Patreon Weekly #61 - Aug 3rd, 2020

Hey Patrons!

After crunching pretty hard on it last week v0.8.2 went to beta on Thursday! It’s seemingly quite stable now after a couple followup patches, so things look to be in track for a full release in the middle of this coming week.

Now, I’ve got some information to share on the last content poll, and a rough outline for what’s coming in v0.9.0.

Regarding Content Poll #8

Here are the results for last week’s content poll:
Pharmacophobia:   76% Support
Faith is My Armor:  47% Support
On Diet:                       41% Support

The results of this poll clearly show that people are hungry for new challenge mechanics, with the more extensive Pharmacophobia changes getting strong support, compared to relatively weak support for the other two changes. However, I’m unhappy with this poll for a couple reasons:

Firstly, I think I did a poor job of communicating that this poll was not competitive. While I did mention it in the text, I changed basically nothing about how the poll was structured. This gave no way for people to abstain from voting on a specific thing: patrons either had to be for/against everything or not vote at all. In the future when running non-competitive polls like this I’m going to offer a distinct yes and no choice for each option.

Secondly, and more importantly, I’ve spent some time thinking on the initial design thoughts I wrote for these challenges and, especially in light of some feedback, I’m currently considering some revisions to them. The game definitely should be getting some new challenge mechanics, but heavily ramping up the complexity on some of the most straightforward difficulty increasing challenges is probably not the best way to do that. I’m going to see if there’s a way to accomplish the goals I wanted (clean up the final item removal mechanics from challenges), without tacking on quite as much in terms of new mechanics.

So, with that in mind I’m going to be running a Poll #8.5 soon, probably next week, with a tweaked voting process and some adjustments to the proposed designs. Then at the end of this month poll #9 will cover some new challenges that will offer new challenge mechanics. If anyone has specific thoughts about what they’d like to see for the three challenges in poll #8 I’d love to hear them!

The Rough Plan for v0.9.0

So, I’ve decided to move forward with calling the next update 0.9.0, but unlike the previous 0.X.0 updates I’m not going to let it take six months! Rather than releasing the new gameplay system in one monolithic update, I’m going to try and release it steadily over 0.9.0, 0.9.1, 0.9.2, etc.

For v0.9.0 in particular, here’s what’s on the table:

• Code structure for the new gameplay system, as well as implementation up to around hero level 10. As mentioned before the system is going to be layered, which should lend itself nicely to releasing it incrementally.
• Improvements to some existing challenges as covered in Polls #8 and #8.5
• At least 1 entirely new challenge, info TBD based on poll #9.
• Possibly 1 or 2 more small-sized additions, depending on how things go. Good examples include targeted improvements to alchemy (I’ve got some recipe ideas that might help with inventory and quickslot demand), that ring of tenacity rework, or some improvements to the badges scene UI.
• The usual balance tweaks and bugfixes