Been a busy couple days rebuilding on-demand tournaments and permadeath tournaments, and hooking up all the Steamworks SDKs - added an additional cyber security testing agent to my swarm which is earning its keep and keeping the remediation devs very busy - and of course UI polish.. never ending UI polish.
Hopefully moving onto balancing today, which shouldnt take more than a day or two. I built a full Monte Carlo dashboard with 15 archetypes at all ten tiers, and toggles for all the perks (every category individually), sets, and arena effects... and can run 100,000 fights in a few seconds. So should be able to get all the data needed to balance out any OP metas pretty easily. But i need a break and want to talk about some fun stuff. One of the most inflencial mechanics in the game. that I havent seen in a lot of similar games.... an actual meaningful stamina mechanic. In almost every auto battler, agility is the God stat.. attack more, more chances to inflict damage, win... simple. But we dont like simple in these parts. So i built a brutal stamina system that effectively nerfs a fighters stats across the board based on how tired your fighter gets. An attack costs 2% stamina, and a miss costs 5% stamina, defending doesnt cost you anything... and there is also multipliers based on aggression and effort in your fight plans. In your fight plans you can set agression (frequency/intitative), and effort of each strike (power/damage) individually, so you can have a fighter that throws a lot of gentle stabs leveraging bleed perks to stack damage. Or a nuke build that throws high damage strikes at a low rate, which paired with perks that stack damage when youre not doing damage, could create some crazy builds. Anyway, stamina then works as a pretty simple but effective nerf to a fighters stats... at 50% stamina, all of your stats are at 50% value. This of course creates a great rubber band effect on agility/initative. A high agility fighter starts off with all the attacks, but eventually their agility value will drop to below the defenders, and the defender will gain initiative and become the attacker, until their agility value drops, and so on and so forth. I also tied in the move descriptions into this system.... a Godslayer fighter might start off throwing "Earth shattering strikes that hit with the force of a thousand suns"... but at 50% stamina, they will be getting descriptions of a Champion Gladiator, and at 10% stamina, they will be swinging like a complete novice Unknown fighter. In early balance testing, Agility builds were actually by far the worst archetype, which I've balanced out now, but great sign the theory works... and means defensive/fortitude builds are a very viable strategy, and precision (accuracy) and Perception (defense) are very meaningful. My aim with all this was to make every stat have a true importance, and completely dismantle that Agility Meta... and it creates sooooo much more depth and strategy to how you build your fighters. Anyway, back to the grind.. learning about steamworks and SDK's for the first time is a fun curve, but everythings on track to launch next month. I'll probably have it finished up earlier than the release date I scheduled so I'll end up waiting impatiently to launch this thing... but thats a pretty good problem to have. - uniek.