New Challenges! | Patreon Poll #9

Hey Patrons!

As promised in Content Poll #8.5, this poll includes some options for new challenges! Each of these challenge ideas tries to focus on taking an existing aspect of the game that’s challenging for the player and lean into it more heavily, rather than the common challenge approach of restricting/removing mechanics that are helpful. We’ve got a challenge each for bosses, enemies, levelgen, and equipment!

The winner(s) of this poll will have these ideas developed on and will be implemented into v0.9.0 as new challenges! Depending on how support shakes out I might pick one or two winners from this poll. 

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Please vote for all the options that you like, not just for your one favourite! I allow multiple votes as it means that a higher proportion of people will end up voting for the winning choice. It also lets me gauge interest and lets polls be a bit more flexible, I might choose to implement the top 2 choices in some polls for example.

All patrons are encouraged to share their opinion by commenting and voting, but currently only the votes from Golden+ Supporters are counted when determining a poll winner. Votes from Shattered Supporters are worth double!

Stronger Bosses

The first challenge idea is one that’s been bouncing around my head since midway through developing v0.8.0. When reworking bosses, I purposefully designed them with a bunch of mechanics that could be tuned and adjusted to increase or decrease their difficulty.

This challenge is all about taking those new mechanics and amping them up to make the game’s bosses quite challenging indeed! Below I’ve written out some rough ideas for each boss, but things will need to be refined a bit with playtesting and so these might change. The goal is to start things off moderately harder, and steady crank things up to 11 by the time the player reaches DK and Yog.

• All bosses get a boost to max HP and a smaller boost to attacking power.
• Goo can now move while pumping up and heals slowly increasing amounts of HP the longer it is in water.
• Tengu spreads traps and uses abilities more aggressively, and all of his special attacks deal substantially more damage. I may also look into giving him a tool to counter ranged damage a bit.
• DM-300’s arena features more hazards, DM-300 digs faster, and three power pylons activate instead of two!
• DK is more aggressive with his minion summons and abilities, and summons stronger minions faster, including golems! 
• Yog now summons TWO fists every phase, for all 6 total over the course of the fight. Yog’s regular attacks and summons are also stronger, especially if you’ve left spawners alive.

Champion Enemies

This potential challenge instead focuses on regular enemies. Somewhat like how regular enemies can sometimes be replaced with a rare variant, this one gives each regularly spawned enemy a chance to spawn with one of a few possible champion buffs. Each buff would be visually indicated with a different colored aura.

The goal here is to make regular combat both more varied and more dangerous! Champion enemies would pick from a small pool of possible champion effects, with the aim of mixing up how the player might want to interact with that particular enemy. Champion enemies would be more common than rare variants, perhaps around a 1/15 chance. Some of these effects might be:

• Heavily boosted evasion, which would force the use of consumables, wands, or surprise attacks.
• Boosted damage, which would encourage the player to evade the enemy and not fight them directly.
• High damage resistance and boosted damage but made large. This would mean the player might choose to fight the stronger enemy or might choose to avoid them.

More Secrets

Moving away from hostile creatures, this challenge focuses on parts of the environment that are out to get you. Anyone remember back in vanilla when important items could be behind hidden doors?

This challenge amplifies the game’s secret mechanics by making hidden rooms more prevalent and less optional. All of the dungeon’s various hidden elements become more common, and true secret rooms even get an upgrade in importance. This means that a player’s intuition for finding secrets becomes less of a small advantage on the side, and much more necessary for progressing in the game.

• Traps are slightly more common
• Doors are more likely to be hidden, and a visible path to each non-secret room is no longer guaranteed.
• Secret rooms now spawn with additional bonus loot, which can include progression items and other things that would normally spawn on the floor.
• The talisman of foresight will likely be adjusted or disabled by this challenge

Heavy Upgrades

Lastly, this challenge amps up the strength system to make it more strictly gate what types of gear you can use. Think you’ll just get around this by using wands? Don’t worry, I thought of that ;).

The goal here is to try and amp up the value of mid tier items for the player by making it notably harder to invest in higher-tier gear. Additionally, the value of dumping upgrades into rings and wands is reduced, as their power is now also gated by the strength system. My hope is that this challenge keeps the relative balance between these two types of equipment, while also making the strength system much more oppressive.

• Upgrades no longer reduce the strength requirements on weapons and armor.
• Wands now require 11 + lvl strength to use, or 10 + lvl strength if the wand is imbued in the mage’s staff. If the player has insufficient strength, wands will have a chance to fail to zap, wasting a charge and a turn.
• Rings now require 11 + lvl strength to use. They will have no effect at all if the player has insufficient strength.
• The ring of might will probably be adjusted or disabled by this challenge.