v1.12 - Balance In All Things

Hello there! :)

A new update to Lost For Swords just dropped, with lots of cool changes and additions:

• Monster Movement Change: monster movement is cool because it makes the board dynamic and keeps players on their toes. But I realized that it is often too constricting for new players. Without a good understanding of the monster’s AI, it is very easy to get surrounded and lose a run… not fun!
  To fix that, monsters now telegraph their movement and give players a much better sense of what will happen until their next turn. Monsters choose a movement direction and “lock” that in, meaning they can only move in that direction on their turn (and will do so, if possible). This change makes monsters slower in terms of reacting to player actions and should make fights feel less constricting, while making players feel... smarter :D

• Unlimited Undos: limiting undo options and treating it as a finite resource for players to handle was something I thought about long and hard. Ultimately, I decided to let players have unlimited undos instead of limiting it to one per room. There are pros and cons to each approach, but I decided I want to value player experimentation higher than the downside of allowing players to cheat a little by finding out what’s behind flipped cards and then undo’ing. It’s a singleplayer game, if players want to cheat a bit and make their game more enjoyable, I’m good!

• Reworked dungeon deck structure: the old setup of a floor involved a “dungeon deck” that contained all the monsters and loot you’ll encounter. Your main goal was to empty the dungeon deck, defeating monsters and collecting loot. I liked that it produced a nice symmetry of your deck vs their deck. And it made the goal inherently clear(-ish) for players. But there’s a huge downside to this: the game played very unevenly in terms of difficulty. The first room on a floor was always the hardest. The dungeon deck was still full with monsters and they were all at full health. By the time players finish the first room, the dungeon deck has become weaker already and subsequent rooms become easier. This leads to a wonky difficulty curve that is really hard to balance around. For example, cards that increased in power during a floor felt bad because they performed poor at the start and when they became powerful later, their power wasn’t required anymore. That’s way the dungeon deck is now removed and instead, rooms are always filled by more “appropriate” numbers of monsters and loot, allowing for a much better balance and difficulty curve.

• Because of the dungeon deck removal, the previous main objective (empty the dungeon deck) was gone too. So I had to come up with a new system that governs player’s progress within a floor. Players are now tasked with filling up a glass sphere that contains the key to the floor exit door. Once they fill it up completely, it breaks and releases the key. They fill the sphere up with… blood… or life… or souls… I honestly haven’t decided yet how I want to handle this thematically. :D Whenever a unit loses life that amount gets added to the sphere. One cool aspect is that your own life counts too, so in dire situation it might even make sense to “donate” a part of your own life in order to unlock the door. This change is pretty experimental, and I myself don’t yet like it 100%. But I want to try out how it feels and see if there are improvements to be made. If you have ideas, let me know! :) One possible improvement that I will definitely add (but haven’t gotten around to yet) are secondary objectives that are optional, but reward players with extra loot.

• Visually changed “Ruby” to “Emerald”. If Zelda told me one thing, it’s that the lowest loot should be green :D And also, the red ruby clashed with the objective marker, which is also red.

• Switched shaman and wizard: wizards felt too strong for the floor they first appear at, while Shamans were underwhelming later on. So I switched them around and made Shamans appear in floors before Wizards.

• Rogue buff: Rogues still felt underpowered, especially their damage output was lacking. That’s why I buffed a lot of the rogue’s weapons and also redesigned a bunch of cards and mechanics:
  reworked Battle Row to Weird Rod
  Rogue starting weapons “re-skinned” and re-balanced
  pushing does not wrap anymore
  other balance changes

• Due to the dungeon deck change, I had to remove the Chest for now. It will come back soon though!

• Fixed a bug on the Embark screen that led to cut off buttons on the bottom in certain window sizes

• Added a second music track :)

• Looots of visual, UI and game feel improvements, too many to mention

As always, thanks for reading and see you at the next patch! :)

Bye! (ʘ‿ʘ)╯