appreciate your feedback, we did tried limit it to 1000 but gameplay wise it doesn't always connect to your actions then, any ideas on that?
I've got an idea - maybe limit the max (wandering) Normies and Cultists to say, 20 or so. (Or maybe 100, whatever number you think is a good one)
Maybe have an extra building to increase your Normies cap - say, 2x as much as church capacities? And you build those in conjunction with churches. Can call those Houses or Shelters or something.
Show both buildings (Church / House or Shelter) on the map, with the windows slowly lighting up as they near capacity. So in canon, those extra Cultists / Normies you don't see are inside those buildings, and you greatly reduce lag.
(Alternatively, the option isn't to "build" but upgrade your Church / Shelter so it's the same building we see at the start, and it makes sense there's only one of those)
And with the lag reduced there's also the possibility of adding anything extra (demons or magic or what have you) without also killing your screen rate, if you have any such ideas for those in future.
Edit: if there's excess beyond the capacity it just doesn't show up, but yeah the gist is you cap the number of wandering units in the map by shoving the rest into those buildings.
Also, while I'm at it, some suggestions for the ending!
I do like the idea of summoning a big monster at the end - maybe after reaching a certain number of cultists.
Or - and this is if you make a save function for the game - how about multiple monsters? Like, Cthulhu or something, a horned demon, an eyeball, maybe a frog for fun. Each monster summon destroys your whole church and resets everything but gives you a bonus - like maybe one monster doubles your coin income, another doubles your soul income, another doubles your church / shelter capacity, etc. Each new monster needs more cultists to summon based on how many you've already summoned (like a Prestige mechanic). Maybe there's a final boss, or your goal is just to summon all of them through several runs?
Collecting demons sounds cool damn, now it actually gives me more motivation lol.
Thank you for all the feedback btw, this is the main reason why we post our game here, to come back to your previous replies:
We actually had other protypes where the main focus is on the buildings but from our test we found out that took the pivot away from the cult a lot, therefore we're very careful with 'buildings' in general.
But getting characters inside the building sounds doable, but the problem I'm seeing right now is that when the task's target is inside the church, how do we show the visual feedback then, just light up the house? (actually that could work as well).
And yes, appreciate your appreciation on our updates! It was almost a painful process for us as dev team to make those big pivot decisions, ty again for playing and for your awesome feedback!
No problem! Thank you for your awesome work on the game!
As for visual feedback, hm. Could show the actual feedback effect from the church / house, OR yeah, light up one of the windows (it could be a single blank window that lights up with a different colour). It depends on which one looks cooler, though with multi-sacrifices / persuasions the window lighting might be more efficient for screen lag?
Also regarding it taking away from the cult: Fair enough! I mean it does look neat that there's a lot of them but it kills framerates in the later game.
From my own experience (made a game in the same genre), players cared a lot more about a smooth/lag-free gameplay experience than about visual effects or tactile-feedback, especially if they're in the end-game where numbers get huge. There are some things you can do to optimize without a hard-cap; sprite-batching is a big one.
In the end though, a cap is the most practical. One simple technique you could try is to pool the 1,000 visible-entities separately, so your actions can bind to one of them randomly and always produce a visual effect. A subtle tradeoff that still provides that visual juice! :)