Conash things in 0.44

Hey people, Conash here! Today I thought I’d talk about my contributions in the 0.44 release since I haven’t quite  gotten my thoughts organized for one of my little mechanical analysis  posts… Also because I haven’t quite talked about this yet!

So to start off with, I think that I should note there won’t be any major scripting changes. Between the holidays, family, a bunch  of different games that I’ve got to play with different groups of  people, but most importantly it taking about 2 weeks after the 0.43  release to finally narrow down what was causing all those game  crashes in the Golden Tomb I didn’t quite have enough time to handle any  big coding project, just a bunch of little ones added in over the  course of this release. Always sad to not get to have a ton of fun with  that, but it is what it is, let’s move onto the stuff that I did get in!

The first major thing that I got into was working on the reward for  Gargan’s upcoming quest. Backers may already be aware as to what this  new quest will unlock to some extent or another, and having been  privileged to such information back when NoMoshing was talking about it  on old backer streams (well before I was on the team), when NM outlined  what quests we were handling this update it became my first priority to  figure out a way to implement it in… Right, heck I think that I  might have even made a blog post analyzing the sorts of things that I  was worried about when designing it, but despite my concerns the  solution came relatively quickly, and after some back and forth with  testers I more or less knew everything that I needed for it before the  0.43.3 release (though none of it is in the base game yet, lots of  little scripting things that I was worried about that may have caused  problems). I’m also currently working on the enemies for Gargan’s quest,  I’ve talked with NM and I know the theme of the enemies, I’ve theorized  a few things that I think will be important for the boss battle, and  gotten some feedback from fans about some of what they’re hoping the  enemies bring to the table, but it’s still in the planning stages and  subject to change so I’d rather not make promises that I have to go back  on.

Next up, Kevin’s respect quest! This one I’m actually a lot farther  along as once I was done with the reward for Gargan, I went immediately  into trying to setup Kevin ‘right’. See I try to put in the time and  effort to try to keep the ludo-narrative together when I can, and I’ll  probably talk about this in more detail later but suffice to say there’s  a reason why Nerys doesn’t leave you feeling like you want her as a  permanent party member, and Kevin won’t give you that feeling either.  With Kevin though, I wanted to capture more of a ‘random Joe’ feeling as  I haven’t quite hit that with the more civilians that used magic like  Nerys or Professor Ambitis (yet at least), so I had to very carefully  craft both his stats, his growth, give him a custom exp curve, and  create enemies specifically designed in a way to capture this feeling.  Kevin inherently couldn’t be designed without also designing at  least half of the enemies on his quest alongside him, so his quest  ended up with it’s enemies done first. I still need to go back in and  add the finishing touches to the boss, not to mention adjust some of the  fights to have different enemy combinations now that I don’t need to  test anymore, but based on the feedback I got from testers I’m very  happy with how all the Kevin stuff turned out.

Now, with those big things out of the way, I mentioned that back in  December I spent a lot of time working on fixing the crashes in the  golden tomb, well I didn’t want that to be the only thing that I  got done in December so I sat down for a bit and realized that I was in  a good position to add in the 4th bonus boss into the game! It took  some discussing with NM as my inherent focus on mechanics left quite a  few holes that he ended up having to figure out how to resolve  (resulting in more work for him than I had intended during a release  that he was already facing a time crunch on >.>), we managed to  get it in! I also decided to reach out to the fans for some suggestions  for the reward here as I noticed that the other Bonus Bosses all had  rather varied rewards. I’m quite happy with how both the boss and the  reward turned out, so look forward to that!

The last thing that I’ve really got planned for this release I  honestly didn’t think I’d have time for, yet another revamp! Originally I  thought that between Gargan’s reward and making Kevin from scratch,  there wouldn’t be any room in my head left to revamp a character, but  after I had figured out what I wanted from Kevin and had finished  testing Gargan’s reward I ended up getting into a discussion with some  users about how the Damage over Time statuses aren’t very rewarding as  you usually kill common enemies in 1-3 turns, so doing 1/20th of their  HP per turn (at best) for 3 turns isn’t worth inflicting the  status on those enemies, which is a fair assessment as when you have to  fight 100 common enemies, spending an entire action to inflict 1/20th  their health just isn’t worth it unless you’re in a challenge run. This  got me thinking about what I could do to make poison and bleed fit in  better against common enemies specifically, without making them  over-powered against bosses, and well, by the time I had that  figured out, I was basically half-way done to figuring out how to revamp  Bronwyn, so look forward to a Bronwyn revamp in the 0.44 release! I’ve  already got my ideas for it ready, but if I end up running short on time  I may have to push this one back a bit.

And that’s about it for the 0.44 release. I could go into more detail  about the Bronwyn revamp, but I don’t like talking about stuff that I  haven’t gotten feedback from the testers yet. While I do generally trust  my ability to play with numbers and take approaches that seem to  typically be close to what we end up with, I just don’t like the idea  that I might give you guys the wrong idea if I change gears, so maybe I’ll talk about it in more detail after the backer release is out! Bye!