Week Six: Shops n' More

Overall a great week! Act 1 is much more complete, and the game continues to feel way better. The addition of shops make towns a lot more useful, and card removal is revealing some balance issues in the game. Additional items help add some needed variety.

Progress

• Shops
• Card removal
• Enemy sprite art (partially done: 5/11)

Stretch goals:

• Multi-effect items
• More quest events, and character quests (not done)

Shops!

We now have shops in the game! Building the initial shop UI went really well; it only took one day for the fully functional version you see below.

That being said, building UIs in Godot just makes me miss React, where the same UI would take 20% the time 😭 Maybe it's just that I'm more used to it, but I think the ui-as-code approach is way easier to work with.

Enemy Sprites

Here's a first look at the wilders!

And the party fighting an automaton!

Playtesting

Had a quite fun Ratpack run this week. I got double Raise Rat, plus a Rally, plus an Exert into curse into Rat Infestation. The Exert was really fun to play around since it pretty quickly started nerfing my draw. The scaling was slow, but it was still enough to defeat the Wolf Lord without anyone dying. Feels right for Act 1.

The Wolf Lord also debuffed my Soul pretty early, so it was nice to have cards that didn't depend on my primary stat. That's gonna be something to watch.

That being said, I rushed the boss and wasn't very strong otherwise, and still won. Might need a bit more difficulty in the boss fight?

I'm also finding that every time I playtest I find a new way to break the game. That is somewhat fun, but it's maybe also an indication that I need to do a lot more playtesting & balance correcting.

Reward Icons

Not the highest priority, but it does make it much easier to orient you when you're first learning the game. It also makes the reward screens look better.

I'm also hoping this will make the main quest more noticeable; alpha testers sometimes didn't make the connection between "defeat the wolf lord" and the quest marker on the map. Hopefully showing it here will make it more clear what you should do next.

New Equips

One of my stretch goals last week was to add some more advanced equips; I added 6, a couple of which I'll highlight below.

• Blood Stone: Adds an action you can use each turn which costs 1 hp, but gives you one mana. A great equip for decks that need more mana whatever the cost.
• Cursed Amulet: Grants strength and precision, but adds a curse into your deck. Could be just worth the cost, or you could run good curse mitigation cards.
• Ruby Amulet: This is a type of effect I've been trying to add to the game since the beginning. When you first equip the amulet, you can bind a card to the equip; this removes the card from that player's deck and changes the Ruby Amulet's effect into "Includes \[Card] in your deck". That card remains bound to the amulet for the rest of the run. I wonder how that could be useful???

Next Week

• Quest Events, Town Notice Boards, and Character Quests
• To keep making town more useful as waypoints, I want them to be a source of quests. I think this will also help drive players around the map so they don't just beeline the boss.
• I also still need to add the quests to add a character to your party.
• More Fights & Enemy Variety: 14 distinct fights, ~20 enemies.
• There are currently 7 distinct fights you can encounter in act 1 (4 of which are region locked), so playtesting is leading to a lot of repeat fights.
• Wandering merchant events (shops outside of towns)
• Add more common items; there are currently only 8 so you always see the same ones. Larger goal is to have 40 total items by 2 weeks from now.
• Finish enemy art
• Allow selling unused equips
• Balance gold costs, equip drop rates
• Lots of playtesting and balance changes
• Scrollable map?

Card Library