Hey there! I know we've got the discord now, but I'm posting here for visibility (and also hopefully so any interested parties scrolling by can hear about how cool this game is 0_0). Been playing loads with 0.39 (excited for the QOL in 0.310/11, which I just downloaded), and had some more thoughts/comments!
Compliments: The New perk system remains as cool as I thought it was when I first got my hands on it, even all these hours later. Not sure, but it feels like the armor changes (and possibly some enemy balance passes? That's what it felt like, but balance can be deceiving) have put the early game in a much better spot, and made the whole game overall a little less feast/famine (either die early, or get geared and go far). I also got to spot some new enemies that I'd never seen before, having been able to engage in overland travel this time trough the rocky mountains and snowy tundra south of the main spawn cluster! It's cool that after all this time, there's still new stuff to run into! While at first I thought straight backpack upgrades might be a bit much, the exponentially scaling costs and much simpler implementation have thoroughly proven me wrong on that front! Progression for inventory feels clean and natural, and allowing the player to start with chests in their inventory makes managing your early loot feel much, much better! Finally, the color-coding on the text window to the left has worked wonders for readability with respect to events, I seriously can't say how much that little change has made me much more aware of the world around me!
But foremost of all, I wouldn't even be able to sing all of these praises if it weren't for the substantial improvements to performance. I've made it all the way from Oldbridge to Azuremouth with no drop in performance I could even notice, and that's saying something on a laptop that could barely run slay the spire (the first one)!
The game seems to be in a really, really good spot right now. So pat yourself on the back, get some hard-earned rest, and really take the chance to be proud of all you've accomplished. It's a Marathon, not a sprint, and you're on really good track.
I had a few thoughts on some things from my most recent playthrough, mostly with regards to the perk system, for your perusal to help you out when you're feeling refreshed!
Perks - all in all pretty cool, and I think the different guilds are a unique take on having different playstyles in game that aren't just the classic fantasy archetypes. Seriously, it's taking tremendous effort not to turn this into an essay. With all that said, I noticed a couple of things which may be intended or not:
- It'd be cool to have a way and look at our history of not just perk selections, but also what we rolled and what our current terroir perks are. Not just a track record of our journey, but also fruitful information for seeing where our character's at and where we wanna head with them. It would also make giving feedback on this system easier in the future, as I must admit I've forgotten much of what I've rolled.
What's been too common to forget, however, is how easy it is to pick up the +2% Wanderer's Evasion perk. "The roads themselves have become your teacher" more times on my characters than I can count, even when I'm not traveling nor using roads. It would make sense to have some perks be more common than others, but this one in particular has to be like half my rolls. Making it take a longer journey, or having it reward you for specifically traveling on roads, might be a way to alleviate this. Likewise, It's kind of hard to pick up the perks that aren't either the evasion travel perk or the biome perks - I can spend a whole night in and out of my shelter killing mobs, or delve an entire dungeon, and still have only managed to trigger the +damage perk once. Finally, while it's likely an incomplete picture given how much of early game is spent in the plains compared to other biomes, I'm not sure how common enemy elemental damage is - perhaps it's more common than I've thought it is, and I haven't been able to tell? As a result, rolling an elemental resist perk seems a little feels bad. Again, that could easily be a matter of perception rather than actuality - if the game has more elemental damage to the player than I'm seeing, maybe that needs to be more visible? Finally, there's a pretty substantial overlap between the different guilds in practice when I'm picking guild perks. I've almost never seen the hardened guild's damage perk, but I've seen plenty of Life Steal and armor - things I've also rolled plentifully from other guilds. Some of this is by design I imagine - some stats are important, and some are powerful - you wanna make sure that players are rolling the important ones often enough and the powerful ones rarely enough. Still, while it could be a result of limited trials and me needing more repetition, from where I'm sitting at least it looks like the weights could use some fine-tuning.
Finally, a couple of thoughts on things other than the perk system:
Dominion Soldiers seem to be spawning on later nights rather than ending my runs early now, and it looks like their building damage is much more manageable now - whether that's cause I'm later in the game or because it's been tuned I can't say. That being said, raids seem to be spawning in pairs - usually two delayed waves of soldiers - and even though I've been on the move, they've been coming for my base just about every night. Not the end of the world and certainly not urgent, but figured you should know.
There seemed to be some weirdness involving supply quests - at first I thought it was that it wasn't detecting crafted materials, but I was able to turn some in on my most recent 0.39 save, so it might just have to do with feedback on making them.
All in all, with every update to this game I've found much more to love and much fewer rough edges - It's been evident every step of the way this has been a labor of love.
Lastly, I saw that 0.11 seemed to have borked something with saves, and you reverted the download to 0.10. I can confirm that the reversion works. I know you're likely mortified, but stuff like this happens to the best of us - especially on one man projects. Don't lose heart; Rest up, take a deep breath, and come back with fresh eyes and a refreshed spirit in a little bit. This community loves the work you've done, and we're excited for what this game has in store - we're not going anywhere.
All that said, just wanna reiterate - seriously well done. Not just on the most recent updates, but everything this game has gotten to do so far.
Bird Iron!! As always, thank you so much - this is genuinely one of the most thoughtful pieces of feedback I've received, and coming after all those hours you've put in, it means the world. It makes me a bit speechless to receive this kind of feedback - it's a bit unreal to be co-creating worlds in this way, thanks to the amazing interlocutors on itch and now Discord too.
So glad the performance improvements have landed well - that was a huge amount of work under the hood and honestly you're a big part of the reason I kept pushing on it, so thank you for that
On perks - all of this is so useful in terms of conceptual stuff and mechanical insights. The perk history/terroir log is a brilliant idea and I'm adding it to the roadmap right now. I think that will have to be for the steam release though, to ensure I don't start breaking stuff here without testing it enough. You're absolutely right that the Wanderer's Evasion perk is way overtuned - "the roads themselves have become your teacher" showing up constantly is definitely not the intent. I want it to feel special, not like background noise. I'll do a pass on the weighting for this and the other underrepresented perks (the combat damage trigger in particular sounds like it's basically hiding). The elemental resist point is a really good catch too.. if the perk feels bad it's likely because the threat it's countering isn't visible enough, which is a design problem on my end, not a player perception issue. And the guild overlap - yes, I think you're right that the weights need fine-tuning. I'll dig into those numbers. It's always a matter of both getting the human feel for it (is it fun? is it the right feeling?) versus getting the math right. And a lot of math goes into Roguefort's systems - not super fancy stuff but definitely applying my academic side of things deeply into this game.
The dominion raids spawning in pairs every night even while you're on the move is a bug I'm now onto - thanks for this and yeh that's not intentional behaviour, they shouldn't be that relentless. And I'll look again at the supply quests weirdness too.
And re: the 0.11 situation - yeah I'm not going to pretend that wasn't mortifying 😅. But the community response made it so much easier to just breathe, fix it and move on. Thank you genuinely for that.
Rest assured I'm taking your advice and getting some sleep (and the advice of quite a few others too). I ended up fixing the bug last night in the wee hours of the morning but then getting a nice sleep too - well, more than my usual amount. Thanks again for this message hey - it's made my day