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Talents and Feelings | Patreon Weekly #71 (Patreon)

Published:
2020-10-12 15:01:01
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Hey Patrons!

v0.9.0a was released a couple of days ago, and I’m now working on v0.9.0b, which will include more fixes, balance tweaks, and some internal code to support v0.9.1. I’m also hard at work on concepting for talents and levelgen, so here’s some more of that!

Tier Two Talents

Firstly, I want one or two talents with a shared theme between the heroes, like in tier one. One of those talents will definitely be an on-rest effect. When the hero rests, they’ll gain a small bonus in addition to the usual HP regen over time. The current idea for each of these is:

  • Warrior recharges his broken seal shielding faster.
  • Mage recharges wands slightly faster.
  • Rogue recharges artifacts slightly faster.
  • Huntress regens HP slightly faster if she is in grass.

I might also do another set of talents that trigger on-eat. Food is common enough that there’s room for two effects per hero, and this might also let me reposition some of the better scaling T1 talents. In general I think the non-warrior food talents are the biggest culprits when it comes to some T1 talents that are fully useful the whole game, and so moving some of them to tier 2 (while coming up with more appropriate tier one effects) should help with that.

As far as hero specifics go, I’ve primarily been thinking up talents for the rogue. Here are my ideas on that front:

  • I want the rogue to have a talent that allows him to be less noticeable or even invisible to sleeping enemies when not adjacent to them. This is super cool thematically without being too powerful.
  • I’m also likely going to give the rogue a talent that helps him locate secret rooms. The current idea is to give him a chance to notice if a given floor has a secret room when he first enters it.
  • I’m also considering repositioning the rogue’s enhanced search radius into a talent. This is tricky though as the radius is a pretty distinctive property of his, and so it may be too much to move to a talent.
  • Assuming I keep his search radius innate, I might instead give the rogue a talent that gives him a chance to detect a hidden trap just before stepping on it.
  • I also have an idea for a talent that would let the rogue use his cloak of shadows without equipping it, but at a big penalty. This might be more appropriate for tier three though.

New Level Feelings

I’m continuing to plan out exactly what I want to do with levelgen in v0.9.1, and level feelings are another place where some easy improvements can be made. I’m currently considering three possible new feelings:

  • A ‘large’ level feeling, that contains more rooms, and possibly more giant rooms specifically. The extra time spent traversing a large level would be offset by a second guaranteed food drop, and a bit more general loot as well. I’m feeling pretty confident about this one.
  • I’m also considering a feeling that ties into traps. Simply boosting the traps on a floor is likely to be frustrating though, so I’m considering mixing things up a bit by making many of these added traps spawn as visible.
  • Lastly, I might add a level feeling that interacts with doors. Currently the idea is for most or all of the dungeon doors to spawn locked, but I worry this might end up being more tedious than interesting.

Comments

Shattered Pixel

Andrew Gasper is trying to post this comment, but it's not showing up for some reason. I'm posting it for him so I can reply to it publicly: "I really like the ideas you had for the rogue. I had some ideas involving his search radius. A lot of the time a large part of his radius is wasted, you are looking for a trap in front of you, or a door in the sides of the room or other specific things. If you wanted to remove some power from the default search radius, it could make sense to allow the rouge to move his base 3x3 search in a direction from himself by selection a direction after hitting the search button. Either by moving the center point of the search or by extending the search by a 1x3 rectangle for up, down, left, and right or "L" shape around the corners in the direction desired. To avoid this resembling the talisman of insight and/or making it redundant for the the rogue, by default the rogue could only extend his search in a straight line, it would not make the cone of search the talisman does. This would allow you to put improvements to it into talents, and maybe you could let the player choose how he/she wants to improve the search, possibly locking out other search specializations. One set of talents could return the search to the current default, one could allow more cone shapes, and a third could allow to rogue to extend his search even further in a single direction."

Shattered Pixel
>>45777685

A more directed search radius would be neat, and would definitely help with talent tuning, but it also creates a UI issue. Choosing a direction for the search would require an extra tap on top of already double tapping the examine button, which would be an unfortunate usability tradeoff.

Andrew Gasper
>>45777685

Is it possible to have little directional arrows show up near the rouge or on the edges of the screen? If you double tab search you get the centered search, if you select a tile you get the info on that tile, if you select an arrow you get the directional search. I agree though, that may be either too much to develop and/or make a button that is very self explanatory for other classes more complicated.

Shattered Pixel
>>45777685

The problem with adding buttons for this sort of action is that it would be right on top of a tile that the player may want to examine. I'm steadily leaning toward just keeping the rogue's expanded search radius as an innate power.

Andrew Gasper

That makes sense, keeping things simple has its own merit. Making it even larger is still an option for a talent though, maybe a higher tier one? Depending on the max size it could get a little ridiculous. I don't like the idea of the random chance to know if there is a secret on the floor though. It seems like there is very little game play added, and you could never trust the negative. If you were already a player that wanted to get all the secrets the talent wouldn't do a whole lot for you unless at its max tier the chance was very high or guaranteed.

Shattered Pixel
>>45895886

The chance would likely be fairly high, but not being able to trust the negative would be an intended part of balancing the talent. Letting it get to 100% would be way too powerful. Also keep in mind that the total number of secrets in a region is somewhat consistent, so smart players would be able to use this to cut down on searching.