The stability is finally such that some games are getting completed. The most obvious observation is that the pacing is completely wrong: A 3 player game took 2.5hrs to complete. That’s a long way from the target time of 1hr for 4 players. So I started redirecting my attention to cleaning up the pacing. The most obvious problem was the addition of difficulty areas. The way the game was set up is that the plot quest took place over 3 areas, and within each area were 3 layers of difficulty- each layer blocked off by a boss. This worked pretty well at creating a sense of progression and letting the player know if they could handle a plot quest (if the plot quest is in a medium difficulty area and I just beat the boss to the medium area, then I can probably handle that plot quest).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But it was also pretty obviously the single biggest time sink. It also had pacing issues in of itself: by the third area the routine became pretty drawn out and players were getting sick of it. The first area also took the longest- partially from players having the least options at that point in the game, partially from the exp/gold progression curve being lowest at that point. Another property worth noting is that since there wasn’t a boss between the third difficulty tier and the next area, the last difficulty of each area ended up skipped over most the time since there were enough non-combat quests that the most optimal way to progress was to always be in the highest difficulty area available. What this meant is that ultimately there were already only 6 difficulty ranges instead of 9. Which meant that doing minor sprucing up like removing the third difficulty tiers or reducing the final area to a single difficulty tier wouldn’t really be enough to hit our goal. So I went for the most dramatic route of removing difficulty areas entirely and reduced it to just the 3 plot areas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This seems to be getting closer, but we haven’t yet completed a game with this new layout due to bugs and disconnects. So far it seems like roughly 1hr for 3 players and 1.5hrs for 4 players. Not perfect, but within reason that with additional smaller tweaks we can hit our goal. Right now I feel like the new system is really missing something compared to the old one, but I think the majority of the problem stems from the main quest. The two things that didn’t get done in the alpha 2 push were equipment revisions and doing a new main quest. So having the alpha 1 main quest still in place is dragging the rest of the game down. Making the new one will probably be the next step. Right now I sort of view the current goal is to produce a really good demo build of the game. That mostly means refining existing content, fixing bugs, improving the interface towards playability, fixing up balance within the smaller scope, etc. Once we’re satisfied with a slice of the game, we can move towards expanding and polishing it.