Patreon Weekly #48 - May 4th, 2020

Hey Patrons!

Content Poll #4 has ended with the Talisman of Foresight winning by a pretty commanding margin! Here are the full results:
Talisman of Foresight: 80% Support
Master Thieves’ Armband: 50% Support
Footwear of Nature: 40% Support
Horn of Plenty: 30% Support
Now that weeklies are pretty consistently coming out at 11am on Monday, I think I’m going to try to sync up polls with them when one is due. That way polls can go for almost a full 7 days and the results can still be included in the next weekly.

As for releases, 0.8.0a is currently doing quite well. I’m planning on one final bugfix patch by mid next week but don’t see a need for further changes.

Read on if you'd like more details...

Talisman of Foresight

Now that a winner has been decided for the artifact poll, it’s time to start work on a more specific design!

As mentioned in the poll, I think the talisman’s passive is already quite good. It might need small tweaks but overall I think it does a great job of helping the player while being interactive. What I want to primarily focus on is the active ability of the talisman. I don’t yet have a concrete design, but here are a few thoughts:

• The talisman should have multiple abilities which consume varying amounts of charge and possibly require a certain talisman level to use. 3 is probably a good maximum number of effects.
• The talisman should have a low-cost ability with limited usefulness unless it’s used intelligently. Something like revealing tiles in a cone or letting the talisman detect hidden doors for a short time. 
• At least one ability should have direct combat applications, such as revealing enemies in some way.
• A strong general awareness effect would work well for the most powerful ability. Scry currently fits this somewhat but surely it can be made more interesting. 
• Just giving players buffs that already exist in the game treads on the toes of other items and is a bit boring. If possible the effects would work best without them.

Game Balance After 0.8.0a

In 0.8.0a I made some changes to sniper shot and general game balance, let’s see how those did!

Sniper shot is clearly in a much better place now. While it is still showing as weaker than snapshot, that could be explained by momentum from the previous versions, or even just variance. If sniper shot continues to be a bit weak I might give it another 10-20% to the distance scaling.

This is a great example of why so much of my balancing is based on analytics data these days. I knew that sniper shot likely needed a buff but the numbers helped inform me on how strong that buff needed to be. The 20-40% buff sniper shot got might not be perfect, but it’s close, and I likely would have been more conservative if I was balancing without data to back me up. 

As for overall balance, time plus the general tweaks in 0.8.0a are pushing things in the right direction. Both Yog and DM-300 are settling down nicely compared to 0.8.0, and any remaining balance issues can probably be solved with minor tweaks in 0.8.1. I think the biggest issue that remains is that DM-300’s difficulty is still heavily influenced by whether you understand its mechanics, and a lot of players don’t until after a few deaths. While existing players have gotten over that hump, I worry that new players won’t fare as well. I’m hoping to make some tweaks in 0.8.1 that will make DM-300 easier to understand, without watering things down for people who already know how to fight it.