Patreon Weekly #34 - Jan 26th, 2020
Added 2020-01-26 20:13:32 +0000 UTCHey Patrons!
This week has been spent on a mix of addressing issues with beta-3.0, and making progress on beta-4.0.
Beta-3.0 has been going very well, and I'm really happy with how the new DM-300 fight has been received. The only significant issue has been that the fight is a bit unintuitive. On initial beta release death rates at DM-300 spiked up to 4x earlier beta numbers, and have steadily been dropping since; currently we're at 2x. This clearly indicates to me that the fight is too tough to understand on the first try, and I have recently made some changes to address this.
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As for what's coming next, I'm currently working on beta-4.0 with planned changes to Ghouls and the Dwarf King.
Ghouls are balanced well, but are also a bit boring, so I'm looking into giving them a bigger twist than just spawning in high numbers. When a ghoul dies it will collapse as normal, but gets back up with low health after a few turns if other ghouls are nearby. This sort of 'life-link' mechanic will help reinforce the 'stronger in numbers' nature of ghouls without just making their stats higher. half-dead ghouls also won't occupy space, which means that one ghoul dropping will make the way for another to get at you. Naturally I plan to tune the balance of this so that it's more of a small wrinkle to fighting them than it is a major inconvenience.
As for DK, while I haven't decided on specific abilities yet, I am pretty confident that the fight will be in three phases:
- The first phase plays similarly to current DK, but he will be more mobile and will probably have an ability or two. Most notably he will no longer need to stand on a pedestal to summon undead. I will likely try to balance this stage to encourage a mix of fighting DK and his summons.
- In the second phase DK becomes invulnerable and steps out of the fight, it's entirely you versus his undead.
- In the last phase DK is on very low health and spawns undead quickly. This is a bit of a damage-rush phase, where you need to finish him off before becoming overwhelmed.
I've made good progress on DK's floor as well:
The visuals above are very close to finished, mainly I'd like to tweak statues to not all stand in the same direction, DK's arena needs a throne in the center, and I'd like to improve the transition between the city and halls tiles. You might also notice there's a nice bit of open space after DK's throne room, perhaps enough for someone to set up a shop...
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Finally, as mentioned last week I've been working on a new Patreon Poll! That should release in another couple of days, and will let you guys vote on the mechanics of the upcoming rare variant of DM-200s!
Comments
The poll will be out tomorrow, so you'll see then, but I'm mostly looking to put more emphasis on DM-200s being limited to a room, and toying with their power budget using that. A corrosive gas option seems obvious but I've shyed away from it because it plays the exact same as regular DM-200s, and I wanted the poll options to be a bit more interesting. Scrapped mechanics are mostly just variants of what ends up in the final fight but less fun. For example originally DM-300 was going to drop rocks on the player if it couldn't see them, but I decided to ditch it as shooting gas was enough to complicate ranged cheesing it, and being able to hide from it when it isn't supercharged is actually pretty neat, and helps emphasize the power of it being able to dig.
Shattered Pixel
2020-01-27 21:43:05 +0000 UTCIt wouldn't be a proper minion-master boss otherwise! I also hope to preserve some of that for an improved Yog fight as well.
Shattered Pixel
2020-01-27 21:29:27 +0000 UTCNice! One thing I liked about the DK fight is that it really allowed some of the more powerful AoE items to shine and be cathartic, so I'm glad there's a dedicated "one vs many" section to it.
s9menine
2020-01-27 04:03:57 +0000 UTCi'm not sure what you have planned for the dm-200 variant, but i'd have to guess either replacing the gas with corrosive gas, or some form of terrain destruction (perhaps removal of doors, which synergizes with the gas shot) that arena looks really cool, and i'm excited to see how the fight plays out! i'd honestly love to hear some details of scrapped mechanics you considered for the new dm-300, and maybe the same for KoD once 4.0 drops. all in all, i'm extremely excited for how 0.8.0 is shaping up to be :)
Lassoloc
2020-01-26 20:25:11 +0000 UTC
