Weekly Devlog - Alpha 4

some notes on the general state of things...

Release Notes:

• Bearkin
  • A high-health short-range unit
  • Higher damage, but less armor than Knight
    • Perhaps still a little too-high damage, balanced by not having many rituals that impact them
  • Cute
• Weapon Types
  • Natural - Bearkin
  • Martial - Sword, Bow, Dagger
  • Magic - Witch
  • Cards now, generally, target these tags specifically rather than individual weapons
• Armor Types
  • Unarmored - Bearkin, Witch, Woodsman
  • Armored - Knight
  • Cards now target these tags specifically rather than individual unit types
• Removed a few boring cards
  • At some point in the future more will likely be removed (whenever it comes time to actually design the final ritual list). The ones removed this time around were redundant or just boring
• Narrow and Broad Rituals
  • Rituals are now either Normal (3 cards), Narrow (2 cards), or Broad (5 cards)
    • Cost changes somewhat
• Epic rituals
  • Only pull Ultra-Rare (purple) modifiers
  • Only one of these is currently available at the beginning of each session
  • This feature will likely be put behind a progression system in the future
• Emotive Eyes
  • Added eyes to all characters
    • They look around, blink, sleep, and wince in pain
  • Will need to be made more processor-efficient in the future
• Wizard and Merchant now hide at better times
  • For now they just vanish, in the future there will be animations for this
  • They also actually stop existing rather than just turning invisible (blocking pathfinding)

QoL/Balance:

• Increased building neighbor radius a little bit
  
  • Less in the way
• Increased wander radius a bit
  • Less units bunching up during the day
• Ear hunting logic now more logical (should go a bit faster)
• Locked building adjustments at night
• Made some progress understanding the lag spikes
  • They seem to happen because of the skybox size. As far as I can tell sometimes the game 'reloads' the skybox every second or so, and since it's a pretty large image that causes problems. Still looking into this, but it seems like if I do a little wiggle with the files before saving and exporting the bug mostly goes away.

Known Bugs:

• Web version is a bit jank still
  • Visually I can probably take a pass at seeing what bells-and-whistles I can re-add to the web version to make it look a bit better
  • The Skybox (especially in the main menu) is fucked
  • The game lags every time a new node is loaded for the first time. I had thought I found all of these, still working on it
• Lag spikes probably still exist, let me know if/when/where you run into these

Next up:

I'll be out of town for most of next week (partly why I'm posting this update early too) so next week's update will likely be pretty small. I'll have my tablet with me for some 2d art (maybe some 3d too if I find a good app). I'll at least have time to create a final version of the card art and logo, everything else is gravy.

Soon there will be a UI overhaul. This'll involve making some better buttons, 3d card portraits, refactoring how the current UI functions to make it easier to work with, and reworking the whole UX (now that most of the UI exists).