Two weeks in a row I’ve had almost zero free time due to work. This will push the next play test 1-2 weeks out.
- Combat balancing. For the longest time, the player couldn’t be hurt and instantly killed enemies because weapon and armor stats weren’t properly configured. Because this was advantageous for testing (I didn’t get slowed down by combat) and I hadn’t finalized stat values, I didn’t fix the issue. But, it made the game very boring. This had to be addressed before the play test. I started adjusting a few enemy/item values at a time until zero damage and one-hit kills went away. I also set minimum and maximum damage to the same value to remove randomness and simplify the balancing process (I’ll add back in after getting the base values right). I’m using a simple Weapon Damage – Armor Damage Reduction formula. I prefer this in principle but I still need to prove it out in practice.
- Sprite variants. For visual variety, an object’s sprite can now be randomly selected from a list of sprites. There was a way to do this previously using Entity Collection Types, but it required creating separate Actor Types for each sprite variation and was consequently redundant and inefficient.
- New enemy: Bat.
- New Map Elements: Mushroom Alchemy Chamber and Bat Colony. The former is basically the existing Alchemy Chamber, but it’s placed in caves and has some mushrooms growing in it.
- Minor fixes and improvements mostly involving map generation.
Next week, I’ll resolve the biggest issues I found while play testing this week. Maybe I’ll reach a decision on the number of armor slots to include. For now, to simplify damage reduction balancing, I’ve removed the starting head/feet/hands armor from the player classes.
Leave a Reply