Patreon Weekly #41 - Mar 16th, 2020 (Patreon)

Hey Patrons!

Beta-5.0 is almost finished! I got a bit held up this week with finalizing aspects of the Yog fight, doing spritework, and implementing an ability for ripper demons! I’m now expecting to release beta-5.0 sometime in the next two or three days. 

In total, the following is now coming in beta-5.0:
- A reworked Yog-Dzewa fight (I’ve once again failed to make the changes small, so I’m calling it a rework)
- A new ability for ripper demons
- New sprites for dwarven ghouls, ripper demons, and demon spawners.
- Some improved animations for DM-100s.
- Lots of various smaller bugfixes and balance changes.

Read on if you'd like more details... 

Yog-Dzewa’s Summons

One notable thing that I’m hoping to accomplish with Yog’s new abilities is to encourage players to explore the demon halls. Typically the game encourages exploration via the items spread over a floor. I’ve already amped up the loot in the halls, but by that point most players are already geared up, and so often prefer to skip over these items in favor of minimizing the enemies they fight. To counteract this a bit, I’m going to significantly increase the importance of exploring the halls and finding demon spawners.

Yog will of course spawn larva during the fight, but for every demon spawner left alive, Yog will have a chance to spawn a ripper demon instead of a larva! While I don’t intend for this to make rushing impossible, I hope it will dampen the reward of rushing, so that exploring the demon halls is a more compelling option. Of course, adding this mechanic gives me a chance to look over rippers as well…

Improvements to Ripper Demons

I’ve been consistently getting feedback from players that rippers are disappointingly simple for the stage of the game they appear at. This is even more prominent since ghouls were given a unique ability; Rippers are now the only enemy past the sewers to get all their power from stats and not from a special attack or ability. While I don’t want to make them overly complex, I do think there’s room for rippers to be a bit more interesting.

I’ve opted to reduce their base movespeed to 1x and give them a mobility-based ability instead. Whenever rippers are a distance away from their target, they will attempt to leap to them after charging for a turn! Rippers will leap to where they think the player will be next turn (this is telegraphed) and will deal bonus damage if they pounce right onto the player. After leaping, rippers immediately get another turn too! This means that while rippers can close distance very quickly, once they’re close the player will be able to back up without constantly being hit. 

I’ve also been working on sprites for ripper demons and demon spawners! Rippers still need work, but spawners are in a good enough state to show off. I leaned heavily on image randomization to give spawners a chaotic look, while still using some consistent color patterns in the animation so they appear less random than they are: