While the statistics for the demo were bad, the development side of the game has vastly improved. When this project first began, it was only the 3rd game that the team had attempted to make. Because of this, most of us were practically beginners at programming in a clean and efficient way. Our logic was long, unnecessarily huge, something that would just annoy you when you attempted to read it and understand it. This made it hard when we attempted to add new features to the game engine. So a minor overhaul was completed. The way that the player’s data is stored has been changed so that the system is faster and more powerful while running the game. To help improve this, the system now also removes multiple steps of switching terrain, making the loading process faster, while keeping the game running. While the loading times haven’t been removed, they are significantly faster. Another major fix was with the FPS drops but we decided to address our fix to that in a separate paragraph due to its complexity and overarching effect.
Scaling in Difficulty:
Enemies have now received a new data type, one which tells them their base health and their base damage. The way that an enemy’s health and damage has been calculated is by taking your level and adding it onto the enemy’s base stats in order to come up with a scaled number. No longer will you be able to fight weak, “low level” enemies, as their health and damage, the team would like to emphasize damage, increases. While we cannot control your experience and the way you play, we still recommend that you don’t grind as enemies, in particular bosses will have their stats increased massively. We are still fine tuning this system as we don’t want people to be grinding and then be insta killed because the enemy’s damage increased at an insane rate. Keeping in mind that the player is unable to control their damage output with their level. It is important to know that your damage is based off your weapon, nothing else.
Dealing and taking an enemy’s damage.
Diversity in enemies is important. You don’t want to fight the same zombie or bat over and over again. You don’t want to fight the same mercenary twice in a row. The way that enemies behave and attack in Dungeon Raider has been changed significantly. Enemy’s now have a defence stat, something that we could use to differentiate between 2 separate enemies. The main purpose of this defence stat is to put difference between an enemy such as the magical cannon, which is designed to a heavy-hitting, quick to kill enemy while the baby rock golem is designed to be a slog, a really long fight. We decided that you being able to consistently deal the same damage to two very different enemies was not right. While it may take longer for you to kill your foes, you should be happy. Enemies now have damage variance. This means that their damage now is no longer the same between different hits. Currently this is set at a 3 variance on either side of the 0. Enemies have received a slight buff with reduced damage but they will not be able to consistently and reliably defeat you. If you think that enemies are now extremely overpowered then we would request that you stop reading, as enemies have any more buffs to come.
Special and Ultimate Abilities:
Certain enemies have been given special ability and a few lucky ones, *cough* Cyclops *cough* have received insanely overpowered abilities which deal over 50 damage. Specials have around a 4 turn cooldown while ultimates are more towards the 6 or 7 tier. Both of these abilities deal damage based upon It is even more vital that you kill your enemies faster so that they don’t pull off their ultimates swinging the fight into their favour. There are animations for these abilities. While some of the abilities may seem a little bit lackluster, some of them are not to be underestimated. Below is a table of the enemies with their new special and ultimate abilities. Enemies not listed simply do not have an ultimate. Estimations are completed with a level 1 enemy’s stats.
Our personal hated enemy now has to be the zombie. The heal on the special makes it a tough enemy to deal with as it now is able to get a 20 health heal every 4 turns. If you thought that was bad then wait until you discover the immunities of the zombie. And just before you become worried, Cyclops are not currently enemies available to fight in the game, they are just meant to be incredibly overpowered. We are still searching for their place in the game.
Improvements to Game Performance:
A major theme of early May was improving the performance and fine-tuning of the game. While you have already seen the changes to the enemies above, the exact details of the changes made to the way that the game runs have not been expressed yet. Most of these changes have been internal changes, the only difference that the player will notice is better frame rates as well as faster loading times. The internal changes revolve around deleting irrelevant sprites such as enemies during the overworld scene as well as removing the massive terrains left in the game. While substantial work has been completed in fixing this code, 10 of hours of work fixing the code, we are proud that we have been able to fix some of the game’s core issues.
Sign Off - With Statistical Data
If you thought that April was a bad month for the game’s publicity then you won’t be shocked or surprised with the game’s performance in May. It is to be noted that the game’s download and views are only tracked on the itch.io page. Any views on other sites are not being counted. The views are 14 with 5 downloads. The views are up 250%, which is great since more views is more publicity which led to increased downloads. While this number is very low, we are still happy that in a month with no new version releases it was still able to improve from the month that was April. Perhaps this is due to the creation of a separate website found here: https://firstlitmonkey.wixsite.com/website, remember that there is also a YouTube channel where some of the new gameplay will be shown, be sure to check it out in the next 2 weeks or so since we will be dropping a cyclops reveal video. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGdUK9bjjfWhDa9IVL5_9IQ?view_as=subscriber