Thank you so much! And interesting theories :)
I'm sorry there's been no updates in ages - I'm trying to get better at both coding and art so that I can tell the story I want to properly - and while progress has been slow, hopefully the day I can get back into the flow of writing this will be soon!
Have a great day (and sorry again for the delays) :D
Ah nice! I can't say much about the narrative/dialogue side of things just in case I accidentally spoil stuff, but hopefully it will work out well!
And yeah, any encounters with hidden defence slots would need to be balanced a bit differently to usual combat either way - I'm hoping to, if I do use it at all, have it so that the player can lessen the disadvantage through earlier dialogue/action options, but I still want it to be enjoyable even if people don't do these earlier preparations :D
And no worries! Sorry that I haven't been able to work much on the next part with nanowrimo going on, but I'll hopefully have it ready soon(ish)!
Ooo, thank you for the nice ideas :D
I've been messing around with the numbers and doing some playtesting, and yeah, the difficulty is definitely in finding that right balance between fun and unfair(and engaging/boring). I want to avoid it becoming a full MTG/Heartstone style tcg, but for it to still be an enjoyable change of pace between stretches of text. One minor change I'll probably make is booping the critical break damage up to about 5 - which so far has made the whole thing flow much nicer and allows for tougher fights with it still feeling more player-involved.
This is poteeentially heading into spoiler territory, but the idea of cards doing more specialised things was actually where I'm (hopefully) planning to take the combat in the future :O (characters would get character-specific cards that could do specialised things, like destroy a defence-slot regardless of its value etc. - with each character having a focus) - but that's still very much in the oven xD
I do like the strategy involved with holding onto cards, and I want to eventually try and create something that uses that, but that'll probably be when I have a clearer idea of how best to let it play to the player's advantage :O
Ah, also one more idea I have that I've played around with a bit is actually to have defence-slots hidden at the start of each turn - but have them able to be revealed by burning a low attack against them - although I might save this only for specific enemies...
But aa thank you again! I'm gonna try and get special cards working so I can really start making the fights a bit spicier :D
Ah yeah! I tuned down the enemy numbers so it will hopefully flow nicer now! I’ve thought of some ways that should make combat feel less rng-dependant/make the player input matter more for in the future when battles become a bit more challenging, whilst also keeping it simple. I just need to figure out how to make it work xD
As for the affinities, I’ll try to hold off mentioning it here as there’ll be a bit in the story that will properly explain what behaviours increase which affinities (and also why they don’t increase based on what they intuitively should)
And ah whoops, I think that was a line I was supposed to change! I was planning to mention that stuff on the floor had been jostled around a bit in the update :o I should probably also put more focus on the player shutting the trapdoor quickly when they first leave
And aaa thank you! :D
Thank you! And thank you for the feedback! I’m working on a quick hotfix where I’ll absolutely include a lil option to check up on the barista’s situation :D
Combat is definitely an area I’d like to improve – for the current stuff, I want to tune down the enemy’s numbers so that it doesn’t grind the pacing to a halt. The goal is to have affinities with things like “War” and “Death” affect in-combat numbers (so that playing a more “evil” route could potentially make combat easier/open up options to deal with more things violently) as well as a couple other things that'll pop up later, but I’m still working on a way to add more skill expression into the core loop!
(As for the disappearing liquid, I think I might’ve straight up forgotten to write the line explaining how it had seeped away – although now that I’ve got the time, I should probably just draw a couple puddles to help solve the issue :D)
