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That Awkward Week Between Xmas and New Years | Patreon Weekly #291 (Patreon)

Published:
2024-12-30 16:18:26
Imported:
2025-01
Tags:

Content

Hey Patrons, I hope you’re all having a good holiday season! I’ve been trying to take things easy (with mixed results), and so don’t have anything new to share just yet. Instead I thought we’d quickly go over the plan for the new year.

Quick Cleric Update

Firstly, the Beta (which is now about 10 days old) is going quite well! Analytics data and feedback are both still early, but there are a few major points to share:

  • Very early feedback (within about a day of release) was that the Cleric was super OP, and was going to need heavy nerfs to be in-line with other heroes. “get your free wins now!” was a comments I heard more than once. After a day or two though, that OP feedback faded, and replaced with general satisfaction mixed with specific criticisms. This is pretty much perfect in terms of player impression: a character that feels powerful and satisfying to play, but isn’t as OP as they seem.

  • Currently overall hero WR analytics (comparing the Cleric to other heroes) are unreliable as people are still learning the Cleric, but this data is currently pointing toward the Cleric actually being weak! I expect these numbers to creep up over time, and so don’t plan to make substantial changes yet, but I might nudge up the Cleric’s earlygame a bit if the trend continues over the next few days.

  • As far as specific talents and mechanics go, currently these are actually shaping up to be much more balanced than I expected! Aside from the Flash spell (which is showing as quite strong vs. The other two ascended form spells) all the various hero mechanics are showing as being pretty close to each other in terms of success rate. Even the Ring of Energy, which a lot of people worry is busted on the Cleric, is only showing as moderately stronger than on other heroes.

All of this comes together to point toward the Cleric being much closer to balanced than I worried they might be, and definitely much closer at this stage than the Duelist was!

One thing that definitely does need to be dealt with is a small pile of minor bug reports that have come in over the past week, so probably the first beta release after new years is going to be a big patch that fixes up a bunch of these little issues.

Once that’s done I’ll probably mostly focus on plans for 2025, and getting the usual “Shattered Pixel Dungeon in 20XX” blog post ready. Expect to see some details relating to that in next week’s weekly.

When that blog is out (or at least drafted/outlined) I’m going to start focusing on filling out the Cleric and the other smaller changes I have planned for v3.0.0. You can take a look at this weekly for a reminder as to what I have yet to finish for v3.0

Comments

snow

Hey Evan, have you thought about adding more challenges on top of the nine? They seem a bit too easy right now. Also, how about introducing some new achievements?

Shattered Pixel
>>160155197

It's not a priority currently, but yes I would like to add more badges and challenges in the future.

Robert Heinig

Yup, there's an absolute score cap at 2235000 😉 But the change I'd welcome most is some mitigation of the "UI is lying" problem: Just now I had one of the trap-filled rooms, throw toxic cloud potion in, wait. Afterwards there was a gold drop in the doorway, and the UI displayed the toxic swirls on top. Normally I'd waste satiety and hit search 20 times then ignore the display continuing to pretend there's a toxic cloud there. This time I used inspect instead - it said gold and no cloud - step on the tile - damage. On non-door tiles that would have worked. The annoyance isn't that the inspect lied this time, but that we are trained to believe the clouds displayed may be a lie. Some slider to control the "after-image" length would be nice. Seems default is at least half a minute, half a second as option would be nice.

Shattered Pixel
>>160365482

I do agree that the clouds fade a bit slowly currently, but this is something I've experimented with internally (decreasing the particle lifespan) and doing that visually destroys the appearance of the gas. The gas particles have a lifespan of 1-3 seconds, so you don't need to wait forever for them to fade, certainly not 20 turns of waiting if the gas is already gone. As for the examine, this occurred because there was something else on the tile, so it gave you the item's description. The game doesn't apparent gas descriptions to the description of an item, it expects you to rely on the visual indicator in that case.

Robert Heinig
>>160365482

Cloud visuals lifespan is not bound to turns, true, but the start of the decay is, thus the search button spam to ensure the cloud is gone even if the display lingers long enough to play several handfuls of turns running scot-free through the cloud visuals. Pity a simple turn-constant-into-var won't do it... As for 1-3, calmly counting to three before checking a cloud isn't enough in my experience. Are multiple particles queued in advance with delays for some, as would be the case using Gdx's particle system? Rhetoric Q, I'm sure since you're aware you'll come up with something in due time.