0.8.0 BIG Update - October 30, 2023

Hi all,

It's been longer than I would have liked since the last update (about 2 months) - though not that long in the scheme of LIFE. 

Being part of the launch of a game as a contractor this month had me pretty busy. I also took a little side quest to make a solo Ludum Dare game (which came in 22nd in the Overall category!) 

Since launching the demo on steam I got to watch a lot of long play videos, and even Retromation covered it! Which got me pretty excited.

Watching people make long play videos of the demo was super helpful and I collected a lot of feedback. I think the biggest problems I saw/heard about were:

1. Not enough content
2. Summoning is way OP
3. Battle takes too long

For this build, I made a big mechanical change that hopefully addresses 2 & 3: Units now trade damage when they attack each other (much like Super Auto Pets & Hearthstone Battlegrounds). This affects summoning by not allowing low stat summoned units to soak up full attacks from much bigger units - they will die when they attack instead. It also greatly reduces the length of battles, which I think is a big win. It's almost like those other games knew what they were doing!

I also observed that distillation wasn't the "killer feature" I hoped it'd be - or at least it's a bit buried right now. I decided to allow distillation from 1-1. It's always there. Perhaps I'll tutorialize it a bit more or something in a later patch, but for now I'll just let it sit there. 

Since the goal of the meta-structure is to introduce new mechanics in each sub-rank, I needed to replace the introduction of distillation in 1-3 with something else. So I decided to create "positive cell effects". Negative cell effects were already implemented, and showed up in rank 2, (not reachable in the current demo). I decided to introduce positive and negative (temporary) cell effects in 1-2 and move the introduction of indulgences to 1-3. I am actually surprised I didn't think of this sooner, since cell effects add to the overall direction of the game, which is to encourage the strategic positioning of units (much more so than indulgences currently do IMO).

AND I PROMISE I HEAR THE CRIES FOR MORE CONTENT. I totally agree that's the biggest thing missing. Honestly, on one hand I hate making content, so it makes sense I've held off. But on the other hand the base game has been in flux, so I've been holding off. Take for example this giant mechanical change to damage trading... It really changes the kind of content I need to make. 

So generally, my plan for content now is to focus on making more items, cell effects, and indulgences. I THINK the overall amount of units will stay relatively low, but we'll see.

So those are my thoughts! I currently don't have any contracts right now, so I have a bunch of time for this. If you're in need of a Unity dev feel free to reach out.

Thanks for reading,

Mickey