Armor Recharge | Patreon Weekly #98

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, the next Patreon Livestream will be this Saturday the 24th, at 8pm EDT! As usual, if you have any questions you’d like answered, please write them in a comment here, or on the Patreon Discord. Golden+ Patrons will be able to watch the stream live, and all patrons can access it after the next weekly.

For the rest of this weekly, I’ve got some more news on iOS and some design changes coming to armor abilities in v0.9.3.

iOS Turbulence

(Apple calls the service TestFlight so there’s going to be some aviation puns!)

Since last weekly, I’ve been spending more time than expected fixing various issues with the iOS port. Thankfully this hasn’t impacted the timeline for iOS release I shared in the last weekly, but it has slowed down the pace of v0.9.3 a bit.

A lot of this time was spent tweaking iOS configuration data that’s supposed to be filled in for you in a more standard iOS project. This led to the old programming trial of trying random things, scouring decade-old forum threads, and digging through arcane documentation, all to find out the one line of code that needs to be changed to make things work. After repeating that process a few times, I’ve managed to fix a bunch of issues with the iOS build!

Shattered Patrons can expect a post about TestFlight very soon, and I still plan to share the TestFlight beta to all Patrons in a future weekly, probably #100. For now though, let’s get back to v0.9.3!

Armor Charge Design Changes

Back in v0.8.0, I changed armor recharging to no longer use 1/3 of the hero’s current HP, but that HP cost was still the benchmark for balancing the effect. I wanted to remove the HP cost without making class armor way more permissive, so one use every 2/3 of a level sounded about right. For v0.9.3 I’m giving class armor a much bigger power budget though, so this charge speed started to feel very restrictive.

I don’t yet know exactly how each armor ability will recharge (some will likely be faster than others), but I’ve set an initial baseline that’s a fairly straight conversion of the old charge rate. At base, armor now recharges based on time, not levels, and takes 500 turns to reach 100% charge. This results in 175 turns per ability use, which should be much more often than the old effect.

As I start fleshing out the specifics of some effects this week, I think it’s likely that some of them will charge more quickly, or perhaps use less charge amount. I may just end up moving class armor to a system similar to wands, if that ends up better from a UI standpoint.