Changes

• Entirely new main quest prototype. Highlights include the ability for any step of the main quest to potentially win the game, timed objectives where all players lose the game if they expire (time limits often so low that players are forced to team up or lose), and escort missions where you go into new areas instead of back to the starting area.
• New Monster Den system where every player has to fight a battle to unlock each tile on the map.
• Switched to a hand made map instead of random (possibly temporary for testing), switched map to open world instead of locking areas based on the plot.
• Revised most of the classes in the game to have more attack abilities, generally stronger attacks, and removed most class stat losses.

Test Results

I think one of the testers said it best: “It’s like playing a game now, instead of avoiding playing a game”. The new monster den system is basically the update we’ve desperately needed for awhile now. Battles actually feel like part of the game, and as a result it feels like there’s a complete game now instead of half of a game. It also dilutes the number of luck-based events that occur since the battles act as a mostly static constant of progression, instead of relying on the more heavily randomized events.

There’s still tons of problems to solve (pacing is screwed up because of so many battles, battle system flaws are way more obvious now, balance is a long ways off, etc) but this is basically the start of a base game that we can finally start to expand on instead of pulling out the carpet over and over again.

Next Up

One of the more prominent issues is trying to make the mid-game victory conditions feel a little more earned instead of anti-climatic. Even in cases where two players defeat the final boss, it’s difficult to determine a victor in a satisfying way. I’m currently considering stuff like having the two players duel for it. It’s a tricky problem.

Now that battles are actually part of the game all of the problems with them are much more obvious. I’m a little worried that the RPS system won’t stay entertaining in the long term with the AI. Having other players control the monsters might help, but I still don’t think there’s quite enough depth to make it last. The biggest thing is that since players make only one choice in battle, there isn’t much room for satisfying combos. There’s a lot of potential workarounds for this (and not just adding more battle commands, the brevity of choice is helpful for pacing), but I haven’t really decided which one is right. Something I can implement quickly is especially important at this point.

I’m kind of shocked that an idea actually worked for once. So much so that I don’t really know what exactly I’m going to work on next. I’ll probably start by trying to restore the pacing back to where it’s supposed to be (which probably just requires shrinking the map).