Version 0.19.1963 - Balancing

Previous time we’ve started from routine stuff, so now let’s start from fun straight!

If the character is exhausted and went to sleep, now she can’t just wake up. And the heroine can get pretty exhausted from a good tickling session or fighting with twinkle. Also, if twinkle discovered the character sleeping, she’ll most certainly will have a deep and healthy sleep for quite some time. Of course, in case any serious danger occurs, she’ll wake up, though she might be in a very unfavorable conditions, if not in bondage mittens ready for some nice tickling fun.

Many aspects of Tickling slime and Twinkle were rebalanced a bit, fixed and improved based on hours of playtesting (it’s sometimes good to feel bad on weekends).

One more interesting improvement goes to monster vision. No, they don’t have proper sensory organs yet, it’ll come much later. But now they can discern between clothed and naked heroine and some monsters can see one or the other better. Obviously Thief Slime and Twinkle have an eye for nice clothes to steal or to zap with electricity. On the other side of the coin - Tickling Slime and Binder Slime (the one which was Yellow before renaming ;)) will have a good eye for a nude heroine parts which will make sure trying to stealth-kill those while wearing a birthday suit is far from trivial (yet still possible).

And the boring part goes to…

Up to this time the game is a dump of features, and it’ll stay like that for some time, until most of the planned game mechanics will be implemented.

However, it doesn’t prevent from reconsidering some balancing issues to ensure a more enjoyable and consistent testing experience :)

First of all, the map sizes now don’t scale that quickly. I personally found it that the most enjoyable experience comes from 5-10 minutes per level sessions, running polls at Reddit and Twitter only confirmed that it should be the way to go. So, after depth 7 the map size will grow much slower.

This allows to fix multiple issues:

• It was boring to navigate huge empty map after it was cleared
• It was hard to find good items on the map
• Enemies had a hard time finding the player, even curious ones
• Session length could go above half an hour, that is had to be split into smaller sessions often
• If you pause the game for a while, you have hard time remembering what is where

Of course, I’m fan of gigantism, so we’ll have a few literally huge maps, but that’ll be a bit later and those will be specific missions, where the problems above are significantly less critical.

This also allowed making the enemy progression slower, each new dungeon level introduces a single new type of enemy.

Also multiple other small fixes to game balancing were made.

Changelog:

• Change map size progression. Quickly get to 7000 tiles and then advance slowly (trying to keep one dungeon level length in 5-15 minutes)
• Fix map proportions randomization
• Rebalance monsters spawns with depth
• More control over spawns and patrols
• Guards always spawn of different kind and never more than 4
• Have at least one of each kind of monsters generate on the dungeon map
• Different kinds of monster vision (can see naked/dressed heroine better under some circumstances) - now used by Cyan, Yellow, Thief slimes, Twinkle and guards
• Monsters are not too active at the beginning of the map
• Generate twice fewer traps
• Change patrols delay from 180 to 150 seconds to accommodate for smaller maps
• Increase twinkle’s health, so it can’t be killed by a bare-handed stealth attack
• More diverse reactions to twinkle’s attacks
• More consistent vigor drains after interacting with twinkle in sleep
• Cannot wake up if sleeping exhausted (e.g. after interacting with twinkle or after a nice tickling session) taking damage will force to wake up
• Fleeing behavior significantly improved (for thief and twinkle)
• Thief slime never spawned in spawner trap or patrol
• Add item noise to many actions, weapons make noise on attacks (now fighting with golden bells on is very, very loud)
• Reduce bondage mittens noisiness (it was almost a certain gameover)
• Reduce player’s attack cooldown (it’s a broken mechanic for now, but needs a larger change to fix)
• Gray slime - generic very weak opponent for upper levels
• Play surprise sound when cyan slime equips bondage mittens or drags heroine closer
• Play sound when stardust is applied in sleep
• Show logs for vigor/psyche damage
• Reduce tickling damage to psyche
• Lower Tickling Slime damage
• Rename yellow slime to Binder Slime
• Fix item durability displayed “0” sometimes