Blog

It’s Wednesday so it’s time for another blog post! The past couple of posts that I’ve made were more general design stuff so I thought it’d be good to talk a bit more specific coding stuff for a bit. For the most part I haven’t been up to anything big with coding for HC lately, fixing some bugs here and there but my time has typically been being drawn to some other parts of my life or to other parts of the game. So all that I’ve really got are plans that have been on the back-burner for awhile that I’d be interested in getting feedback on.

The first change that I’m planning on making when I can is going to be a slight change to the furniture system. People have talked about how it’s difficult to tell where the various ‘rooms’ are when putting down furniture. That said, the visual interface gives me limitations in this regard, I can’t draw a grid over the map and have a face of every character who cares about a room (and to what extent) on top of each grid, nor can I exactly easily place them in a ‘room’ only during the course of the furniture system without creating a ton of confusion and bugs. The solution that I came up with was to change it so that the red/green squares that show up will either be what you already see in the game or have a number 1-5 on them depending on if they’re in area 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 of that map (so far no one map has more than five ‘areas’ to it). While this won’t exactly give you all a full sense of ‘who’ cares about this room, it would help more clearly define ‘what’ room you’re looking at at any given time and in turn you could maybe figure out who cares about a room through some thinking or just by putting down furniture and see who cares. It’s not quite what people were asking for, but given the tools at my disposal I think that it’ll give at least a major aspect of what people are asking for.

Something that’s a bit more farther off will be expanding the encyclopedia. Currently it’s only set to show you the stats of equipment, including hidden stats, because a big complaint people had was that they needed to use the wiki or ask someone who was digging through the code what any given piece of equipment did before they could use it and I managed to figure out a way to format it all to fit on one screen (though if we did put in items that had too many ‘extra’ effects it wouldn’t fit on the page running into the same issue again, so this process has a side-effect of limiting what we can do with the equipment). However, the encyclopedia has always been meant to do more than just that. A big thing that we want to add is putting in monster data, the idea that I have is program it into the game so that once you encounter any given monster it’ll add it to the encyclopedia (which will mean that if you’re having trouble with a boss, after a gameover or reload, you can open up your encyclopedia since the Misc_Data file is separate from your save file) though I’m still not fully sure how we’re going to get all the formatting for the things that we want… After talking it out with NoMoshing we also don’t want to just show players the full stats of the enemies so there’s also some busy work that needs to be done in order to give the players an ‘idea’ as to what the monster is strong against or weak against without just handing the Hero a walkthrough to his own world. There were a few other things that we had talked about potentially adding to the encyclopedia, but at this stage I’m not as confident promising that they’re going to stay on the docket so I’ll just leave it at that since we DO want to give players feedback on enemies for sure (largely it’s an issue of how to display it as I’ve already gotten around the issue of showing the enemy battler in the encyclopedia).

Finally, the only thing that crosses my mind right now that’s planned for sure are more achievements. While a lot of achievements are held back either because of limited time for writing or just ideas not coming to us, one achievement that NoMoshing’s wanted me to implement more or less since I redid the achievement system is the ‘Taste the Rainbow’ achieve which you will get if you use each element in one battle (scrolls will count). It’s not incredibly complex on the face of it, but in order to get it working I’ll have to setup 10 switches for each element that gets set to ‘off’ at the start of every battle, then every time you go to use a ‘skill’ (attacks and guarding are skills even if the game displays them differently) the game evaluates if it has one of those elements and if so it turns on the relevant switch, then after battle it looks to see if all 10 are on and if so it awards you the achievement. While setting up 10 switches isn’t that hard for me as I can create my own and am not limited by what NoMoshing has to work with, the idea of interfering with the skill process for those elements and all raises a few concerns, namely in the potential bug department (as well as a few questions about if say Bronwyn’s acid bulb counts for the achievement, or if you have Felix attack with a necronomicon does it count as a necrotic skill/spell). More universally though, I would like to sit down at some point and add in a ‘tracker’ for achievements. Like when you haven’t unlocked an achievement but have a hint for one available it’ll show you your progress towards unlocking it, though that one is going to be a bit more involved since the achievement system doesn’t actually record the ‘goal’ of any given achievement, but rather just has a check for if this variable or switch or whatever meets this condition and if it does give an achievement.

That’s really all that I’ve got planned for now though. A lot of the major coding projects that either NoMoshing or myself wanted have already been added into the game… Granted it seems that the autosave feature has stopped working so that’s going to be getting my full attention at some point before the public 0.36 release, but yeah. If any of you have any questions, comments, or feedback of other nature feel free to share!

Backers, keep your eye out for the backer release later today, a few aspects are running a bit behind but we’re working on getting it out as soon as we can! That said, I think I’d like to share something that’s crossed my mind a few times that has given me some trouble at times, balancing HC.

Balancing different features can be very difficult, and having quite a bit of experience min-maxing myself I can have a bit of an easy time seeing how much or how little something will shift things in the grand scheme, but that doesn’t necessarily give me a good idea as to how to properly handle things. Sometimes this can be a problem with enemies as it comes to trying to get their numbers to be ‘just’ right, fit their skills in a way that work, avoid easy weaknesses for bosses without leaving players that brought say a stun-based party feeling useless. That said, while I do struggle in certain situations, I feel that for most quests at least I’ve managed to get the balance for most things pretty well, even if not perfect (though a few oversights have gotten by at times). That said who knows how things will look when we re-balance the game, as I plan to be taking a meat cleaver to both the rate that the player levels up as well as the stats the enemy has to help make lower level quests more interesting and higher level quests more approachable.

That said, enemies aren’t the only area of balancing that have given me some pause. Items in particular have been a bit of a sore thumb for me, and not just because of the typical item-hoarding that I’m sure many people are familiar with. See, while there are some very useful items in HC (Essential salts have made some fights go from flat out impossible to just incredibly challenging), some of the items strain the min-maxer in me to see them as anything other than something to collection for completions sake or items to sell for a minimal increase to my sil. The reason for this is because all aspects of an item need to be taken into consideration and contrasted to the players alternatives. For example, 1 item will always cost 1 action to be used (out of a typical pool of 4 actions per turn) and have a ‘cost’ associated (either in sil or not being able to use it at a later time), with that in mind you have to look at what any given item brings to the table. A lo-potion for example gives 33% healing and you’re given quite a few of them (or mid/hi-potions) which isn’t too bad, but it’s big advantage is that you can use some of your characters who may not have anything better to do (like Hero in many cases) and have them ease the healing burden from other characters, as a result it takes an important job and can serve to reduce the action cost by regulating it to Hero allowing say Felix to pull off another chain lightning or avoid someone being killed. Reinvigoration Potions however tend to rarely be worth it in battle, they use up one party member’s action (when you typically have 3 or fewer actions) to bring someone back with 10% HP, this will typically mean that they then proceed to die before you can heal them or they get an action meaning that you just used an item that you could have sold and one of your limited actions to accomplish nothing. The buffing potions tend to also leave a sour taste in my mouth too, as the magic based alternatives offer at least 2-3x the effectiveness if not more and only cost a small amount of MP (which 1 ether can give you several casts worth). Balancing Florine’s store can also be an issue as you’re asking players to invest several forms of resources, one of which is highly limited and can’t be renewed, to get the items… There’s just a lot of stuff to take into consideration. That said, if proper balance isn’t taken into consideration enough, you can end up in situations like how the current HC meta typically values mages over non-mages. While non-mages will still appear in various parties, it’s pretty rare to find players who don’t make at least half their parties mages, with a 3-mage party typically being the most common that I’ve heard about, and this boils down to how easily mages can use their abilities to get a lot of damage with a low action and MP cost to them, which means that when rebalancing things we’ll have to find a way to make it so that magic doesn’t feel quite an easy ‘I-win’ button to help encourage more diverse party make-ups (without making a 3-mage a bad choice except in specific quests).

There are other aspects of the game that can also give me some trouble when it comes to balancing, like trying to make it so that the furniture system doesn’t boil down to a simple easy perfect solution (which at least one player has found and posted about on the wiki I’ll say), trying to ensure that investments can feel useful in the grand-scheme of things, and other areas. I’ve seen some people talk about being able to measure the value of things by boiling it all down into one common point of comparison, but to me that approach to balancing can just as easily backfire as if you want players to be in a position where they have to choose, it means that they can use that same formula, even if they’re just going by some personal experiences, to always figure out what the ‘best’ option is or realize that it doesn’t matter. When it comes to balancing, to me the best balance is being able to look at two things and figure out if you prefer apples or oranges, and then find a way to find a way to get the most out of your apples to the point that it feels incredibly powerful, as I’m sure that a few people who noticed a bug in the ‘Feedback’ magic might have felt (though I’m sorry to say it’s been patched out).

Perhaps I got a bit off-topic here, I’ve got a tendency to do that when I ramble, but the point is that it can be difficult to balance things, especially when you’re continuing to develop the game (and as such creep can easily off-set any sort of balance that you had), which is a big reason why we’re waiting until HC is content-complete before we work to make sure that everything has the exact balance that we want. With that in mind, how about you guys? Any thoughts in particular about what you wish the balance would be like to make it more enjoyable for you?

I would like to take a moment to talk about gimmicks. I tend to like to make it so that all bosses in HC that I design are unique and have a gimmick to them, even if some aren’t as easy to identify as others, and I recently beat a game where just about every boss has a gimmick and it left me with quite a few thoughts I wanted to rant about for a bit.

A key part of gimmicks I believe is that they should typically require that the player uses resources they have in unique ways to force the player to be constantly adjusting how they play (assuming they don’t have the numbers to just plow through the entire game with no issue), but the player should always have a way to overcome them and shouldn’t be put into a situation where they feel that they can’t win. A gimmick done right should make a boss feel unique and help spice up the game-play experience in new and interesting ways, while always leaving the player able to feel like they can win and without requiring the developer to rewrite the entire rule book every dungeon. To that end, gimmicks should always be carefully considered to make sure that they fit in and don’t disturb this balance in general.

One gimmick for example that has always stood out to me as a risky venture is the idea of bosses who eat people. I’ve seen it come up in various games and I’ve even incorporated it into HC, but whenever you give a boss the ability to ‘eat’ people in the players party you can start to run into some big issues. If it’s used as a means to temporarily remove the character from the party and return them back to the player afterwards (probably from the other characters cutting open it’s stomach afterwards or something off-screen) you can run into big issues where you could potentially be crippling the player based on which character it is, and the more freedom you give to the player to continue what characters they have and what abilities they bring the less sure that you can be that there are any ‘safe’ picks. An alternative to this is to have the boss basically dish out instant deaths but that can be a bit weird to then utilize a revive item/skill on the afflicted party member whenever you think about it. I’ve also seen a few games give out instant game-overs if you allow the boss to eat any party member, and while this can work in some games where you give the player the tools to be able to manipulate the flow of battle to prevent this, I’m still not a huge fan because it ultimately serves to be a hard stop to the gameplay experience. See, if you’re losing to a boss due to numbers the game-over is either gradual and gives you a chance to recover or it’s immediate and you know not to fight the boss, the feedback the game gives you on how well you’re doing is very apparent and accurate to the situation, but whenever you give a boss an ‘instant game-over’ ability it can be a bit jarring because how the immediate feedback the player gets through the damage they give/receive is relatively immaterial to how well they’re actually doing in the battle. This idea isn’t limited just to the idea of having a party member being eaten, instant game-overs that are just that, game-overs (rather than a fight that the story continues with even if you lose), aren’t something that I’m really a huge fan of in general as they’ve always felt more like ‘gotchas!’ instead of obstacles to overcome or work around. Sure, maybe you can control the battle better, sure maybe you need to raise your numbers more, oh maybe there’s an item that you’ve got that turns off that boss feature entirely, but no matter how you cut it I always feel like there are better tools as the developer’s disposal these same strategies room to work with that doesn’t take a player who’s in the middle of an engaging battle that they’re working hard on managing and just instantly hits a reset button on, which is why when I made a boss that eats people I only had it eat other enemies (the reasoning behind this is that with your whole team fighting the boss it just didn’t really get an opportunity to grab anyone from your side). One optional boss in particular from the game I beat stood out to me in particular, and it falls under a similar umbrella where if you didn’t kill it fast enough it would unleash an ultimately attack that party wipes you and you have to reload. The problem was that on top of this, it had by far the best stats of any boss in the game, and no strategy was really too effective against it (I even bought several stat boosting items that upped my stun chance simply to try to stun-lock it without any significant results). It just really left a sour taste in my mouth because ultimately my options were to invest hours into the game to get numbers better than it, or buy 10-20 items to constantly recharge my MP to spam the strongest attacks over and over and over again, neither of which really feels fulfilling just to get that 100% completion.

That said, this viewpoint on gimmicks is probably strongly influenced by my own desire to think, plan, and analyze situations in general. Perhaps I’m putting too much thought into my bosses and should let most of them just end up being basically giant stat blocks that players kill with their even bigger number sticks. I don’t know, feel free to share your thoughts on gimmicks done right or done wrong if you have any!