Patreon Weekly #36 - Feb 8th, 2020

Hey Patrons!

Work continues on getting the dwarf king fight ready for release. All the individual parts of the fight are now working, and it's a matter of tieing them together properly, as well as tuning and balancing.  I'm now anticipating a release of beta-4.0 early next week.

Additionally, content poll #3.5 has ended and the winner is the corrosive grenade ability! DM-201s with corrosive grenades will be added at a later part of the beta.

Results for Patreon Poll #3.5
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Firstly, I never actually gave the results for Poll #3:
DM-201s: 55% support
DM-205s: 44% support
Unstable DM-200s: 33% support

This is also partially why I decided to do a poll #3.5, as the just 55% support for the winning choice implied to me that none of the options were especially exciting.

The results for Poll #3.5 were:
Corrosive Grenades: 75% support
Targeted Rockfall: 62.5% support
Self-Heal: 37.5% support

That's much better! With 75% of support corrosive grenades were the clear winner, though targeted rockfall got good support as well. I may try to make use of a rockfall effect elsewhere at some point.

Dwarf King Progress
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You can see the finished visuals for DK's floor above, with the arena on the left and exit on the right. The only thing I'm a bit unhappy with is the slightly puny throne. I may edit that so the throne also occupies the tile above it, which would give me enough space to make it larger and more impressive.

You might also notice that a certain shopkeeper can now be found immediately after the fight, rather than on a separate floor! Moving the imp here frees up floor 21 to serve as a regular demon halls floor. I definitely think that having a short sort of gauntlet set of floors is a neat concept, but just hacking one floor off a regular set doesn't accomplish that well, so I'd rather make the length of the demon halls consistent with the other regions.

The extra floor lets me move the second spawner on floor 24 to floor 21. However, to still have some difficulty progression to ripper demons, deeper spawners will spawn rippers slightly faster, but never as fast as the old doubled-up spawners on floor 24. This also gives the demon halls enough space to have a proper fifth enemy type, though in the interest of time I don't plan to add one just yet.

(direct video link)

Lastly, here's a demonstration of the different vfx when DK is summoning an enemy, though of course normally he won't summon so rapidly when the fight starts. Each particle type represents a different minion that will appear at that pedestal after a few turns.