Let’s talk Hard Mode

Conash again! This time I’m here to talk about a new feature I plan  to introduce in the 0.43 release that I’ve been talking about for  awhile, hard mode! So for anyone who’s interested in hearing about it,  and why it’s coming up so suddenly, this is the post for you!

So to start this off with I would like to give a bit of a brief  (hopefully) background to why Harem Collector will be getting a hard  mode. The short of it is, that the difficulty of Harem Collector has  been very important to me. See, while I’ve got nothing against the  people who don’t care to sit down and potentially spend hours focusing  on how to make a perfect route or setup your equipment or whatever, with  how my brain is I regularly get this kind of ‘build up’ of mental  energy that if I don’t get regular outlets for actually brings me pain,  and well the best that doctors and therapists have been able to figure  out thus far is that it’s the result of my ADHD. 

Normally I can deal with this sort of constant mental energy with  like puzzles, or listening to podcasts while I play games, but when it  starts to get really bad I feel that I need huge problems to solve that  require me to consider variables from all directions that play into one  another, and well, Harem Collector was one of the few games that could  accomplish this to make it so that I wouldn’t end up in pain from not  having something to thing about. Just planning routes to find the  optimal route for collecting the girls while getting all love quests  (not really the biggest concern with how many days there are), managing  all the grinding spots in order to maximize my money and experience  keeping in mind that if I killed a bear too early that many of the girls  would miss out on some experience (though now they respawn every day),  figuring out good ways to handle some of the higher level quests early  on with weaker teams that way I could get Gargan, Yeon, and Kyrie  earlier to begin working on them sooner, along with figuring out the  optimal way to invest my money and save some sil here or there with the  items you could get.

It was great, though I don’t need that anymore since I can also deal  with the issue now by just working on more complex scripting projects or  enemy designs for HC, but given the dozens of times that HC served  effectively as medication for me I can’t help but look back on those  challenges I had to overcome fondly, several of which have become  non-issues as the game has progressed. That’s why ever since NoMoshing  added in Easy Mode, I’ve wanted to make my own Hard Mode, to capture all  of those challenges for anyone who wished to experience them without  putting a burden on players who don’t want to put in that much time and  effort.

Now, I’ve been talking about Hard Mode for awhile, but I kept putting it onto the back burner until I could implement the entire  thing… Except it’s been a few years and so far it’s all concepts. It’s  been eating at me to tell some of the people who’ve been looking forward  to Hard Mode that it’s coming soon(tm), so a couple weeks ago I said  fuck it, let’s put in what I can and expand it as we go. Worst case  scenario? Some people might avoid playing it until it’s more fleshed  out. 

So what does this Hard Mode skeleton entail? Mostly combat stuff,  like for starters all those dungeons that you can clear out every day  for more experience and loot? First priority was to go back to the original  system where if you kill them once they’re dead forever as that was a  part of balancing experience that has since been lost even in the  challenge runs that some people who share in my insanity engage in. If  you’re worried about having no options if you don’t have enough  experience, I did make sure to leave the daily dungeons and vacations  untouched by this, as I felt that the unique equipment from the daily  dungeons was too important to cut out, and you should be allowed to  trade money for experience in the form of vacations. 

Next on the plate? Well that’d be the main problem with challenge  modes, the fact that with how much experience HC gives you that once you  complete one challenge, you’re usually too high level find anything of  similar ‘difficulty’ challenging so you’d have to start a new  playthrough to be challenged by everything, so to fix that I cut down  all experience gained in Hard Mode by 30% (so enemies give 70% of their  normal experience). You can potentially still end up a bit on the higher  end of levels with this, but thanks to extensive testing from RomeoPapa  I can safely say that unless you get a lot of vacations you won’t be  getting much higher than the level recommendation for quests in general.  

Finally, a common thing that I’ve found based on the information from  the players who do seek out combat difficulty from Harem Collector is  that you can just about do any quest safely at 5 levels below the  recommended level, and the ‘challenge’ comes from pushing things lower,  so in order to try to turn this into the ‘standard’ difficulty without  further reducing experience (and thus risking players not having the  skills needed to win some quests), I opted to give all enemies a passive  +20% to all their stats, we have also made sure that the most  challenging tests did not reach a point where this felt unreasonable. So  yeah, players looking for a combat based challenge look forward to all  of that!

That said, I don’t intend to stop there but it may be awhile before I  come back and touch up on Hard Mode again. See, one of my biggest  priorities when I revisit and touch it up some more is that I plan to  add some more skills for bosses or changes to the fight or something so  that when you’re in hard mode every fight feels a bit more unique (to an  extent the boss fight at the end of “Princess Bride” has gotten this,  but it’s more that the boss was taking too long which slipped past our  testing due to a bug, as such the length of the fight will be shorter in  normal mode, and even shorter in easy mode, while Hard Mode will retain  the original length), because while giving the enemies a statistical  advantage will require that you think on your feet if that’s the only  difference then each quest is going to eventually end up feeling the  same. Adding in some new moves, new mechanics, changing up the existing  mechanics to better reflect ‘hard mode’ for the bosses will help shake  things up and add in a more nuanced difficulty that I know I at least  appreciate. 

Another thing that I want to add into hard mode down the line is  changing up the day end process, see one of the important things about  the old HC meta is that you had to plan out your days very meticulously  in order to make sure that you got all the character’s love quests at  the right time, but with all the content Harem Collector has now,  planning such things out is a bit silly, so once I’ve got a firm grasp  on how many days will be possible along with all pitfalls that a player  may run into, I’m going to want to change things up so that instead of  the day passing as often as it does currently that you’ll need to finish  anywhere from 3-5 quests to get a proper day end in it, thus helping  bring back yet another element that was critical to the former meta but  has long since been made irrelevant. 

The final thing that will be important for me to consider ties a bit  into the last one, see a big reason that I’m not yet comfortable  lowering how often a day ‘ends’ in Hard Mode is because if you only got  your daily income at 20-33% of the time as before it’d harshly impact  the economy as you go through items and get new ways to spend your money  without getting the same amount of money as before, but as things stand  I don’t have a comfortable grasp over the HC economy, and with every  quest we add into the game my grasp gets looser. Currently we do have  plans to revamp the HC economy down the line, and well I’d like to go  through the numbers for that and get some play-testing on how it works  out before I make any big changes to the economy in Hard-Mode, though I  do have a few ideas for what I might do like either stopping the loan or  changing it along with making a few of the special vendors not buy your  vendor trash. 

That said, I may also try finding a way to have more customizable  difficulty, such as if I can think of a menu or something for  determining difficulty, I might allow players to be able to create  experiences where the combat is the same as normal mode, but they get  the economy of Easy Mode (like those gold and silver bars), and the time  passage of Hard Mode, or something like that so that players who enjoy  combat challenges don’t feel like they must decide if they want  the stress of a more challenging economy or give up on their dreams of  taking on Slenderman at his strongest… Hmm… You know a menu system does  sound a bit fun…

Anyways, that’s more or less all that I’ve got to say on hard mode.  Squires, look forward to the mini-release next week, we’ve got several  things in the words other than just the bare bones Hard Mode  that I put together! For those of you who are looking forward to it  though, please send a Thanks to RomeoPapa for all his hard work going  through the entire game in a week and giving me the feedback I needed to  fine-tune the experience! If you’ve got any comments, questions, or  concerns feel free to contact me, I’m most active over on the BKG  discord found here: https://discord.gg/3eEnXpT