Patreon Weekly #21 - Oct 26th, 2019

Hey Patrons!

As mention in last week's weekly, this week I'm going to be giving more detailed info on what's coming to the caves! All of this content is in the middle of being implemented, and so is much closer to being final than before.

(note that some of these sprites are a WIP. In particular DM-200s are just a shrunk DM-300 at the moment, spinners are still drawn from totally above when they shouldn't be, and I'd like to see if I can diversity the mask pattern a bit for shaman alts.)

Firstly, bats and brutes are getting relatively minor tweaks. Both of them already fit their roles as fairly straightforward damage enemies well, and I don't want to mess with that too much. 

Bats are getting a very slight damage nerf, and a more significant nerf to the amount they can heal from each hit. Rather than healing for full damage dealt, they will now heal for damage - 4. My goal here is to make bats less powerful in general, and also to make armor more effective against them, as they will heal very little if they can only land small amounts of damage at a time.

Brutes are getting slightly more complex changes, as they will now wait until they reach 0 HP before enraging. Once they enrage they will gain shielding for a few turns, and the player can either risk fighting the enraged brute or back off while the shielding dissipates and the brute dies on its own. This should hopefully increase the number of cases where enrage does more than let you hit the brute again for free, without making it too complex to play around.

Shamans are getting some variants, similar to what I mentioned for elementals in the previous weekly. My plan is to given them a new magical bolt attack which better fits their tribal theme, and the debuff they inflict will vary by the shaman type.

I'm currently planning at least two shaman variants, with a possible more rare third one. The classic red shaman will inflict a tweaked variant of weaken, which reduces physical damage dealt by 33%, and does not affect strength. Blue ones instead debuff armor, reducing blocked damage by 33%. The possible purple shaman is a generalist which will inflict 'hex', a negative version of bless that reduces accuracy and evasion. Purple shamans will also have the ability to bless allied gnolls, and will attempt to seek out a gnoll brute to follow. I don't want to commit to purple shamans yet as I have to be sure they'll work well (might be awkward or overpowered), but I really like the concept of two regular enemies buddying up.

Of course, with weaken going to Shamans, you might wonder what debuff warlocks will have. I'm planning to share some info on that one soon, perhaps next week..,

As I mentioned in the previous weekly, I'm looking to add more pseudo-ranged enemies to the game, and I think cave spinners can fit in that role perfectly! Rather than just laying web as they retreat, spinners will now be able to shoot webs at a distance to block whatever path they like. Spinners can fire webs through enemies, but cannot directly web the tile a character is standing on. This will give spinners some extra control over player positioning, and I'm planning on letting them observe how the player is moving and attempt to web accordingly.

I'm also planning to adjust the properties of webs themselves. I'm planning to make them solid, such that they block projectile attacks. In compensation, they will be broken if something is thrown into them, and will now give a new 'webbed' debuff instead of rooting. Webbed acts similarly to crippled, but will require the player to move enough times to break free of the web instead of just spending time. As usual, spinners will be able to move through webs freely.

DM-200s are going to be the first larger enemy in the game, and are restricted to the room they spawned in. In exchange for this heavy mobility price, DM-200's will have considerable defensive power. Using tools to attack them from range is best, but they won't simply stand there and let you kill them. Like their bigger cousin, the DM-200 model is capable of some basic self repair, and any turn that isn't spent attacking is a turn where a DM-200 will lightly heal itself, up to a cap. They will also attempt to retreat out of sight if a character is attacking them from a place they can't reach.

DM-200s, as you might expect by being a limited-mobility enemy, should be more easily defeated by ranged strategies, but it's my hope that their defensive abilities will mean that they aren't conquered by just tapping on a stationary enemy a bunch. I suspect this will be a tricky bit of balance to get right though, and so I will be actively evaluating the design of DM-200s once 0.7.6 goes to beta. Other large enemies in later stages of the game will have enough power budget to have more exotic abilities, so I think there shouldn't be issues there.

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I'm hoping to get the implementation of these caves enemies to a functional state in the next couple of days, and them I'm moving on to implementing enemies in the dwarven halls next week. It's looking like the first beta of 0.7.6 might show up in early to mid november at this rate.

I'm also starting to consider what the options should be for the second patreon poll! I don't yet have a locked-in idea, but I'm consider letting you guys vote between a few different choices for new enemy variants. Let me know if that sounds interesting!