Need to take a break? Update 9

Welcome back to another round of Tic Tactic updates! The new update is made up of a variety of small changes that span many areas of the game. I'll highlight the bigger changes below.

In other news, Halloween is officially over, so the Bloodborne costume is back in the closet until next year (or, until I decide to add outfits. Feels almost inevitable at this point).

Run! Save yourself!

In this update, I added the ability to continue an existing run. The game will automatically save at the start of each battle (after the first), storing all your tiles, stats, and the world position. Each update has made the game slightly longer, so this gives you the ability to take a little break and revisit the game later.

Since the random seed is stored, you can also quit the game to retry a specific encounter that you may have gotten stuck on. Of course, you can still abandon a run by hitting "New Game" instead.

Note: you may notice what seem like performance issues when moving through different areas. That is actually expected behavior; multi-threading is not supported in web builds, so the game is waiting for the save system to confirm that it completed its action (saving, deleting, loading, etc.). Future downloadable builds will not have that issue.

This is also the reason there's no loading screen. It exists, but it doesn't work in the build.

I demand a recount

I had some issues with the existing leaderboard system. Let's start by talking about it worked before.

Look familiar?

Win or lose, you would end up at a screen that looked a lot like this. You could enter your name to send your score, and you'd get to place yourself on the leaderboard. I didn't really get any complaints about the system, but I had 4 primary issues with it that I wanted to fix.

1. You have to enter your name every time you want to upload a score. It's not a huge problem, but it's not the way it should be done. Also, anyone who can't enter a score (i.e. mobile players) can't save their score.
2. The only information saved is what is being showcased here. I get questions on Discord about how many turns a top 5 score used, and I have no response to that.
3. Manual entry means that the only scores anyone would want to save are basically top 10. Out of over 1000 attempts, only 88 entries were added to the leaderboard. I mean, that makes sense, right? You get bumped off early and have zero incentive to save your score. This skews the data and doesn't tell me much.
   
4. Moreover, if your score wasn't in the top 5... that's all the information you got. There was no consolation, no indication how many more players you had to beat, nothing.

In this update, I fixed all of those issues. Now, you enter your name once on the title screen. Then, every time you play, the game will automatically update the leaderboard. Can't type your name? Not a problem, the game will generate a codename for you and use that instead. Plus, now you can see how your previous score ranks against the rest of the entries, so you still have an incentive to try to climb higher. This will also make it easier for me to track and manage difficulty through regions in the game, since I'll be able to tell how many runs end in each area.

Balance Changes

The aforementioned leaderboard update was actually a few days ago, and, so far, the biggest thing I have noticed is that an alarming number of runs are ending in the first area. The first boss was meant to be a challenge, but not at the level it was proving to be.

In this chart you can already you can see that the vast majority of runs have been ending in Act 1, but...

Here's the same chart when filtering out scores from experienced players. This data in itself wouldn't be a huge concern, since a roguelike is supposed to be difficult, and the first Act is usually where players get caught. However, the game is still really short, so these runs are ending after just 3 or 4 battles. That's not the desired outcome; I want people to experience the game, not to fight the same starting enemies over and over again.

I made some updates to the starting area to make it easier to get through. For one, I removed all the handicaps on the AI (or the lobotomy, as discord has called it) and instead reduced the size of their decks to make it easier to lock them out of being able to attack. I also reduced the costs of things like rerolls (always) and shop items (pond only). I also slightly increased the player's starting health from 10 to 12, so hard enemy hits are now doing slightly less than half your health. 

Lightning Round

Here's a non-comprehensive list of other changes you might notice from this update:

• The Halloween decorations have been removed
• Several animations have been updated, including the attacks for our hero and the pond Elites
• The "tie" state will now trigger whenever both players are unable to add a tile to the board. That means that the board could be full, or that you just don't have a piece to put down.
• Fixed the overlap bug when dragging pieces out of your hand too early
• Removed the tile detail and just made the damage indicator appear on hover. There were some bugs with the earlier system, but it also dawned on me that the system itself was a design flaw. Why am I gatekeeping tile damage?
• Changed the quit button in settings to red. I'll change the sprite eventually, but for now, it's a little more visually obvious.
• Added a "remove" button for potions in your Item Belt. 
• Merchant pools have been updated and feature some differences between regions.
• Added some interaction effects to different things, like items in the belt.

The next update is number 10, so I've been planning to do something special. I'm not sure exactly what yet, but if you've enjoyed the game so far, I'm hoping you'll be excited to see what's coming.

Thanks for reading and see you soon.