Patreon Weekly #23 - Nov 9th, 2019

Hey Patrons!

This week I've been mainly concepting and making technical improvements, but I have a few things to share!

Firstly, I've got elementals into a final state. There will be two common elementals, one uncommon, and one rare. As mentioned before these will be 'pseudo-ranged' enemies: each will have a weaker ranged attack which they can use every few turns. Each elemental type has the same base stats, but has different weaknesses and inflicts different debuffs. Note that no elementals deal direct damage with their ranged attack, but some might inflict a debuff that deals damage.

- Fire Elementals are the traditional red with fire particle effects. Their ranged attack is a weaker fire bolt which will set their target ablaze for a short time. When they melee, fire elementals will deal bonus damage and have a chance to set their enemy ablaze. Both their ranged and on-hit attacks are totally negated by water, but otherwise they have the most direct damage of any elemental. Fire elementals have a chance to drop a potion of liquid flame. Newborn fire elementals are getting a more green coloration, as blue is now needed for the next elemental type.

- Frost Elementals have a blue core with snowy particle effects. Their ranged attack is an icy bolt which adds a significant amount of chill to the target. They also have a chance to chill when meleeing, but the effect is pretty minor if the target isn't in water. They deal notably less damage than fire elementals, but make up for it by hindering your ability to defend yourself. Frost elementals have a chance to drop a potion of frost.

- Shock Elementals are uncommon and have a white and yellow core with electrical particle effects. Despite being electricity themed I've decided against making them just a souped-up DM-100. For their ranged attack they flash with bright light and temporarily blind all enemies who can see them. When they close into melee their electrical attacks can arc to multiple characters, and will deal bonus damage in water. Shock Elementals have a decent chance to drop a scroll of recharging.

- Chaos Elementals are rare and have a white and grey core with a bunch of rainbow particle effects. They can randomly trigger most cursed wand effects from both their ranged and melee attacks, so be wary of unpredictable effects! Chaos elementals are guaranteed to drop a scroll of transmutation!

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I've also been making some more technical progress on the game as well! The new desktop version is currently missing key remapping but is otherwise at feature parity with the old desktop version. I don't think I'll be distributing a desktop version of the game too widely right away, but starting with 0.7.6 I am going to be offering desktop betas through channels like the Pixel Dungeon discord! In the slightly farther future I will likely use a platform like itch.io to distribute desktop builds.

In addition to desktop features, I've also finally started tackling Shattered's backlog of small issues. I maintain a list of smaller bugs or design issues that people have reported to me, and over the past month the list has slowly grown to over 50 items! I've gotten it down to around 10 this week, and moving forward I want to try and address these smaller issues more quickly, instead of putting a large number of them off until an indeterminate time in the future.

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Finally, I've been mulling over what might work well for our second patron poll, and I think I have a pretty good idea for it. In keeping with the theme of 0.7.6, you'll be choosing between a few options for enemy variations! Right now i'm focusing on getting 0.7.6 to beta, so expect to hear more regarding the patreon poll once that happens. If all goes smoothly I'm hoping to start the beta for 0.7.6 (with most or all regular enemies but no boss tweaks yet) in another week or two.