Pre-Alpha Progress Update 1

Updates

Hello everyone. I’ve slowly and quietly been continuing development on my game after my 5 dedicated days ran out. I’ve made some significant progress which I want to share here before going into some game design discussions.

First off, in my last post I mentioned some things I never got around to, but some of those are now (mostly) done.

[ ] Main Menu and a way to restart the game (or a pause menu, or a help menu…)
[ ] Passive Skills not implemented
[x] Skill Upgrades are very basic
[ ] Skill Replacement
[x] Actual Dice models
[x] More enemies and bosses
[x] No sounds
[ ] No visual/particle effects

The main change is that skills are smarter and upgrades are easier to define and more specific. I’ve also added an animated d6 for when you roll, a very basic one, sure, but it really adds a lot I feel. I still don’t have the passive skills working, but there has been some progress on reworking the Skill system to allow them.

I’ve added some more sounds, again more from https://freesounds.org/, but I have some timing bugs and audio balancing to sort out. Still, for a prototype, it’s a start.

I’ve also made some UI changes so the game looks a bit less like a prototype and more like an alpha, but there is more to be done, including menus. Super important. Especially one to restart the game and another to show a help menu.

Game System Issues

It’s should come as no surprise that my idea is heavily inspired by Board Games, especially stuff like Dice Forge, and TTRPGs, like D&D, Pathfinder and AGE. The system up to know included the use of d4s and d6s for each character, but nothing else. I wanted the skills to also use dice, in the same way TTRPGS let you roll for an attack and then roll different dice for damage. But this hasn’t been a smooth transition.

Damage Rolls

I started to implement a system which lets me set skills with the effect amount as a string dice roll in the form XdY+C, e.g. 1d4+1 or 2d6-3. The problem I’ve found after a few hours of playtesting is that RNG is a fickle mistress… I will have times where my skills are constantly rolling the minimum while enemies are constantly rolling the max.

I’ve been doing some reading on the C# System.Random and the Unity UnityEngine.Random, and AFAIK I am using these correctly. I am following best practices and generating seeds and requesting new values as suggested, but so far the game has just become severely imbalanced.

I’m considering two options at the moment, the first being just to revert to flat damage for the time being.

The second option is to use very different dice rolls instead; e.g. rather than doing 1d4+2 and relying on the d4 to average at 3 and having values between 3 and 6, I just make the roll 3+1d2 and have the values between 4 and 6. On a d4 this seems like a small change, but when you somehow channel the Wheaton curse and constantly roll a 1, it adds up.

Pity System

At the moment the pity system is fixed. Every third roll is guaranteed to be what you want. The problem I’ve found with this is again when RNG screws you, and you only ever hit pity on all rolls. When there are 3 enemies some constantly doing max or near max damage, and you are spamming heal but only get it on the third attempt, it sucks, and doesn’t help.

Again here I am considering a few different options. The first is that different skills have different levels of pity. Maybe Healing has a pity of 2 and the others a pity of 4, since most of them will be damage dealing, it’s fine. You might not get the exact skill you want, but at least you are still doing damage (unless you keep rolling Fumbles). Healing is different. You kinda want it now.

The other option, which ties into a future system I haven’t implemented (Epic Skill / Limit Breaks / Ultimate Skills) is that a Heal always succeeds, and that instead of being one of the Side types, it is instead a passive skill you just always have.

The idea beind passives have always been to mimic armor and weapons. One passive slot will be used for increasing defense or Healing over Time (HOTs), and one will be used for bonus damage for certain rolls or for Damage over Time (DOTs). So maybe Healing should also be considered passive, and you can just use it. It grants to different abilities, an Active skill you can trigger and upgrade (e.g. heal 1d6/2d6/3d6) and a Passive on a trigger (e.g. heal 2d6 after each wave).

Another option is to just change how pity works. If pity is 3 and you’ve been trying to heal without luck, maybe the pity roll should be a crit? Double the healing or whatever, since you probably took more damage while waiting for pity. The issue here is how the crit system curently works, since you can still roll a 1 plus your modifier and only double that…

The Crit System

This ties in nicely to the third issue I’m having. Currently, the crit system is you roll the max on the (so a 6 for the test d6 system) and then* your next roll* is a critical. Crits are different per skill and skill level, so it might be x2 on lvl 1 and x3 on lvl 3, but either way, if you still roll crap, why bother doubling it? You could also Fumble next time, which I thought was a risk that would add tension, but actually just makes me want to (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

So there are two changes I am considering to make here. First, when you roll a crit, you immediately reroll for the same choice you just had. This means a crit immediately means something, but also, your pity just went up, so you are more likely to crit on the thing you just tried to roll.

The second change is that a crit isn’t a multiplier, it just becomes the max results. Rolling a 2d4+2? A crit means you got a 10. Done. Just like that. But then I should probably keep the times to modifier in place as well. So a normal roll will be range 4-10. In the old system a crit would be 8-20. In the new system, the result would either always be 10, or always be 20.

Or! What if the system was “double the dice”, so a 2d4+2 (range 4 to 10) becomes a 4d4+2 (range 6 to 18). This again feels more dynamic, but your minimum roll is still lower than the regular max, so it doesn’t really feel special, does it?

Future of the Project

Clearly I have some issues to work out. My plan is to release a pre-alpha to some friends and family by the end of this week, and then I want to work on getting an Alpha out on Itch by end of Feb.

This Alpha will include significant visual improvements as well I’ve decided I’m enjoying this project enough and I’m dedicated enough to it to buy some decent assets from the Unity Asset Store which I’m hoping to use to greatly improve the visual experience of the game. The aim for the Alpha is to have most of the systems for the core gameplay loop in place and have at least two different Dice options to play with so I can get more feedback on the game before I finish up the full gameplay loop and bring in the roguelike mechanics (probably unlocking skills between runs to allow customization before a new run) which I want in the Beta later in the year (date TBD based on Alpha feedback).

And I suppose that’s it for now. Hopefully there will be another update over the weekend.