New Effects, Moves, and Mechanics

Hey Folks, It's been a busy couple weeks.

Head Specializations have been added:

Numbers will be tweaked as balancing continues, and Icons still need to be properly made but the designs are solidified and properly implemented:

The head has been redesigned to be a tanky character, because of this all of the specializations have been geared towards increasing defenses in some way. 

• Some like Autophagic Response or Metabolic Lapse will exchange lower health or increased Fatigue for a better and equal defense boost. 
• Others such as Calcified Ducts will decrease Fluids damage in exchange for a big boost to bone and a small boost to sinew, while Sturdy Tendons will decrease Trauma damage for a big boost to Sinew and a small boost to bone. 
• Acidic Tissue and Skeletal Overgrowth will go the specialist route, and drain one resistance to 0 while the other boosts to 100 - for when you REALLY want to tank 1 type of damage

Everything is hopefully communicated simply through colors and numbers, my initial draft of these had % values and didn't show what the initial data was, and it was a bit of a mess. randomly hearing a few complaints about other roguelikes not being clear with what stuff actually did was enough to make me revisit it.

Some new effects have been added:

• Fixation: an enemy or player Afflicted with this is limited to targeting only the character(s) that this effect was applied from. It is ignored via multi-target attacks and does not change self or team-targeting moves like buffs or heals.
• Lethargic: Increases Target's Fatigue forcing the target to take more time between moves.
• Agitated: Decreases Target's Fatigue making the target take their move sooner.
• Hemorrhage: Target takes Direct Damage, with no mitigation from Bone or Sinew.

Each of these are designed to add a depth to both enemy and player moves down the line. 

Moves that increase and decrease fatigue can be used strategically with some risk/reward, the ability to take direct damage allows for moves that have a "health cost" type mechanic, or moves that can be upgraded to deal a sort of "true damage"

Meanwhile, Fixation for instance is currently being used for building out different types of enemies (two words, angler fish) , while also making moves for the player to act as a disruptive tank, here's a little shot from testing, showing how it limits who can be Targeted:

Speaking of moves I also added in functionality for dynamic move lists, now upon leveling you will see your current move list to make better educated decisions, and in some levels you'll get to choose a new move to add to your moveset:

Moves like Mock Distress, which acts as a 5-action Taunt for an enemy, and Tightened Lid, which buffs resistances of the head for a few turns are on the left and right, Another move called "Polycoria" isn't rolled, it gives a damage debuff to a target enemy. As time goes on other moves will be in the move pool to roll. I'm working on fleshing out unique direction and utility for each move so they're as useful as regular attacking moves, and can be upgraded to have different uses. 

I also made the art for each move I've made so far and their move icon:

Polycoria - based off the condition where there are multiple iris openings, sometimes being depicted as having multiple irises in the eye.

Mock Distress - a bit of a play on words, both "mimicking" distress, but also Mocking in a taunting manner.

Tightened Lid - based off muscle cramps and spasms, featuring the vein texture from the egg encounter.

Delirium - based off a nice little personal fear of an eye being stuck shut.

I'm also working on adding moves for the heart, such as Tachycardia, which uses the hemorrhage effect to hurt itself in order to decrease the fatigue of all player characters by 2.

Another development was that with the Fatigue changing effects, I had to change how fatigue was implemented. Fatigue used to be very simple - The order would run Head > Limbs > Heart > Enemy 1 > Enemy 2 > Enemy 3, repeat. Anyone with 1 fatigue would go every cycle larger enemies and bosses were meant to go slower o they had 2 fatigue, BIG guys might have 3 or 4. well, with the fatigue effects increasing fatigue by even 1 was a huge deal, so I upped the amount of fatigue, treating it more like a speed stat. I also added some visual juice with a dark bar creeping up behind the fatigue counter to show how far along their fatigue course a character was. 

This also required that I changed how Effects worked - It used to be that I could just count down the effect each round and could apply an effect even if a turn was skipped. However with the sudden increase of skipped turns with this new system, characters with defense buffs, bleed effects, and heal effects would just burn through them instantly. So I changed it to only count down if the character acts, this way there's a strategic reason to add effects like increasing enemy fatigue, or decreasing your own.

I also made some new splatter effects:

Damage, Effect, and Heal Splatters are now replacing the placeholders I had before

I'm trying to get the moves and specializations of the Limb and Heart Characters together, once I have at least a basic set there, I'm going to pivot back to art to try and round out the presentation of everything. Finally, I'll be changing to an enemy, then an encounter. Once I have those all figured out, I'll be working on getting a steam page up. my goal for that is ~January 2024.