Post by GMRin in Surviving Magic Academy as a Demon Lord - Demo comments

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I designed the Screaming Mandrake to be sort of a mid-game ingredient. You’re meant to have a good stockpile of them by the time you reach the late game. I understand why it feels unfair right now, though, since we’re still in the early game and there’s no reliable way to obtain it aside from RNG.

I’ll try to add transmutation in the next update. Once players can create Screaming Mandrakes on their own, that will mark the transition into the mid-game phase. At that point, getting an extra mandrake from RNG drops won’t matter nearly as much as it does now.

Reverie Requiem13 days ago (2 edits)

It still remains weird that it's even there, if it's not to be used during this stage, imo. The fact persists that if you get it, it changes early game balance. If you don't, you miss out. Not to mention how it ends up becoming a red herring when discovered before learning of transmutation.

GMRin13 days ago(+1)

Maybe I leaned too much into a roguelike mindset here. Random power spikes aren’t uncommon in that genre, while most incremental games are like “numbers go up” in a more predictable curve.

So far, I haven’t seen any major anomalies in the leaderboard. I don’t collect gameplay data, so this is all I have to go on for balancing unfortunately.

slabdrill13 days ago (3 edits)

Allowing random lucky runs is fine. Normal incrementals are usually treated as specifically curated experiences, but they don't have to be, and they're usually more fun the more it feels like you're sequence breaking.

Incremental game players usually hate RNG in their games because it means you can't just brainlessly follow a guide, and allows you to blame bad RNG instead of your strategy. It's best to make sure you always have an RNG-less path to success in general anyway, though if it's possible to get extremely unlucky (e.g. getting 0 truffles if there's no alternatives) it'll be frustrating when it happens anyway.

In current balance, I'm pretty sure the haste potion is more important than the screaming mandrake for getting good runs, anyway. That one I'm curious about how you'll keep from being essential to get on every good run in the future, since it's kind of boring needing a specific RNG roll on that action (which has to be done pretty late in the run too, because of the no calmness gain side effect)

Reverie Requiem12 days ago (2 edits)

My point wasn't having 'lucky runs' in general, but having odds so bad there's a good chance you'll just never get the thing, ever. Although, personally, I'm never going to do the RNG and instead savescum every time - I don't care about guides or it being braindead but I do want a consistent experience that doesn't have me resetting or refreshing the page dozens of times.

And yeah, vitality potion makes you invincible to calamities. Haste ensures you don't die to fatigue or hunger (assuming you can find the bed). Either are pretty game-breaking, tbh; anything that breaks balance is still going to do so regardless of if you lock it behind rng.

slabdrill12 days ago (1 edit)

It's perfectly fine to have content you're extremely unlikely to see. If you get it, you have a single opportunity to explore beyond your means. One single opportunity, with which you're almost certainly not going to be able to do everything and so will have to pick and choose what you actually want to use it for. If you're intentionally aiming for the good luck, of course the rates will feel ridiculously low - because you're not supposed to be intentionally aiming for it, instead just immediately pivoting your run the moment you hit the good luck. In the end, you're not going to be able to achieve much without repeated runs that get far enough to be able to actually experiment with things. (Or at least that's the obvious idea of the game design. Whether they manage to pull that off is up to how well they can actually design the game's challenges.)

Similarly, if you get unlucky on something that has a high chance, then you got unlucky and that's that. You can pivot and try one of the other options you still have open, or just treat it as a run for grinding comprehension instead.

(I don't treat savescumming for RNG as something that needs to be worth considering in balance. You're obviously not supposed to do it since if you were they wouldn't include the RNG in the first place.) (6% isn't even that low of a chance. Are you not doing like 15 runs just to learn all the actions on the map anyway??)

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