Where Is The New Patch??

Oh, hello, I guess you're here because you're wondering what's going on with the new patch to Bloodmoon Survivors?  Welllllll, the patch is most certainly coming, but it's taking a bit longer than I expected.  Unfortunately, the changes to the economy are so big that I've had to make the decision to wipe and reset save profiles for this one.  This is not an easy decision so I'm most definitely trying to be cautious, and for that I would like to do some serious play testing, which will be happening internally next week.  (If you're interested join the discord! https://discord.gg/U9T9bdHF6H).  Either way though, I would rather take my time with this one.  A wise man once said "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad."

Art/Music/Marketing

In terms of art and music, Ref is actually on vacation, and Juan's music is complete, and the new trailer commission is bubbling away in the background without real much input from me.  These are all important, but honestly there's not much to talk about this week, and that's a good thing because GOD DAMN do we have a lot to cover when it comes to gameplay changes.  Either way though, in the interest of tradition, here's a picture of something Ref cooked up before running off to enjoy the sun.

(Yep, is this all I have sadly.  Say hello to our new currency.  Boss Souls, this will be big for the next patch)

Programming

Alright, so the patch... well instead of breaking down everything I've been doing I figure it'll be easier to show you the patch notes for now, so here it goes:

Data Wipe:

• The changes to the game are so big that we need to reset the demo’s save data.  I apologize for the inconvenience.  

Economy rebalance:

• Removed “Potatoes” (ore) drops from the game.  Replaced with “Elite Souls” and “Boss Souls” which are gained from killing bosses
• Rebalanced upgrade, weapon unlocks, powerup ability unlocks around new currencies
• Made it easier to unlock all upgrades
• Released all upgrade abilities to be unlockable in the Demo

Upgrade Changes:

• Added upgrade to increase player block. Reducing enemy damage when receiving it
• Health regen upgrade no increases health regen over time. This is a passive effect that is always active no matter how many heart points the player has
• Added new upgrades to deal more damage to resistant enemies and boss enemies
• Added new upgrade that lets player increase the RARITY TIER of a current upgrade they rolled without rerolling the upgrade itself

Health System:

• Added a new health system where hearts are divisible. Player can now take half heart and percentile of a heart’s worth of damage
• Add ability to block (reduce damage) so enemies deal reduced damage
• Changed armor to block one full HIT of damage, no matter how much damage it is
• Removed old last heart regen logic, and replaced with a passive regeneration rate which is upgradable

Drop Rates:

• Increased drop rates of healing items (Set amount healed to 10) | reduced drop rate of shields
• Reduced drop rate of armor item since it now blocks a full unit of damage

General Bugs:

• If a boss is on screen and you die, clean up function kills boss without unlocking achievements
• Fix player so he can’t get shoved by enemies (setting to heaviest weight 10000)
• Disabled outlines accessibility option to not interfere with new resistance enemy outline highlights
• Disabled increased heart regen accessibility option. Moved it to upgrades
• Disabled Heart regen ability on LAST HEART and removed it from accessibility options. Now player passively regenerates health at all times and can be upgraded
• Fixed a bug where armor was not appearing correctly when the game started. If you unlocked extra armor in the beginning it was not visible until taking damage

Enemy Balancing:

• Runner enemies go through all other enemies
• Fixed boss and elite movement by setting to Extremely heavy weight so it can push enemies out of the way
• Fixed Resistance enemies by setting to heavy weight so they don’t get pushed around by other enemies
• Fixed Resistance enemies by giving them distinct OUTLINES based on their resistances. 
• Added enemy rings and charging enemy groups that make new spawn configurations for the player to fight his way out of

Tutorial Changes:

• Tutorial causing quests to spawn during tutorial
• Tutorial causing issues with preload
• Tutorial causing issues with enemies spawning in and dying
• Set tutorial to the 10 minute manager so the player starts first round on 10 minute difficulty

Boss Chest Powerup Balancing:

• Boss chest: Rebalanced heartichoke powerup to heal for 1 heart and gain 1 heart (20hp)
• Boss chest: Reduced swift metal powerup to gain 1 armor from boss chest instead of 2

Powerup Balancing:

• Armorer Powerup: Armor gain only triggers if you are at 3 armor or less
• Live Triage Powerup: Decreased heal to half a heart
• Heartiness Powerup: You now deal increased damage for each heart that has taken ANY damage (So damaged half hearts or hearts with only 1 point of damage will still trigger this ability)

Difficulty Changes:

• Tweaked difficulty scaling based on player power level and time spent in round 
• Reduced difficulty options to 5 per level
• Introduced new round lengths of 10/15/20 based on difficulty (Final boss is different with each increase in difficulty
• Distributed elites and bosses so they are more frequent at higher difficulties

So yeah... lots to cover.  But the TLDR of everything I've been doing is trying to give the game a more replayable structure.  I've noticed from how people play that it's just too damn hard in the beginning for people that haven't played a Survivor-like game, and too easy for people that have.  These changes aim to rectify that by tightening the loops and scaling the game's difficulty only as time goes on, so everyone has a chance to familiarize themselves with the game.

The crux of these changes is introducing the bosses GRADUALLY in shorter, and more replayable intervals. The game now scales horizontally, meaning you unlock new levels with each successful run, but it also scales vertically, by increasing the difficulty with each round, promising more rewards, and more challenge.  This was all really inspired by a game I tried recently Astro Prospector called https://store.steampowered.com/app/3503440/Astro_Prospector/, which takes my LEAST FAVORITE genre, an old school SCHMUP, and wraps it in layers of incremental unlocks which make a really difficult genre to get into suddenly very fun and enjoyable.  Hopefully these changes start pushing the game in that direction.

Lastly, I just want to cover what I think is the biggest change, which is the health system.  This I gave a lot of extra attention over the course of this patch, because I think it was silently killing the game. The 1-3 hearts of damage was really making each run either a God mode run, or one that ended before it got going.  I spent a lot of time breaking up the hearts into a more granular series damage so that enemies can hit harder based on the difficulty!

Next Week

Next week I want to have the damn patch out.  That is my goal first and foremost.  There is still plenty of stuff I didn't fix, but the larger the snowball grows, the more difficult it is to adjust course.  So I think the plan for now it polish this patch until it shines, then start tackling my back log of improvements in smaller, more granular patches that should hopefully come pretty quick.  Till next time!