Patreon Weekly #19 - Oct 12th, 2019

Hey Patreons!

This week has had me busy with more technical work and some more detailed concepting for 0.7.6.

I've just put 0.7.5b to beta, and the new platform-independent text renderer that it includes should be ready for primetime after a bit of user testing. There ended up being a lot of edge-cases involving Asian languages which I had to address, which is why 0.7.5b ended up taking longer than anticipated. Now that this is done though, the game can compile for desktop! There is literally no logic for desktop yet, you can't even play the game with a mouse, but it compiles!

Now, regarding upcoming game content, I'm going to more deeply elaborate on two things that I've already lightly teased:

Firstly, Mimics are getting some changes in 0.7.6 to be more mischievous. Instead of looking exactly like regular chests, they're going to have a couple of 'tells' that observant players can use to see if the chest they're walking towards is waiting to attack them. Players will need to be observant, as walking up to a mimic and trying to open it normally will now let the mimic get a powerful free attack in! I think mimics will be much more interesting and engaging if they actually punish blindly opening chests, instead of just being a surprise no matter what.

Secondly, that bigger caves enemy I mentioned earlier is going to be the DM-200. This second generation of dwarvern defense machine ditches the electricity and lighter frame from the DM-100 and instead opts for a bigger body and powerful physical attacks! This design completely corrects the weaker attacking power of the DM-100, but adds a new flaw. Because of their size, it is impossible for DM-200s to move through doors or thin passageways, and unlike their successor (the DM-300, of course) they lack the ability to drill through the earth. This makes for a powerful enemy which the player has complete positional control over. While that might sound like an easy enemy (especially for ranged builds), I've got a few ideas as to how I can make them challenging despite their movement restrictions.

With 0.7.5b in beta, I'm all finished with major technical adjustments for now and am working on 0.7.6 in full force, so expect a lot more info on that soon!