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(+1)

Aqua is now useful? This game is no longer canon friendly /j

Jokes aside, I'm very excited by the upgrade. Not only a lot of new content for the story, but also tons of updates for the combat system, which is one major attraction for this game.

That being said, even without testing I can already tell, 50% hp execution is way too high. Usually in other games the threshold is 30 or 20%, otherwise it's too strong against bosses and minibosses. 

But also, I fear that giving resistance for bosses against debuffs and DoTs will make their battles harder and at the same time, simpler. The combat is enjoyable precisely because it requires some strategy, and removing tools from the formula makes the strategies available be more straightforward. I do understand however that some strategies may be too effective as well, causing the exact same problem of being used repeatedly regardless of the situation, and that's hard to balance. I'll be able to tell better how this change affects the enjoyment of boss battles when it comes out to the public, for now I hope it's not full immunity for all bosses, and instead just that some bosses have different resistances to different de buffs. 

(+1)

Chris's execute threshold only applies to regular enemies (not bosses), which I initially set to 30% but it seemed rather weak and not worth the upgrade, so I tuned it up. I prefer buffs over nerfs in singleplayer games, so we'll see how this upgrade performs.

The debuff resist is an attempt to make cheesing bosses a little bit harder since I've given the players a lot of new tools to do just that (in addition to the already existing ones). Hopefully it's not too overtuned, so I'll just have to gauge that based on the feedback I get afterwards.

(+1)

Makes sense then. For normal enemies, usually a well built character will kill them with a few hits anyway, so it's easy to see why 30% might seem not appreciable enough.

I do see as well your concern over the cheesing. I saw you added a lot of new status effects that might tip the balance in the player's favor, although I assumed they'd count as "debuffs" and thus rendered useless by the bosses' resistance anyway. What I fear is that boss fights could get reduced to just a matter of having big damage numbers (and some way of surviving/reviving, which we get a lot of in this update as well), instead of a tactical puzzle of figuring out combinations of buffs and debuffs. I also fear that builds centered around DoTs would be discouraged, which I think would be a wasted opportunity to diversify the game's experience for players.

At the end of the day though, I also understand that the focus of this game isn't solely the combat system, and even without that feature it'd still be very great. Taking time to "perfectly" balance the game would be in detriment of further developing new content and polishing the existing one, specially for a single dev such as you. I don't wish my ideas and feedback to add pressure for anyone, specially when I still haven't even played the version myself, I'm just speaking out of the experience of having played a lot of games myself, which might prove to make for an insufficient insight. Thank you for taking your time to read me nonetheless, I feel quite passionate about your game and wish it nothing but success.