Monday, July 3, 2017

Up next

This is a big list of things I'm considering for the near (and far) future:

First, some reasonable ideas.

- Adjustments to the new stats and difficulty settings as they come up.

- Fix a few known broken things, like magic descriptions in the ring menu (these can crash the game currently--it's a side effect of my generating the weapon ones for the randomized weapons)

- A few minor enhancements have been suggested, like renaming the mech riders so you know which one's which.

- Add in the missing bosses.  Most of them (the wall, the slimes) require a special arena.

- Fix vanilla glitches, like the reflect experience glitch used in Shade's palace in the run, and the item trashing/other ring menu glitches.

- A couple new tilesets.  Namely the witch's castle exterior, and a town one.  More will follow later.  These things take forever to create and polish since it's basically a whole new procgen algorithm for each, just to keep things interesting.

- Additional room types for the mana fort interior tileset.

- Replace "Mana Magic" spell with something new for each character.  Maybe a new saber effect and/or an HP regeneration status spell.

- Have "Speed up" make you move faster and improve attack recharge (and charge?) time.

- Maybe a Santa NPC with random gifts.

- Faster weapon charging for earlier levels if it's a higher level.

- If you open a chest and can't hold the item inside, don't remove the chest.

- People have suggested having a gamble of sorts that you can choose to use.  Vanilla SoM has a dummied item called "?" that I'm considering adding to my drop tables.  Using it would give a random effect.  I'm thinking of things like the following:
   - +/- Max HP, MP, other stats "permanently"
   - Refill all characters' HP/MP
   - All characters to 1 HP
   - Half current gold, double current gold
   - High-damage nuke to all on-screen enemies
   - Random negative status condition to all characters
   - Random buff to all characters
For the "permanent" effects, I'd have an NPC you could pay to reset them.  I'd also like to have a little icon on layer 3 (near the floor number and clock) for each that indicates which are active.

- "Endless mode" is a thing that I'm still thinking about, where the objective is just to get as far as you can before you get wiped out.  This will require rewrites of a few core things to make work properly (mainly that I use the current map number as the floor number indicator, and the maps will need to repeat while the floor# continues to increase), so it's probably not coming soon.


Also, some sillier ideas.

- Some others and I have been experimenting with transforming players into enemy sprites just for fun.  This is still a long way from working properly, but something like "play as a rabite" may be something silly that shows up later as an option.

- I'd still really like to work the black rabite concept from SD3 in somewhere, and possibly track Nuclear Fusion (the primary boss theme from SD3) for where it appears.

- Randomize the moon phase in the ending scene.  Normally this is semi-random from three choices at the end of a vanilla game.  I don't know what factors affect it, but ancient cave ones are always the "3/4 moon" for some reason.


As always, suggestions are welcome.

2 comments:

  1. Sounds great. I have some suggestions about two of these:

    >Replace "Mana Magic" spell with something new for each character. Maybe a new saber effect and/or an HP regeneration status spell.

    How about giving the girl a saber effect that restores 1 MP on each hit? It kinda sucks that once the sprite gets MP absorb it effectively has an endless supply of MP, but the girl doesn't. I guess it's for the better so you don't just use cure water/revive as much as you want, but she still deserves a way to recover it, I think.

    >Faster weapon charging for earlier levels if it's a higher level.

    If possible, faster movement speed while charging would be nice, too. Something like faster than vanilla speed below 4, slower than vanilla above, decreasing gradually of course.


    Thanks for your work, I played your edit with my friend and had lots of fun.

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  2. How about only giving the boy the faster weapon skill charging? It's not much fun playing him considering he doesn't do much other than whack enemies a little harder than the other two. He could at least have that going for him.

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