Item Distribution Changes

This is a more subtle change but it should improve gameplay a fair bit. I’ve already made some changes to how consistently the game drops some items types over others, but things are still a bit too random for my liking.

Right now standard items use a ‘deck’ with 70 entries in it. 70 items is still a lot though, which can still lead to unlikely but annoying things like getting all 4 of the deck’s weapon drops right at the start of the game. I’m going to split this into two almost-even decks of 35, which should make things a bit more consistent. The decks will differ very slightly, e.g. one has an artifact and the other has a ring. The order of the decks will be random.

More significantly, the game currently makes recently spawned special rooms much less likely to spawn next, but otherwise picks special room order totally at random. This can rarely lead to things like getting flooded with equipment in the sewers or getting no equipment at all! I’m splitting special rooms up into two groups based on whether they give equipment or consumable drops and making it so that specials from these two groups spawn in roughly equal frequency.

This should not significantly affect how many of any item types drop, but will make the game a little less likely to give a lot of one item type in a short time. If I do it right this will be almost totally unnoticeable in actual gameplay.

Potion of Adrenaline Surge

I’m still trying to come up with a good change for adrenaline surge. One of the problems here is that strength potions start out extremely important but become much less valuable as the game goes on. This means any sort of exotic recipe has a risk of being strictly worse in the earlygame, and strictly better in the lategame. The way to work around this is to keep the exotic heavily tied to the strength system, but then it’s either +1 strength with some side benefit (always strictly better) or it has to be worth losing that +1 strength for.

What I’m currently considering is keeping the circumstantial +2 that adrenaline surge offers, but making it more limited in scope instead of being temporary. Exotic strength could be applied to an item instead of the hero, permanently reducing the strength needed to wield it by 2. This is still possible problematic though, if for no other reason than it doesn’t fit neatly into the ‘drink’ or ‘throw’ actions that all other potions use.