Posted August 24, 2024 by Coding And Coffee
Yesterday morning I did a Twitch stream playing through the game which you can watch here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2231985657
During the stream I ran into a couple balance/difficulty issues, and performance problems in the arena zone. I've implemented some culling and some object pooling to greatly improve performance in the arena, and also some fixes for things like players sometimes being immortal with 0HP because their character spawned into the wrong "scene" in Unity's hierarchy.
Balance while continuing to add new faction-oriented abilities and equipment is very tricky. I'm doing what I can to add things in a round-robin fashion to keep gameplay experience balanced as I do so.
As I playtested yesterday I ran into a lot of difficulty playing as Verdant when trying to take claim of the crystal beacons in the arena. Gentian, and to a slightly lesser degree Crimson, have an easy time holding and even expanding territory claims within a zone due to their faction-bound equipment.
But Verdant was struggling, so I went ahead and implemented the first Faction passive ability I had planned for later: healing. When Verdant NPCs and players are near either other they will now gradually heal, for up to 5 seconds after they separate. This really helped improve balance without overwhelmingly making Verdant superior.