Devlog #4 - News, Game Loop and Night Fights

The game loop is finally playable - and I even made a trailer to show what Final Form is like! There’s also a new system I've finished - Disturbance - which adds pressure as you progress. I’ll break that down in detail at the end of this post, but first - a few news!

News

First - big news - I’ve teamed up with an artist!

Even placeholder art was taking too much time, and I realized I’d rather focus on game design and coding. Plus, given my growing plans for the game, it clearly deserves better art than I can produce on my own. Nothing to show yet, but hopefully I’ll have new art to share in the next devlog!

I also reconnected with the composer who made the original soundtrack for the Jam version - and he’s back on board to create a few more tracks. Very happy about that!

Last but not least, I've participated in one Concept Trailer Challenge - so I've made a draft trailer about the game. Check it out, if you haven't already!

To make the trailer, I had to pause deeper system work and focus on getting the core gameplay loop into a playable, presentable state. It’s not fully polished yet - there are a lot of band-aid solutions in place - but it’s enough to communicate what the game is like. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be refactoring and expanding the systems from patching into full-fledged ones - skills, abilities, character development, shop, and some more.

The loop

So the game has 3 loops:

• Micro Loop: Every day, you terraform the land, fulfilling quests and managing resources (mana) and disturbance.
• Mid Loop: Every few days, the void attacks, trying to undo your terraforming and trying to bring the land back to sleep. It serves as a "check" of your abilities, whether you are ready to go deeper in confronting the void.  When you significantly increase disturbance, the void reaches a new level, and every new attack becomes much stronger. It also progresses the story
• Macro Loop: You increase the void level, along with researching new technologies, unlocking new tiles and upgrading your creatures, which makes for the global loop that advances the story. There will be even some "roguelite" element, since all technology you research carries over in the next game, in case you feel like "oh, if I knew such a feature existed - I'd do everything differently. Well, you can! Moreover (light spoiler) - the story will require it at some point (which you might, but don't have to follow).

Disturbance

The precise values etc. are up for tuning and are clearly non-perfect now, but the system itself looks cool to me.

So, in short, it goes like this:

• Your every action produces a certain amount of disturbance. The more tiles you terraform, the more disturbance you produce
  • Starting with the 5th turn every day, each next turn produces 10% more disturbance, which grows slowly but exponentially - it's easy to afford 6-7 turns, but the 20th turn produces disturbance like 5 regular turns.
• For each Void level, there is a "disturbance cap" threshold, a "pooling resource," the enemy's weight distribution, and attack interval.
  
  •  When an attack happens, it produces enemies based on "pooling resource," randomly (but weighted) buying enemies with this resource
  • Attack interval represents the timer to the next enemy's attack.
• The "disturbance cap" plays a crucial role in how the attack unfolds:
  • If within this interval your produced disturbance is below 100% of the "disturbance cap" - you face a regular attack. It's power is fixed regardless of whether the value was 10% or 99%,
    
  • If you reach 100% - for every 1% increase, the pooling resource is increased by 1% as well (additively, not exponentially). For every 1% over 200% - the pooling resource is increased by 2%. So, at 300%, it is a 4x increase (numbers are not final, though).
  • If you reach 200%, the timer resets to 0, and the attack happens the upcoming night. It also triggers an increase in the void level.
  • If you reach 300%, the day ends, and the night comes immediately. This serves as a hard cap, so that you can't go infinitely.

This is how it roughly works, although it is a bit more nuanced. But it serves a few roles:

• Adding pressure to be efficient in moves. You don't want too much - the attack might be too hard to swallow. But you don't want to be too slow - the attacks come anyway, so you need to keep moving forward.
• You have control of when you are ready for the "next level" of toughness. But if you overdid it, you still have time to recover: the "next level" regular attack is still weaker than the "300%" attack of the previous level.

So that's it for now! And see you in two weeks! :)