Demo Progress Day 4: a lot (but not enough)

Progress

Today feels like it was a pretty significant day for progress. And at the same time, it feels like I did nothing… But this is only because I couldn’t manage to get to where I was hoping to be at the end of day 4.

Looking at the list of features I got around to though, it wasn’t for nothing.

• Added new enemy types, including variants of enemies and a boss
• Updated the EnemySpawner to generate random waves of 1-3 enemies and spawn a boss as the third wave
• Added some background music (thank you BloodPixelHero)
• Tweaked the BattleSystem and DiceRoller to allow enemies to also use dice
• Put the UI in place for selecting upgrades after each wave.

That’s pretty significant, actually, since as you’ll see in the linked video, this actually makes for a 5 minute proper game experience.

Next Steps

I was really hoping to have Skill upgrades done already, since the original plan was to spend day 5 on UI and polish. This is not gonna happen, which means I’ll be making the first release of a very, very early Alpha version.

I still need to modify the Skills so they have upgrade paths to choose from. The current idea I have is that regular enemy waves give you upgrades for the skills you already have equipped, and bosses give you new skills to add to your dice. Very long term, you will have different types of dice as well, which let you equip more or less of certain types (e.g. a Physical focused D6 or Magic focused D8, or fully customisable D6 etc)

I also haven’t even looked at passives yet. Rough idea here is for things like auto healing each turn or +X modifier to a side type. I’ll look at how these will work in the future, along with the updates animations and more sound effects.

Playtesting Results

Having something at the level the game is at now is already giving me ideas about how I can tweak the concepts and balance things a bit. There are two things I’ve already added to my list to rethink.

How you roll

One of my biggest concerns is how to scale the idea from a D6 to a D8 to a D10… At the moment, the dice sides have types: Physical, Magic, Healing, Dynamic and Passive. These are intended to determine what is allowed to go into a slot.

So a D6 for instance has 2 passive slot, 1 physical, 1 magic, 1 healing and 1 dynamic. Dynamic is special in the sense that you can add any other type into it except passive.

Currently, when you choose what action you want to perform, you choose from one of those 4 types. But this feels wrong somehow. If my Dynamic skill is also a Physical attack, then should it not be a possible roll when I choose to roll for Physical?

Also, how does this scale to a D8? My thinking was originally that all dice must have at least the 2 passive and 1 of each, and then all the rest are Dynamic. But this means at higher levels, you’ll only ever care about rolling for Dynamic? So yeah, I don’t think the way I have this now makes sense.

And I do think it’s important to make a choice, and not just roll randomly, because the mechanic to skew a roll in favour of what you need is important.

Crits

I don’t think the crit mechanic works the way it is implemented. When you crit, it applies to your next roll, which means you lose a turn. It also means you can Fumble on your next roll, losing the crit.

It might make more sense that when you crit, the dice auto-rolls immediately for a new result, to which the critical multiplier gets applied. This should help things flow and makes turn order a bit more useful.

Last Day

Tomorrow will be the last dedicated day I have for this for a while, so I’ll focus on getting upgrades working at the very least. I’ll see if I have time for polish, but upgrades are a core part of the experience.

I’d also really like to add some UI to bring the whole dice element to the forefront. It’s the thing that I feel makes my game unique, but currently it is the most hidden feature.

After that, who knows. My goal is to get to a full release by end of 2024, working on this part time. Tomorrows conclusion will help me determine two things; first, is the idea sound enough to pursue, and two, will I be capable of executing it.

Only time will tell.

[EDIT]

I spent some more time on this instead of sleeping. Upgrades for skills are working, but I found an issue with using Scriptable Objects (SO). I need to make a clear split between Player Skills and Enemy Skills. Because the SO is just a data container, all instances share the same data. What this means is that when I upgrade my skills, any Enemy which just happens to have the same ones equipped also get the upgrades.

So either I don’t upgrade the skill instance, but replace it with a level 2/3/4/5 version, or I split player and enemy skills and hope they don’t get shared accidentally…