Final Next Fest Prep | Patreon Weekly #141 (Patreon)

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, there’s a new Shattered Secrets! In this one I’m showing some new music for each of the game’s bosses!

I’ve also not yet heard back from a majority of Patrons who I sent pins to in the second round. If you received a pin please let me know! I am still planning to send another batch this month, but I want to get an idea of how serious any shipping issues may have been. I may scale back the size of pin shipping rounds a bit to help offset shipping risks, which would mean we’ll get fully caught up in April.

Finally, in this weekly I’m going to share probably a final planning update for new desktop features, and some concepting for the actual content coming to v1.2.0.

Finishing Up on Desktop Improvements

Since last weekly I’ve released the demo to the public and pushed a few updates to it! The demo now has tooltips, some right click support and several hiccups with the new UI have been improved. I’ve started to better home in on what I want to do by Next Fest before moving on to v1.2.0’s content:

• Right click menus for the game environment, in addition to the current inventory ones.
• Two additional quickslots for six total. On mobile I think I’m going to accomplish this by changing one slot to a ‘switcher’ that lets the other slots hold two sets of three items.
• Better default keybinds. Many players have expressed a desire for WASD movement, so I plan to adjust default bindings accordingly. Arrow key and numpad movement will still work.
• Styling for the mouse cursor, so that it better fits with the game’s art style.
• Basic controller support. I don’t expect the experience to be great, but I want the game to be at least playable on a controller. I’ll likely accomplish this by letting the player move their characters with one analog stick and move their cursor with the second one.

I will still make other improvements after v1.2.0 releases, but I think these will be enough to start with, and I can adjust or re-prioritize based on feedback.

Starting on Content Concepting

Once upon a time I was thinking about more than desktop features for v1.2.0. While the update has definitely become mostly focused on the Steam release, I do hope to put at least some content in it too!

Firstly, I plan to do a Full Balance Pass, with an emphasis on alchemy produce. I haven’t run the full numbers on this yet, but it will mostly be focused around buffs to underpowered or underused items.

Next, it’s two piece of content that you guys voted for!

I plan to at least partially rework the Master Thieves’ Armband. Currently the armband isn’t much use outside of shops, and I would be mainly looking at addressing that. The specifics of this aren’t totally solid yet, but I’m leaning toward giving it a new ability that will let the player steal from enemies. This would let them get extra loot from the armband outside of shops, and might have some applications in combat itself as well.

I’m also going to be making some Levelgen Improvements. This will mainly be focused on some adjustments and expansions to special rooms. In particular it might be nice to add a challenge room or two that take advantage of some of the new mechanics Shattered has added over the years. I’m also looking to make a few tweaks to level feelings, including putting a level feel indicator in the primary UI. Here’s a look at some icons I made for that.

I haven’t found a great place to put these icons yet though, so I may decide to switch to using a buff to showcase the level feeling instead.