Hey Ponderers!!
I've been hard at work on this 1.0 update and I've got some stuff I want to share! So without further ado:
Hard Restrictions into Soft Restrictions
In v0.4.0 onwards, I embraced the requirements mechanic that forced you to obtain a certain level in an attribute or research to unlock a specific spell or item. This mechanic is great because it adds tension to the decision making of what you want to level and research in order to unlock spells/glyphs/equipment and so forth.
The problem though is that it limits the amount of tools that are available to the player. Before, when applying glyphs to spells, you'd have the choice of around 6-7 different glyphs, but now you only get 3 unless you choose to invest into *Research Augments*. This isn't a bad thing, per se, but it could be better.
Additionally, the restriction mechanic requires that you invest in something before even getting to try out the tool to know if you like it or not. This means that your investments are somewhat blind.
So 1.0 is trying something a little bit different. Unlocking most spells no longer has a research requirement. Instead, you can always unlock it given that you have the resources to pay, but now certain spells are weaker if you don't meet the research prerequisites.
For example, you can now always unlock Raloch's Cube if you have the glyphs and resources, but if you don't have *Expert Scholar 1* and *Expert Wizardry 1*, its cooldown will be increased by 50% and its spell weight cost will be increased from 2 -> 3. So while the spell is harder to use, it still means you can play around with it and see if its useful before investing into it.
Attribute Ranks
One issue that OoC has always had is the potential for the power singularity. At some point in the game, you start to scale harder than the cost of attributes/upgrades scale and thus you go infinite. This limits my design space and means that I have to be careful with the values I choose to make sure things don't spiral out of control.
New in 1.0 is Attribute Ranks. Every 50 levels in an attribute will rank it up, giving it additional power, but more importantly, increase its cost scaling by an exponential amount. This will have minimal effect on the early-mid game, but by the time you are at level 150-200 in an attribute, things are gonna get expensive fast.
For those that like math, the current rough-math table looks like this:
- Attribute Level 100 will cost ~7.5x more than before, ~9 effective levels lost.
- Attribute Level 200 will cost ~3,000x more than before, ~35 effective levels lost.
- Attribute Level 300 will cost ~60,000,000x more than before, ~80 effective levels lost.
- Attribute Level 400 will cost ~70,000,000,000,000x more than before, ~142 effective levels lost.
...
- Attribute Level 1000 will cost ~2.68e86x more than before, ~891 effective levels lost. (lol)
This has a couple nice benefits, namely it makes a New Game+ mode much more meaningful, since to hit absurd numbers your gonna need to loop a few times. Also means I can play with more upgrade ideas. Things like the cost-reduction scroll will no longer break the game.
In addition to this change, I've increased the scaling of all resource capacities in the game by a large margin to both account for the cost increase and to improve the player's room for massive combo potential.
Druidry Actions
Druidry is getting a small change! Each Harvest element now has multiple actions attached to each element.
*Oak Trees*, for example, where only able to be harvested before, converting the oak trees and some skill into wood. Now, however, you can do more than just harvest them. You can also use space to expand that amount of room you have available for your trees, and later on, you can use spark and energize the oak trees to make a completely different type of tree.
These are actions are unique to each type of element so each tree type and herb type will have different actions associated with them.
Quality of Life
Lots of quality life changes are coming to Orb 1.0. A few I've been working on in the last few days are tooltip enhancements.
Sub-tooltips now highlight additional helpful information that might not be clear from a single tooltip. Effect Levels, for example, is a mechanic that is not explained well unless you deep dive into the various menus. Now its always shown if effect levels are attached to a tooltip!
But sub-tooltips didn't feel like enough. I've also been working on tooltip inspection, which allows the player to pause a tooltip. This prevents it from disappearing and allowing you to hover over the tooltip to get more information on each of its properties.
And more!
There is a lot of little things changing. Little design philosophies changes and general gameplay polish to make more strategies viable and reduce mental strain when making decisions.
I'll be continuing to post updates as we get closer to 1.0 release! (Which is still gonna take some time, but its also closer to being done than the sun exploding, so.)
-Marple
