Patreon Weekly #50 - May 18th, 2020

Hey Patrons!

Content Poll #5 has finished, with the Wand of Regrowth as the winner! Here are the full results:
Wand of Regrowth: 64% Support
Wand of Magic Missile: 57% Support
Ring of Wealth: 50% Support
Ring of Might: 36% Support
Support was definitely more mixed this time around, but the wand of regrowth still pulled ahead by a decent margin. I’m going to get started on some more specific plans for regrowth and should have something to share on that in the coming weeks. In the meantime, if your favourite choice didn’t make it on either of the last two polls, there’s still a third round coming up…

This week I’ve been working on some item concepting and more big QoL improvements. Read on to get some details about new SFX, item icons, and a more precise design for the talisman of foresight!

New Movement SFX

Firstly, go listen to the video attached to this post if you haven’t already. I’m working with S9meNINE (Satellite on discord) to bring some new sound effects to the game! 

The movement sounds in the video are already implemented into 0.8.1, but we’d also like to try and add some combat and misc sound effects for 0.8.1 as well, more on those later. As with any change like this, your feedback is crucial, so please let us know what you think! 

Better Item Icons

Part of this week was spent making extensive code and design changes to the item icon system. Icons now appear in the top-right instead of bottom-right, which means there’s now space for me to give icons to rings! I’ve also taken the opportunity to improve a bunch of the existing icons. Special thanks to the folks on the Patreon Discord, who helped with the design process of several of these icons. 

Talisman of Foresight

Previously I talked about the talisman having two or three abilities to suit different use cases, but I’ve come up with a single active ability that’s versatile enough to stand on its own. This ability is a redesigned ‘scry’ that projects a cone of detection from the player in whatever direction and distance they choose. The player can make the scry short to conserve charge, or large if they want to sweep a whole area. This keeps the talisman simple to use while also retaining the flexibility I wanted.

Scry projects through walls and reveals all secrets, items, and enemies in the area being scanned. As the talisman levels up the max range of scry increases, and enemies/items will be revealed for a longer duration after casting the effect. At high levels this acts as a quite powerful alternative to scrolls of magic mapping and potions of mind vision!

The talisman gains a small amount of exp for each tile revealed, and a larger amount for each enemy/item/trap revealed, and the most exp for revealing a secret door. This replaces the current way the talisman levels, which occurs whenever the player finds a secret by any means.

This new ability should be much more interactive and powerful when used well, and the new exp system encourages frequent ability use. Crucially, because the effect reveals enemies it has lots of potential combat applications. I think this should make the talisman a much more fun and useful artifact.