3.2 KiB
Alright... two months... Yeah, feels like it. Vacation, couple of weeks of illness, and putting in my time here and there. Mostly improvements to gameplay, but also new music (oh god the music is so good). Updates have mostly been going on the garbage fire we call twitter, but this thread is so much nicer. One of the neater changes I came up with, was the realisation that I could get rid of my action points (I called them Oridama) and simply use one of the games ingredients. It would then recharge every round. An added side-bonus of this, was I could get rid of the Defend move (called Aegis Fold), cause ingredients all double as potential shield points anyway, but the Defend move made temporary shield points and it was just all very confusing. Simplicity. Ahhhhhh [imagine a capybara bathing].
By the end of my vacation, two major design issues (for me) were becoming very obvious. The first was the spell called 'Volatile Arcana'. It was just too powerful. It'd either need some delicate fine-tuning, or a major redesign. I tried both and so far the fine-tuning seems the right path. I simply liked its explosive chain reactions too much not to keep the mechanics the same.
Before that, though, was 'Scramble Arcana'. It randomized where new enemies would appear, and what loot they would carry. The meta-aspect of being able to change the state of the game behind the scenes was very appealing, but the level of randomness made it way too unpredictable, and in the levels I had designed for it, though the idea worked, it was too cumbersome to act upon.
After mulling it over for too long, I asked my girlfriend to help me. She's just really smart. We sat down for a brainstorm. I told her about the above, and the spell we came up with is tentatively called...
Material Arcana
I'm real proud of this one. It's a shop directly inside your inventory.
Instead of collapsing reality around an enemy, or destabilizing their very core, it opens a little menu.
You get a random selection of ingredients (and a button to purchase a new random selection), and you can queue up them up to build. It takes 2 rounds
You can also pay to speed up the construction, in case you need to move fast.
Once a move is finished, it is replaced by a random different ingredient (I cheated in the screenshot below)
So yeah. It's a complicated new action/spell/move, but it's definitely usable. I've described it as a spell for the meticulous battle wizard. Programming it was also kinda fun, cause it's a system that spans many parts of the game's systems.
Now that those two design hurdles are dealt with, I need to redesign some levels, design new levels, and do a lot more writing.
Cheers everyone.