It’s a little tough to tell where you are in the Rogue arc, but if you’ve gotten the Rogue shop and aren’t level 2 yet, you probably need explore the Upper River District. Once you’ve complete the jobs there, you’ll have a few more chats at the Selky Pint which will give you another job and level 2 Rogue (obviously this is a top-level overview).
Some more specifics:
The job in the Upper River District is the Dunhaven Heist, which requires Rogue skills and Grenn (switching him into your party requires you to go to the party screen and double-click Lia's icon in the party order).
The Dunhaven Heist involves a set of evasion and mechanism encounters that are generally quite a bit easier than the Anemic Cat, but you have to do them all back-to-back. Checking out the estate beforehand can make it easier, and you might learn things on a run that make it worth rerolling/restarting the expedition.
If/When you complete the Heist, you’ll return to the Selky Pint to report your success, which should carry you further along the Rogue Arc.
The short answer is likely yes, you will probably need level 2 rogue and a second dexterity die.
Explanation
It may be possible to complete with 6 DEX & 12+ CON, but it almost certainly requires 1 STR & 1 WIS, which may be impossible if you already have two STR dice (something I overlooked during testing).
Once you have level 2 rogue, you’ll be able to increase the damage of Smoke Bomb still further with a talent point. So that + 12 DEX + 12 CON + 1 or 2 STR + 1 WIS should be a win.
Sorry it took a while to figure out where you were at. It’s definitely an encounter I’ll be looking at further; it’s scaled up a lot because you can bring a few multipliers against it, but obviously it’s a roadblock if you haven’t unlocked those multipliers yet.
Ah that’s right, I forgot that you needed a more specific item. Sorry about that.
Item details
The Rogue evasion items have damage types and the Cat is a "Focused" encounter, which means it takes more Obscuring damage but less Distraction damage.
The only Obscuring damage item at the moment is the Smoke Bomb.
I read about an approach for posting possible spoilers, so I’m trying it out here. Apologies if it takes a few edits to get right. But:
Tips on the Anemic Cat (click to expand)
It's an evasion encounter. So roll a Rogue with High Constitution & Dexterity and equip yourself with an item from the thieves' guild.
Like the other animal encounters, the cat scales its damage based on some of your stats. So your Rogue should have as low Strength & Wisdom as possible (literal 1's or maybe a 2 in Str if you have to).
Late Edit for posterity: The cat is a Focused evasion encounter. So it takes more damage from Obscuring abilities (i.e. the Smoke Bomb).
It's a bit unintuitive, but wealth rewards are scaled down by the level of wealth you reach. Once you reach Solvent wealth, rewards of 3 or less do not increase your wealth anymore.
Rerolls then (are intended to) set you to the max wealth you would have reached if you got all of your rewards up to that checkpoint in a single run. Currently you should cap out at Solvent 1/10 or maybe 2/10.
The situation you describe is a gap/optimization you could try to take advantage of during a single run, where you spend down below a Wealth tier before completing a mission so that you receive an extra "unscaled reward."
This can give you slightly more buying power for that run, but the benefit of that is pretty limited; basically you can buy an extra tier 1 item or two, at a time when you should already be able to fill most of your active party's inventory with them.
Typing it all out, it definitely feels confusing, and I get how it feels like you "lost wealth" unexpectedly. I'll consider if there's a way to make it clearer; perhaps closing that single run gap is the best option, or maybe there's a better way.
That's great, thanks for the feedback. It's definitely something I'll be thinking on.
I went back and forth on having abilities "cross over" into other classes' arcs, and considered, for instance, making the arena fights nullify non-physical damage.
I wasn't too happy with that though, so eventually decided an easy encounter was your reward that finding an "outside set" of abilities that blew open something like the arena. That said, it's obviously a bit anti-climatic when you can just march through each fight, so I'll continue thinking on ways to mix it up.
To change party members, you double-click their icon in the party/stats screen.
Edit: In terms of info on development, you mean how it's currently going? It's been a slow couple months, as I've spent some time checking out Godot. I won't be porting the game over, but content development has been slow.
Your perspective on the genre/tags seems very reasonable to me. Personally, I view it as something of a mashup of interactive fiction and RPG with some incremental mechanics (e.g. unfolding complexity, multiplicative scaling, and "prestiging") mixed in, but I definitely understand the point of view that it feels different from many incrementals.
Thanks for the suggestion. I haven't shared much of my plans, because I think the unfolding discovery is definitely part of the experience. BUT making rerolls more mechanically interesting (and easier, especially as the number of dice go up) is definitely on the agenda.
Yep, rerolling resets your gold, so if you find you're current items aren't working for an encounter, rerolling gives you a chance to buy different ones.
The longer answer is that while I have a lot of ideas for how the game will progress, it has been growing somewhat organically, so it's hard for me to say with certainty where the fights/challenges will go. The goal is certainly that as the party grows and you unlock more options, you'll have more flexibility in tackling challenges. Having ranged PCs is certainly one of those options I'm keeping in mind.
Glad to hear you enjoyed it and thanks for the feedback. That is the end of the Selky Pint content so far; a note is 100% reasonable thing to expect there.
Interesting to hear about that button leading to the wrong location. I'll have to see if I can reproduce it, though things in the mission select code have been cleaned up a bit, so hopefully it's overcome by events.
I'll try to give some spaced out hints with specifics in strike through to give people a chance to avoid/limit spoiling something they want to figure out on their own.
I'm sure you've tried/noticed these things, but you need to put most of them together to win consistently.
1) You'll have just gotten a new strength die. A 12 strength + 11 constitution (or more) main character (MC) has a lot more leeway than someone with lower stats. If you follow all these steps, you don't need a perfect 12 12 roll, but it can cover for not having all the points addressed + make victory more consistent.
2) Both enemies do edged damage. Loading up your bruiser MC with Scale Armor will let them do more damage for longer.
3) The enemies have different armor types. Equipping your MC with multiple weapon types will help you deal the most damage (this + step 2 requires you to use fighter abilities to gain an extra weapon slot); you won't have space for off-hands + armor + 2 weapons, so grab the biggest two-handers of both damage types.
4) Plan for the enemy knock back. If you have no movement abilities, Lia should have a melee weapon to maximize her damage, as bows do reduced damage from the frontline. But the easiest victory is to use the three earlier clues and have Lia use the duelist specialization with a knife so she can help tank damage.
There are some other tricks that can be used to achieve victories, though the hints above give the most consistent path to victory. Namely, the Kite Shield or Lightning Potion can be used (with the other hints) to get a decent chance of victory, but not as consistently as the above method.
Awesome, thank you. As to your question, short-term, I'll being doing posts on itch when I do an update. I think I'll also start a Substack (or something like it), just so I'm not fully tied to itch as my only messaging; I'll include links to whatever I setup in the itch updates.
As to news on the next update itself, unfortunately July was a slow month. I've been dealing with some life issues (mostly dental and home-water-damage related), so I haven't been as focused as I would like.
Thank you for your kind response. And yes, that is the end of the current content.
Unfortunately, I'm not looking to bring in more people to work on this at the moment. It is a very generous thought/offer/idea, so I don't decline lightly. But I'm just not at the point where I would be able to coordinate it effectively.
As to the game genre, you might not be surprised to learn that I've actually spent a decent amount of time thinking about it. I currently view the game as somewhere on the line between interactive fiction and idle RPGs. A better description might still come along, but that's the best I've come up with so far.
Ooof. Thanks so much for trying. Out of curiosity, did you try to use the scroll wheel to move down the text? You don't seem to be getting the exact error I've been seeing, but it is similar (I see a "Invalid conversion to integer" error).
I have been able to scroll the text to the bottom by clicking the scroll bar and dragging it down. But obviously the mouse-wheel thing is annoying; it has always required a restart for me.
The disappearing-export-string-screen fix I have has also appeared to fix this issue. But I'm currently planning on holding off on another build until I have more to present; I wasn't too happy with the v0.2.1's content + effort/testing coverage to new errors ratio.
Yeah, if you have a save that takes you to 0 gold after a reroll, that would be useful. I still haven't seen it though I admit I'm focusing on other things at the moment.
Oh sorry. To be explicit, if you select the text and it disappears, it is still selected, just not visible. So you can still copy the text with Ctrl - C (even though it isn't visible) and paste into Notepad or whatever else with Ctrl - V.
When you want to import the string, paste it in and hit the Checkmark Button to import. If you click the string, the UI may disappear if it gets selected, but click it again to deselect the text and it should come back.
Thanks. So from what I'm seeing, it looks like if you select the (long) save string, it shoots the game window out of the view of the browser. If you scroll all the way down (but don't use the mouse wheel) and then select the text, it will stay on screen.
I have a fix, but I think I'll hold off until I have a better solution for how to do the WebGL updates. As you guys have found, the text is still being selected and is copy-able; it just disappears. For me, the disappearance was until I clicked again and deselected the text.
I appreciate you putting the time and effort into trying things out and letting me know what happens.
I made another post above about the lost save files: unfortunately, updating the game has meant the old versions saves got lost. There is a potential work around to skip the prologue (explained in the post), so hopefully that helps.
I've added the ability to import/export saves as strings, which you'll be able to use backup your saves or transfer between versions of the game.
Unfortunately, in doing so, I've learned that through some combination of my ignorance + itch and/or Unity's WebGL, the new build loses track of saved games from the previous version. I apologize for any lost progress.
If you had completed the Prologue and wish to avoid needing to redo that, it is possible to start a new game that skips the Prologue. In the settings screen, if you enter the Konami code (Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Enter), you should be able to start a new game that skips the prologue. Entering the code does require the game to have focus and the mouse cursor has to be over the Window.
Again, apologies to anyone who lost save progress.
If you are currently in a dialogue scene, you can mouse-wheel back to see the earlier dialogue.
But I suspect you mean looking at dialogue history once you've already finished the given scene? It's something I'm considering and makes a lot of sense for things like the reasons you give.
So, currently the game pretty aggressively auto-saves after encounters and dialogue. And the interface only really manages the most recent save; the downloadable version keeps extra saves around for backups, but currently it doesn't handle them in game. Sorry!
It's definitely something I'll look into improving; in theory, you'll be able to manually do it when I add the save exporting string implementation (hopefully tonight), though I know that probably isn't ideal.
And yep, Thieves Guild currently just has a first step implemented.
Yeah, I'll look into it; thanks for the additional info.
Edit: So my first few straight-forward attempts haven't reproduced it.
When you go to reroll the character, what does the "Wealth on reroll:" say? I'd expect it to say "Gold 0 (5 / 10)" and that you'd have 5 gold to spend after you reroll.
I'm leaning towards implementing the Save String Export/Import stuff when I get a chance tonight so that you could export a save and I can take a look at it.
With gold/equipment, the expected behavior is that you get your gold back on a reroll (so that you could buy different equipment if desired). If you aren't getting your gold reset, that would be a bug.
