Hello everyone! It's another week's developer's diary.
This week's focus is on making an item generation system that can bring diversity to loots you can get from enemies, chests, shops, and mission rewards.
We already have a system in place that can procedurally generate a lot of different items. However, the configuration can be quite tedious. Thus, a few optimizations in both code and pipeline have been taken to make sure it can be used with more flexibility.
The result is quite good. A few enemies such as the mannequins, the homeless, the crazed survivors, and the corrupted robots all get their own item drop lists that can provide a much wider and wilder range of item drops and variations. There will almost never be two identical baseball bats from the crazed survivors; No two combat robot modules from corrupted robots can be exactly the same. Every weapon or equipment drops from them are almost unique. It's just like everyone who lives in this world is special. You are special.
To push it a bit further, a prefix system is implemented in place to highlight the strengths or sometimes weaknesses for all those unique items. For now, the database is relatively small (it will be further expanded in the future). But, combined with attribution randomization and item procedural generation, there can be a lot of possibilities.
In conclusion, a baseball bat may have its attribution quite different from another baseball bat while it may also have one prefix (in some rarer cases, it may have more) to make it more unique to others.
They are usually limited in a reasonable boundary which people consider normal.
However, what if such boundaries can get broken sometimes? (Maybe genetic mutation, I don't know.) What if you suddenly find a baseball bat that can cut people like a sharp-edged blade and cause bleeding? What if you picked a baseball bat that has magical power? What if there is a baseball bat that can turn you into a vampire? What if it's not a vampiric baseball bat, but a vampiric pipe or vampiric steel chair? Maybe even a vampiric vodka bottle? Maybe it will even automatically register how many creatures you killed with it. (StatTrack weapons. :D )
Welcome to this secret world! All those anomaly items are all possible to exist!
If you are too afraid of them, you can melt them down into basic materials and craft something else.
However, it's more likely that you will find them quite useful to help you fight against powerful enemies that normal civilians can hardly takedown. For example, the weird plastic clothes you can get from those mannequins in a certain basement may just be a solution to defeat an enemy that uses a lot of electronic offense skills.
That's for this week. But, the work will continue.
Today's changelog:
English
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Procedurally generated baseball bats may now have one prefix. In rare cases, they may have two. (Current available prefix for baseball bats: Magical/StatTrack/Strong/Feeble/Anti-human)
Same to the pipes.
Procedurally generated combat robot modules now may have a "lockpicking" prefix.
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New prefix for weapons: Sharp (causing bleeding.)
New prefix for weapons: StatTrack (Basically, it will record how many creatures you have killed.)
New prefix for weapons: Strong (Increase weapon's attack for a percentage.)
New prefix for weapons: Feeble (Decrease weapon's attack for a percentage.)
New prefix for weapons: Anti-human (Increase damage on human targets.)
New generic prefix: Lockpicking (Increase lockpicking skill level.)
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Fixed a bug that the daily supply may have empty items which were supposed to be bobby pins.