Patreon Weekly #51 - May 25th, 2020

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, there’s a new content poll out! Content Poll #6 is the last in the recent trio of item rework polls and gives a second chance to items that didn’t win polls 4 and 5!

0.8.1 is slowly approaching completion, and at this rate we can hopefully start the 0.8.1 beta in early June. That puts us at a roughly one and a half month dev cycle since 0.8.0b, which isn’t ideal but is much better than the previous update.

I spent most of last week working on some specific changes to item droprates, and on some major changes to some of the game’s menus. Read on if you’d like more details!

Major Menu Changes

I’ve spent some time sprucing up some of the non-ingame interfaces. The first of these is a new credits scene which better reflects who is contributing to the game. Here’s what that looks like! (note that some credits listing are pending final approval from the person credited, and so may change)

I’m also looking to make some changes to the supporter and languages windows. For languages I want to reduce clutter, as the game’s growing list of supported languages is making the current window quite bloated. For the supporter menu, I want to change it into a proper full screen with better visuals and more space. This both opens up options for more supporter tiers/features, and should make the process of reading about benefits more exciting.

Lastly, I’m improving hero select in order to finally, yes, finally, get those hero splash arts into the game! It’s not quite polished enough yet to give a full demonstration, but here’s a WIP picture which I think you’ll agree is quite exciting:

Droprate Changes

Another major quality of life change that I’ve implemented for 0.8.1 is some targeted adjustments to item drops. Right now, especially around the prison, the player’s inventory can get clogged with consumables and equipment. Additionally, lucky or unlucky players can end up getting disproportionally large amounts of some consumables and few to none of others. I’m making a few changes to try and alleviate these issues:

Firstly, I’m moving consumable item drops to a deck-based system. This system means that specific consumables become less likely to appear as they are spawned. This effectively reigns in the extremes of luck, and makes it much more likely for players to get a varied amount of consumables that are closer to the average drop rates. Sources of specific items (like health potion droppers) are unaffected by this. With the diversity of these items going up, there should be less need for quantity, so I’m also slightly increasing the rarity of general consumable drops across the board. This should directly cut down on clutter while hopefully not limiting player options.

Secondly, I’m improving equipment drops from enemies. Currently skeletons and prison guards drop lots of weapons and armor, but the quality of these drops is limited to discourage farming. I’m going to remove the quality limitation on these drops, but also move them to a graduating rarity system similar to wands from shamans or rings from thieves. This means that players can still expect to get a reasonable number of now improved equipment drops, but they will quickly become rare if the player tries to farm them.