Big Update! Pacing, Balance, and More!
Hey all!
Appreciate everyone who has played the game, left comments, rated the game, and sent in feedback! So much was changed for this version that I cant list all of the changes individually, but here are the broad strokes:
Shorter Runs:
In response to feedback about pacing, and from watching content creators' videos covering the demo, I decided to shorten the run length. I was seeing 2+ hour play times to finish a run, and while those runs were typically being commentated on, that's still far too long. I also suspect that the long run lengths were discouraging jumping into another run due to the long time commitment and the frustration of getting an hour and a half into a run and dying. With this in mind, we shortened the total number of floors per major area from 10 to 8. This represents a 20% reduction in total floors.
Even with just a 20% reduction, since those floors were predominantly more time-consuming on average, this has had a major impact on run times. This change also had a knock-on effect of reducing the total number of resources in the run, improving another issue of late-game rewards not feeling as valuable.
Major Combat Balance Changes:
Our analytics were showing some issues with combat balancing. In addition to this, shortening the run length created some additional balancing issues in addition to the issues already present. I felt that the power level of the normal combats was not adequately preparing players for how difficult the elite fights and boss fights should be. Players were being caught off-guard when they breezed through the regular combats and got stomped by a boss or elite. So I rebalanced and/or redesigned all of the combat encounters. Keep in mind this game is meant to be challenging. Here is the general gist:
Area 1 regular combats are on average harder
Area 1 elite combats are on average harder
The Replicator boss HP increased, and damage output decreased. The Replicator's unit ability was made generally easier to use.
Area 2 enemy combats were mostly kept the same relative difficulty, but were redesigned.
Area 2 elite combats were mostly kept the same relative difficulty.
Demon of Misfortune HP reduced, and damage output reduced slightly.
Area 3 regular combats are on average more difficult.
Area 3 Elite combats are on average more difficult.
Origin of Sickness damage output increased.
Avatar of the Soul was unchanged.
Spells/Runes Balancing:
I always seek to make the game more engaging and interesting. Sometimes that involves making the difficult decision to nerf a fun spell because it single-handedly makes the game too easy (sorry Spell Graft), sometimes it involves noting that nobody ever takes a spell because it's never better than the other options. So I reevaluated and rebalanced many spells and a few dice runes as well.
Your Most Requested Change:
I held out for as long as I could. I really enjoy the "get good" philosophy of roguelikes and resisted adding the ability to cancel out of spells for a long while. My philosophy on that decision was that you can't cancel out of spells that don't target, so why should spells that target be more lenient? Just don't make the mistake next time. But almost every piece of feedback was asking for that feature, so obviously it's a big deal to the player base. So I tried it out.
Turns out I was wrong. It did make the game better.
There is one caveat: Due to the way countdown dice inputs work, it's just not feasible to be able to revert the game state to the state before a countdown spell was cast. So you can't cancel out of spells with countdowns. Turns out you'll still have to "get good" sometimes.
Many Other Small Changes:
There were quite a few smaller changes and bug fixes as well. I didn't keep a changelog (I should probably start doing that tbh), so I can't remember what those changes were.
As always, thanks for playing!
-Thomas