Patreon Weekly #37 - Feb 16th, 2020

Hey Patrons!

Beta-4.0 released a few days ago, and has been doing very well so far! I've got a few bugs that need squashing, but otherwise the balance and feedback on the reworked Dwarf King have been very solid. The Dwarf King changes ended up being more significant in scope than I originally planned, so I'm calling the changes to him a rework as well!

For this week I'm going to visiting family to help with some household work, so I likely won't be getting much done on Shattered. I'll try to find some time to do some concepting and sprite work though, so I do hope to have something to share next week, even if it's just a bit. Once I get back from that I'm going to start pushing for getting 0.8.0 finished. That means changes to Yog-Dzewa, new sprites, and DM-201s.

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

Early Plans for Yog-Dzewa

Firstly, I'm absolutely not going to let the Yog changes turn into a full rework. This is partly in the interest of time and also because I would prefer to do a proper rework of Yog closer to the game's full release. What that means is that I'm going to be trying to extend and remix the existing mechanics of the fight more than I'm going to be trying to make entirely new ones. 

The most significant thing that needs improving is the pace of the fight, which is currently swings between two extremes. The fight starts out with Yog at full power, but the moment the player gets the upper hand (heh) against the fists this flips on its head and the player is in complete control. This is bad for two reasons: firstly this makes the boss both too easy and a huge noob trap, and secondly the player should never get to feel like they dictate the pace against the final boss.

Because of this, while I do want to preserve all the elements of the current fight (the fists, eye, larva, etc.), the manner in which they appear and their exact behaviour might get shifted around, so that the fight is both less extreme up-front, and harder to get complete control over. This should hopefully make for a more evenly-paced and engaging fight.

Wrapping up the Beta

To quickly summarize, here are the major things left to do in the beta:
- Changes to Yog-Dzewa
- New spritework for all the various additions
- DM-201s, as voted for by you guys =)
- Additional cleanup and polish (mostly needed in the demon halls)

Once I get back from my work with family, my will be starting to knock items off this list and working towards getting 0.8.0 to beta-5.0 and then finally to release. While I'm very happy with all the changes and additions in this update, I was originally planning for it to take 1 or 2 months, not 4!

Cataloguing my progress for this update on Patreon has helped make it clear to me just how badly this update has feature-creeped, and while I am happy with the quality of the end result, it would be much better if such a huge update was deliberately planned instead of spontaneous. I'm going to try being more willing to revise my estimates for how long things will take, rather than just assuming things will take as long as I initially predicted until they don't.

In the case of 0.8.0 this would have probably meant splitting the update into 3 separate updates (one per region). That would have allowed the flow of content to the release version to be more consistent, and given me the option to delay parts of the update to let other content take priority.