Hello everyone, and welcome back to VV Eekly Update! So when you’re doing this exercise, you should really feel it in your abs. Put your feet together, cross your arms if you want, and feel that burn! Now that we’ve done it once, we’ll…
Wait… have I been doing crunch time wrong this whole time??
More seriously, I haven’t been crunching too much. One of the benefits of working for yourself rather than a larger company is that I can choose to take time for myself, and that’s been one of the big highlights of doing this work. (hello new WoW expansion!)
However, I indeed have been feeling the time pressure of my self-imposed deadline of early next year coming up. In particular, it feels like I could always do more to polish various aspects of Vyn and Verdan here and there, but I have to choose which parts deserve attention and which will be “good enough”.
But anyway, in today’s VV Eekly Update, there’s no big headliner. I’ll tell you about a variety of small things I’ve been working on!
Difficulty Levels
Vyn and Verdan will have progression via difficulty levels, like in Slay the Spire‘s ascension levels or Dead Cell‘s boss cells. I haven’t entirely finalized the levels, but here’s a rough draft of what they’ll be!
- Base game difficulty
- Players heal less during fights.
- Enemies recover faster from moves.
- Enemies deal more damage.
- Enemies have more health.
- Affixes are enabled!
- Players start with less health.
- Enemies recover even faster from moves.
- Enemies deal even more damage.
- Enemies have even more health.
- Minibosses are added!
We start with the base game, which is meant as an introduction or tutorial. All players should be able to beat the base game difficulty while learning the basics of the game.
Then, difficulties 2, 3, 4, and 5 ask the player to gradually get better. Healing less during fights means that players can’t reset their health mid-fight. Enemies recovering faster means that players have to anticipate moves better with more knowledge. Enemies dealing more damage means that players have to actually respond to enemies well. Enemies having more health means that players have to actually use the scaling-from-influence aspect of dealing damage.
Difficulty 6 is a big step, introducing affixes. Ideally, most players should reach this difficulty, since it adds a lot more content. I have to make sure to somehow emphasize this difficulty in-game somehow, since I do want to make sure players have an incentive to reach and play on this difficulty!
Difficulties 7, 8, 9, and 10 are steps up from previous difficulties. Hopefully, players looking for a challenge will be satisfied with these difficulties.
Difficulty 11 is… up in the air. I’m not quite sure what this might entail, but I think it would be fun for a room in each level or for every room to have a slightly-harder enemy with special abilities. Who knows! However, it does feel like the final difficulty should be memorable in some way.
Damage Upgrades
Playtesting revealed an interesting balance dilemma. I want two things to be true in Vyn and Verdan:
- Upgrades should be meaningful and feel different.
- Players should be able to upgrade non-damage abilities and not feel like they’re missing out from a damage upgrade.
Previously, I had each upgrade to the two damage abilities (single-target and area) do a substantial x2 upgrade to some aspect of the ability. This ranged from reducing the cooldown so the ability ticked faster to increasing how much damage from your partner’s influence was added.
However, I realized from playtesting that the damage abilities ramped up really fast. This isn’t too much of a surprise, since exponential growth is rapid, but it meant that balancing later enemies became really tough. If a player had chosen to upgrade a damage ability four times, then enemies died really quickly. However, if a player didn’t upgrade the damage ability enough times, then enemies lasted a lot longer and were significantly harder. This basically meant that upgrading damage became the “right” thing to do.
So I had to nerf the damage upgrades. This was a bit of a bummer, since now upgrades don’t feel quite as distinguishing. However, it does seem like the right thing to do.
Debugging Menu
For the longest time, when debugging Vyn and Verdan, I relied on the Godot debugger and print debugging. If you’ve done any coding, you know what this looks like. However, after putting Vyn and Verdan on Steam, that became a lot harder! Instead, I added a debug menu to the game.
I wish I had done this earlier! This menu makes debugging so much easier, and it allows for control of what’s happening without touching any code.
On the right, you can see the debug events that I added. There’s a general tab, a players tab, and an enemies tab. Now I can actually see what’s going on in game while debugging without using the Godot editor!
If you’re ever in a similar situation, I would highly recommend adding a debugging menu and a debugging output as soon as possible after your executable becomes complicated enough.
That’s it for today’s miscellaneous VV Eekly Update. As usual, if you have any random comments or other etceteras, please post in the Discord!