Dev Diary 62 - Shields Up!

This update brings a lot of new gameplay content, including shield designs and building designs. In this post I’ll also describe some experiments and plans!

After recent changes to elemental damage it was necessary to do some balancing, as now it’s much harder to defeat creeps and invaders.

By the way, for now, to make balancing more manageable for myself, I cheat a bit. I employ a technique of non-linear damage scaling: when you get too much damage, it starts to gradually increase slower. So, instead of 5k damage you would get around 80 damage! Which is still a lot. The curve was fine tuned for fun gameplay now, but it will change the damage less severely when I spend more time on balancing. Damage is scaled for each element separately, so it’s efficient to get at least two damage types. When there is not a lot of damage, the curve is closer to linear.

Here is the current formula:

static inline float scaleAttack(float x) {
    if (x < 48.f)
        return powf(x, 1.f/1.5f) * 1.9f;
    else
        return powf(x * 100.f, 1.f/4.f) * 3.f;
}

Later, coefficients will change to make it closer to linear curve. I don’t hope to make damage scaling fully linear, as it requires very careful balancing, which would be very hard with that amount of content.

Tradeoffs

These are “Opinion” choices. You can move towards an axis related to some philosophical or political concept.

As you can see, each step will make you stronger in one area and make you weaker in other area. But not every concept has tradeoff. Some of them are old and have only bonuses, as this one.

The idea was to make all Opinions relative, so that different factions can have different defaults. By shifting public opinion, you’ll be able to adapt the faction you’re currently playing to make it stronger in the current playthrough. So, I’m rethinking some of the old Opinion designs so that everything has a tradeoff.

Experiments: Beliefs

Moreover, I’m going to test one more tradeoff-themed idea in the following weeks. Simple Upgrades (a type of Understandings that just gives you a bonus and has no tradeoffs) will be removed and replaced with Beliefs. They will be basically the same thing as upgrades, but to get the bonus, you will also have to ban one production type. What??? But that’s kind of thing what religions have already actually done thousands of years ago, if you look closely!

In the game, you’re discovering a lot of resources/production types, and for some, you might be sure that you’ll never need them (for example, a type of stone that adds cold damage, and you’re sure that you’re never going to invest into cold damage. Or maybe an outdated weapon design). There is no way to delete production types right now, so this could be a fun way to do it automatically! Most likely, player will be offered a choice to ban one of 3-5 productions.

One (long term) way to go from there is having additional reward after you acquire 6 beliefs - you might be offered to estabilish a panthenon? Eventually resulting in summoning your god into the world.

Experiments: Food Productions

One more thing I wanted to test for years is different food types that give the consumer different stats for one turn. For example, you might fish, farm, hunt, mine edible ore, etc. But I need to be extra careful with that one - I don’t want to increase the learning curve, and having just “Food” available as the first production type is very good. So this idea is questionable.

Currently, some creatures have to eat specific things: fuel for robots and other creatures for dragons. A proper subsystem for different food types could make specific species more unique by specifying what foods they require.

That’s it for today! If you’re in Malmo, I’m waiting for you at the next public playtest in Gamedev Habitat on May 17 :) Check out the full change list. It’s not as big as the previous ones, but quite meaningful:

Changelog

• New Understandings
• Sound effect when moving camera quickly
• Zooming out far away now causes wind sound effect
• Shields: armor type that can be equipped into a separate shield slot
  • 5 shield blueprints
• Weapons can now be categorized as two-handed, so that you can’t wear shields with them
• ~15 new building blueprints - now it’s possible to build some of the structures that you can find in the world. For example, “school of geomancy” can be built by player if they acquire a blueprint and resources
• Blueprint rarity: every 10 turns available rarity increases and you can roll new blueprints. Like that you will never get advanced buildings like Architect in the beginning of the game
• Automatic production assignment is now more efficient
• Rebalanced monsters and damage curve
• Experimental food productions
• Fixed bugs