The decoupling is intentional.. but about halfway through the basic setup for incorporation I realized I can't completely decouple the criminal and corporate sides. It's in a weird place, conceptionally, that I don't feel really works currently. When I started this project job searching and life were my only other concerns, then it became school, job searching and life, and now it's work, school and life all competing. I love my new job, but I feel the decrease in time I get to dedicate to tackling these difficult design questions.
All that to say, I feel the disconnect and it is a real problem but it might take a large amount of time before I'm able to solve it. Solving bugs is easy and AI can aid me when I identify the conceptual issues. Game design is sacred and I actively resist letting AI have influence on it. Bear with me, and know that your input is very valuable.
Genuinely surprised you were able to incorporate before becoming legend. Each incorporation is supposed to be exponentially more expensive. Maybe some wires got crossed, maybe you're just so effective at earning money that low exponents isn't enough.
The partial number is because the math got wonky. I was doing integer division to truncate the fraction, but then a different change turned it into float division instead. The original design was +1/3rd truncated per project level. I decided to keep the fraction to make it a smooth ramp instead of sudden jumps.
It should be a rate change of +.08 at level 4 (.01->.02->.04->.08) which doesn't quite map to an 8% bonus to speed but should be close if it's your only rate change bonus (normal completion time / (1+rate bonus) = final completion time). Either way there should be some change to rate though. I'll dig in, likely something isn't wired up fully.
As of right now you can only earn one per corp iteration, though as I start to roll out more corp-centric features and balance things out better I will be looking at the post-corp balance a bit closer.
I didn't even think of just farming the passive rep for early bonuses - I don't think of that as an exploit that needs to be solved critically, but something I might revisit later... It'd matter more if a generation had some interaction with the game world, but something like that is well beyond current scope. I don't know - something for me to noodle. Corp perks are supposed to be game-alteringly powerful so enjoy the faster bootstrap I suppose!
Found the issue - there was one writer that handled some instance of displaying the text and another writer that handled other instances, and they were fighting. Next update will have them unified into a single function as they should have been the entire time.
Yeah, you're onto something with a supply/demand/usability cycle. It'd need a new supply/demand system running in the background at a minimum, but that also introduces trying to induce demand through projects or advertisement, and I do like having more levers to pull. It'll take me a bit to implement even a simple version of this, but I can do it in stages (supply/demand, then add projects, then start mixing in other uses for the supplies.. maybe as resources to complete projects?)
At some point I'll sit down with the volunteer project manager I've been working with and put together an actual development plan so I don't get lost in the sauce on this.
You're absolutely correct, and I fixed this specific path issue several versions ago (or thought I did). Need to figure out if my fix simply failed or if this is a regression, but spoofing the handshake is supposed to replace the Defeat Electronic Lock step entirely, not come after it.
It sounds like the proper place to target would be improving what a corporation can do for the player to replace some of the "criminal" resources that get locked out when you Incorporate. This fix will take a bit longer - it's not just fixing some buggy code, it's (as you said) addressing a deep balance issue, but I really appreciate your feedback in this.
Your corporation should start with enough cash-on-hand when you incorporate to let you buy a warehouse, an office, a sales desk, a factory line and hire a worker for each with a decent chunk of change left over for experimenting. If that's not the case then something is very much broken
Definitely a bug. I'm on vacation right now, far away from my dev rig, so it will be a while before any of this is addressed but revealing the merchant math more completely is going on the back log. Insofar as the actual loop itself goes - That's the balance I'm trying to find right now. Too easy and you will simply breeze through, too hard and prestiging becomes a punishment. Big part of the reason why I didn't push to the main site with this is because I know the balance needs work, but to really dig down into where I need the exact feedback you're giving me.
Have you been using the new Corpo skills to improve efficiencies for your company? Those are the main early game levers for gaining capital so you can start snowballing with the parts of Corps that aid you in the rest of the game loops. There will be more avenues for the corp helping the player directly in the future, but for now the only real direct aid is paying yourself a wage from its earnings (equivalent to 4 levels of Trust Fund at max right now) and with the missing community projects I've noticed that it is a lot harder to pop off, so to speak.
Pretty likely. Do you have Multitasking, are they part of a container or just stand alone items and what conditions did you give them? Plans are hard to trouble shoot because of all the variables involved, unfortunately
Anyone is welcome to come try the new version. I recommend exporting your save file, found in the Meta tab in game, from this version and bringing it to the beta.
Nope! This is all on me. I'm fitting in pre-release improvements between my classes so things have slowed down on my end quite a bit. But slow doesn't mean no progress - in fact I'm making another patch as we speak to address more mobile issues.
The reason I'm putting such an emphasis on a relatively polished Play Store release is I've seen how fast attention fell off in Itch when I released this web demo version. I'll likely never have more eyes on my game than in the first week or so after its release on a platform. So to retain those players I need to present a reasonably balanced and complete experience. Current roadmap is to finish the third ascension, then do a round of balancing each of the game phases and adding additional content (more mission paths especially), then doing the Google Play release and dropping into maintenance mode with periodic event updates.
After maintenance mode becomes fairly stable (meaning time spent fixing bugs is very low because there just aren't many left) I plan on starting work on another game featuring space exploration and more graphics. I've already started talking to a couple of artists who are interested, but we're still months away from any serious agreements and have only the most bare-bones framework for what the game might be.
You've been amazing - your feedback and interest has really spurred on the growth of this project. Thank you for everything you've done so far. 3rd ascension is going to take a bit, but when it's ready I'll let you know.
It was overly active redraws - redrawing every element on the merc page every time credits updated as part of a check for if the player could afford to hire the merc. Limited the redraw to just the buy button and got smarter about how the check was happening (raising credits won't make an affordable merc unaffordable so no need to check sort of thing). A couple other pages had the same issue but weren't hitting the tipping point in elements where the slow down was obvious - yet. Tried to fix everywhere where it was happening as part of the last set of patches.
These issues normally come down to over-zealous redraw events in godot, and if that's the case it should be pretty solvable with some judicious logic. I'll take a look.
Merchant tasks just got a bit better. Merchant_2 (aka Courier Drone Commission) is supposed to be selling only 1 loot per. If you're getting a ton of money from it its because your merchant skill is so high, and now merchant skill bonuses also factor in to loot price.
It's pretty important to me that the mobile experience be smooth and easy - I don't want players to have to whip out a microscope to find the spots to scroll. I think the issue is the current touch checks if you're hitting a header but is ignored if it's a card instead. Next patch will have a fix.
You're the second person to make a similar request. I'm a bit reluctant because it'd require handling automissions before I'm ready to, but obviously this is a big enough deal it needs to be higher on my priority list.
Hmm, yeah, they shouldn't have levels which means the no_levels flag isn't being honored properly. The tags should only come into play with mission planning (and I'm working on making that more visible in general). The tooltip should also be more descriptive of what tags are being added and removed (electronic and obvious, respectively) too. I'll get this worked up.
The intent is to either have a stealth difficulty 3 with a mandatory combat if there'd been any combat earlier in the mission OR a deception difficulty 2 if the player has no obvious gear, but the indenting definitely suggests what you're saying. Good catch, I'll double check execution vs intent here
