Wantless News

Greetings,

I hope you’re doing well and managing to stay safe with everything that’s going on in the world.

We're stilling focused on preparing our Business to Business demo, so in the interest of time there won’t be any deep dive today.

That said, here's what we've been at:

New feature: Commitment

Every Transposition starts with an empty Commitment gauge. You can fill it by playing bold and taking risks (choosing the hardest room out of 2, killing multiple creatures with a single skill, beating the room in a single turn…).



Reaching certain gauge thresholds will earn you special rewards, most important of which are Knowledge shards, a special currency you can use to acquire certain unique items and perks.



This feature helps us solve 2 problems:

• How to encourage players to take the harder path if they’re up to it?
  
• How to keep it interesting for players with powerful skill crafts while keeping the difficulty reasonable for builds that are more standard?
  

Visual upgrades

We’re still polishing the game’s look & feel all over. We’re not going to list it all here, but here are a few examples:

New skill icons:

New scorched bodies asset:

Enemies & AI behavior

We’re actively balancing and tweaking AI behavior to make enemies complementary and interesting.

We’ve also added Egg sacs - a weak, idle enemy that keeps on spawning Bone and Plague flies. Makes for an obvious priority target!



Gameplay tweaks & additions

We’ve formally added tile effects to game. These apply effects whenever you or your enemies enter, stay on, or leave an affected tile.

2 of them exist at the moment:

• Foul ground: deals average damage to you, heals enemies for a low amount. They’re consumed when you exit the tile. Plague flies and Bubonic behemoths can spawn these.
  
• Fiery ground: deals low damage to you or enemies alike. Fiery ground is currently part of the environment and will not be consumed when you exit the tile. You can try and lure enemies on them for some additional damage!
  

There’s now impact damage when enemies and destructibles are pushed and pulled into one another. That lets you destroy key environment objects without the need for long range skills!



When the looting gets tough, there's always shopping!

We’ve added the shop interface. The shady old man who owns the goods won’t always be around, but when he is, he’ll help you complete your builds and refill Neural Ankhs.



He’ll also sell you even better items for some of those precious Knowledge shards!

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That's it for this one!

Thank you for reading and making it all the way down here. We’d be happy to chat on Discord if you like!

Make sure you stay safe and hopeful, we’ll talk to you soon ♥

Hi there wise gamer!

It’s been longer than usual since we’ve posted our last devblog, mainly because we’re working hard on the B to B demo we need to present the project to publishers and other industry professionals. For that same reason, we’ll be skipping the deep dive this time and sticking to the development update, so here’s what we’ve been at exactly!

New creatures & creature upgrades

We’ve upgraded the looks of our Scavenger faction creatures, and we’ve used that opportunity to add some new family members!

The Bone fly,
before...

...after.


The Rotting behemoth,
before...

...after.


[NEW CREATURE] The Plague fly, bring some cleansing skills:



[NEW CREATURE] The Bubonic Behemoth, he doesn’t bite (really just because he doesn’t need to):



Both flies & behemoths also have boss versions we’re saving for later!

Onboarding & tutorials

If we’re having people play a demo on their own, we need to make sure they’re properly taught the game’s mechanics.

We’ve added a tooltip system that lets us spawn textual tooltips you can move around and scroll through.



The "event system" has also been improved to cover our onboarding needs. That system lets us associate game events such as showing tooltips, dialogues, locking and unlocking menus, spawning a unique patient…to specific triggers, like when you first get into the game, when you beat a specific patient, when you craft your first skill...etc.

New dialogue assets

Speaking of onboarding, there are a few characters that’ll want to speak with you to help you understand what you just got yourself into, so we've upgraded their dialogue assets!

Eiris, the main character:



Pum, the motherly assistant:



UI 2.0

User Interface is also being polished all over the place.

Here’s a glimpse of our new effect icons:


We’ve also upgraded:

The Neural Forge (formerly known as the Neural Shaper, if you're an old timer), where you craft your badass skills:
before...
after.


The Gear menu, where you equip those skills (and more in the future):
before...
after.


Other interfaces are currently undergoing the same process.

________________________________

That’s it for today’s development recap, quite a bit of time was also spent on admin and business plan work, but we’re now back to developing fulltime.

Remember you're always welcome to chat or ask question on our Discord server.

Make sure you stay safe, do what you need to do to feel proud and accomplished, and have fun!

Thank you for reading ♥

Hi esteemed Wantless enthusiast,

We’d like to wish you a happy new year! May we use it to build a fun game together.

It’s been another 4 weeks, and though the holiday season has slowed development a little bit, we’ve still managed to get some work done. Here goes!

More visual effects

We’ve added new VFX to the game, slowly catching-up with all existing gameplay effects! In no particular order: shield, poison, bleed, fracture, grief damage, fear damage.


Many more such as thorns, cleanse, buff, debuff, push and pull are being saved for later!

New effects to craft with

We’ve added new effects to enhance your skill crafting capabilities.

• Thorns is a buff that causes you to reflect a flat amount of damage back to attackers every time you’re dealt damage.
  
• Toxic is a debuff that inflicts a pure damage tick every turn for 3 turns. Its only difference with Poison is that Toxic stacks. Inflicting Toxic to an already intoxicated target increases its damage and refreshes its duration.
  
• Shadowed is a buff that causes your next skill to be cast twice in a row. Double damage, double healing, double toxic ticks...just don’t combine it with effects that don’t benefit from multiplied casts, such as unstackable buffs.
  
• Restore AP instantly restores an amount of Action Points. We found one fun mechanic was to try and extend your turn for as long as possible.
  

New enemy passive effects/modifiers

Enemies can spawn with passive effects, or modifiers, depending on patient traits (more of that in a minute). Here are some new modifiers we’ve added:

• Reflective enemies reflect negative effects (debuffs, damage over time and disables) on the caster. Forget all debuffs, you’d just be hurting yourself.
  
• Vengeful enemies reflect a % of the hit damage they’re dealt back to the caster. Damage over time and indirect damage sources (explosive barrels, thorns) bypass that effect, so pick your skills carefully.
  
• Power hungry enemies deal more damage for each AP you’ve spent during your turn. Play safe

Sound

One of the few tasks still standing between the team and a playable demo, is adding sound to the game. We’ve listed over 200 sound effects that need designing and integration, with a few dozen now implemented. We’ll be using rough sounds and placeholder music at the moment and intend to work with professionals to turn these into unique, quality assets when we’re ready.


That’s it for today’s development highlights, now onto our deep dive: Patients, part 2.
___________________________________________________________________

Part 1 left us with 2 important topics to cover: patient traits, and unique patients.

1) Let’s start with patient traits

As we’ve briefly glanced at in part 1, traits are patient characteristics that delineate their personality and impact their gameplay.

Non-unique patients spawn with a rarity level that defines both the number of traits generated for them and the pool of available traits they can be chosen from (example: some traits will only appear on patients that are Uncommon or rarer).

Since most (not all, mind you) traits make transposition harder, rarer patients with more traits tend to be more challenging. It’s up to you to decide whether you’ll risk it for more abundant rewards.



We’ve decided this feature was a must for multiple reasons:

• Increased challenge variety and replayability.
  
• Additional decision-making parameters when designing your skills and your build.
  
• Increased surprise and reward. That excitement shiver you get when dropping rare loot shouldn't be limited to loot!

Down to details, what do traits do, exactly?

I mentioned traits alter gameplay, here are multiple ways they do that, along with implemented examples:

Alter a patient’s reward
Item rarity, number of item options to choose from, number of items you can pick, amount of currency, amount of experience, reputation stakes...most patient reward parameters can be affected by traits.

• Monk: yields no currency, yields triple the experience.
  
• Generous: you can choose 1 extra item reward.
  

Add a passive effect to all enemies
Passive effects (or modifiers) are effects that remain on an entity throughout the entire transposition, and that cannot be removed - we've briefly mentioned them at the beginning of this devblog. Many traits strengthen enemies with passive effects that require you to adjust your build and strategy, but some might also benefit you!

• Stoic: enemies have increased resistance to Grief damage. Pack Pain or Fear damage-dealing skills instead.
  
• Calm: enemies regenerate health at the beginning of their turn. One shot skills or healing reduction is advised.
  

Add a passive on hit effect to all enemies
On hit effects are effects the enemy will inflict every time it hits you.

• Eloquent: enemies inflict disarm on hit. Disarm keeps you from using offense skills for a turn. Bring the right cleanse skill or make sure you don’t get hit!
  
• Bully: enemies push you on hit. Movement skills might help you get close quicker if you're using a melee build.
  

Add a passive effect to Eiris
Good old passive effects again, only this time they're attached to Eiris.

• Infuriating: you’re Berserk. You’ll hit harder and get hit harder, and you’ll only be able to use offense skills.
  
• Envious: you’re Slow, meaning moving will cost more AP. Builds that don’t need to move much or multiple movement skills are advised.
  

Alter the mind maze’s structure
Floor count, room type tendency, a mind maze is composed from multiple parameters that can be altered by traits.

• Pompous: maze contains more Elite rooms. Elite rooms contain stronger enemies.
  
• Refined: maze contains more Treasure rooms. Treasure rooms are rare rooms that hold rewards. You’ll like treasure rooms.
  

Add modifiers to each room
As we’ve mentioned in part 1, rooms themselves can also have modifiers that alter gameplay inside.

• Disorganized: rooms contain many destructibles (crates, explosive barrels…).
  
• Brilliant: rooms contain 1 Rare enemy. A Rare enemy has 2 generated passive effects and increased stats. It is also guaranteed to yield item rewards!
  

There are many, many more traits and trait categories than are listed here, but hopefully that’s enough to get your curiosity. Now onto our second deep dive subject!

2) Unique patients

Unique patients are handmade patients (as opposed to procedurally generated ones) we design ourselves. They’re essential to telling the world’s story, creating compelling side quests, and challenging you with unique transpositions for special rewards.



Here’s what differentiates unique patients from generated ones:

• Handmade: we determine their traits, rewards, difficulty, often even their exact mind maze layout.
  
• Stories: these patients have stories. That is to say you’ll learn a bit about them before transposition starts.
  
• Progression and persistance: unique patients aren’t limited to a single encounter. Successfully transposing them may cause them to come back later for you to uncover more of their story. They’ll have renewed challenges and rewards.
  
• Events: some - not all - unique patients are associated with main or side quest events. Some may unlock passage to the next area, others may unveil a special upgrade that lets you craft new skills or discover secret areas.
  

Your generated patients will occasionally be replaced with a single, compulsory unique patient, blocking your progression through the main questline. Like a story boss would in a classic RPG.
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That’s it for today’s devblog. We sincerely hope you had an amazing holiday season, and that you have a healthy, prosperous, productive year 2022!

We’re always happy to chat on Discord.

Until next time, stay safe, and play awesome games!

Hi honorable gamers!

Last (and incidentally first) devblog was just over 4 weeks ago, and we’ve been at it every day since then, as you’d expect. Let's go over these weeks' development highlights before we dive into today’s gameplay topic!

Remnants of War

We’ve designed and integrated the 1st few enemies from our new Remnants of War faction. They’re broken incarnations of a war long forgotten, or maybe of every conflict ever ignited..? Their theme is ranged damage-dealing & debuff. More on these guys in a dedicated “Enemy factions” devblog!



The tech side of things

We’ve implemented a save versioning system to handle data compatibility between our builds & saves. Helps us test internally and spot surprise bugs that emerge from playing a new build with an old save.

We’ve also optimized the most frequently used underperforming parts of the code (a grid operation to get all tiles in a certain range was made approximately 800x faster!).

Quality of life improvements

We’ve added an [alt] modifier that lets you display detailed information about effects attached to your enemies.



Enemies now break destructibles if they can’t reach their target, even when it’s not a great idea...you could brain your way to a friendly-fire fest if you’re that kind of mastermind!



We’ve also improved on enemy AI & skills so their turn isn’t as lengthy when they have a lot of Action Points at their disposal. Basically they'll favor using 1 costly skill rather than 3 cheap ones when that's possible.



Onto the bigger chunks that took the bulk of our time.

We’ve started adding VFX!

It’s just the beginning, but we now have VFX for a bunch of situations that really lacked feedback. Dealing damage, healing, looting, blowing things up, dying, it’s all much better with an appropriate level of juice. We still have dozens of these to implement & polish!



Patient traits, room and enemy modifiers

To really make every single patient a unique experience, we’ve added a modifier mechanic that alters gameplay at multiple levels.

Patients now spawn with a rarity parameter ranging from normal to legendary, and have a number of attached personality traits (rarer patients have more traits). For example, a Generous patient rewards you with more items, while a Toxic one has every enemy in their mind maze inflict Poison on hit.



Rooms inside your patient’s mind maze also range from normal to legendary, and their modifiers are a crucial decision-making parameter when you’re choosing which path to take.



All the way down to enemies themselves, they too will spawn with a rarity level and have a bunch of associated stats, modifiers and rewards!



[Visual feedback on these modifiers is still WIP]

We believe this will lead to a lot of decision-making fun, and a constantly renewed challenge. Your own unique build will probably find its preferred challenges too!

Now onto our deep-dive topic: Patients, part 1!

Some more context

There’s a reason why the bleak future is bleak, and that’s Transposition - a neurological procedure that lets a professional Transposer (that’s you, as Eiris) navigate a materialized version of a patient’s mind, and remove (destroy) something that’s unwelcome. That could be anything ranging from fears to consciousness itself, and it all materializes as very unfriendly creatures.

Transposition was designed to help people, and it did. So much so that most of humanity became addicted to it, unable to deal with the slightest frustration without assistance. And that’s just those who could still bear to remain conscious after realizing how dysfunctional they were.

Wantless’ gameplay loop starts with you greeting these suffering patients on your floating Transposition lab, the Alterthought.

Men and women of all ages and backgrounds, with all sorts of afflictions, coming to you to get something abcised.

Mind mazes

Patients are distinguished by a set of characteristics, but most importantly every patient has a unique Mind maze.

Mind mazes are where gameplay happens. They’re dungeons structured as a succession of floors, each with a number of rooms you can choose to go through. These rooms are often hostile encounters for you to overcome in turn-based tactical combat, but they can also hold rewards, or just be eventless passages for you to chill in for a second.

Each room connects to one or more rooms on the next floor, letting you carve your own path to the final floor, where the patient’s main affliction is. Beat this boss to succeed.



4 patient characteristics impact your experience in a mind maze:

1. Difficulty: each patient has a difficulty value, which determines the creatures you can find and how powerful they are. A Dreg in a Tier 1 mind maze won’t be as strong as a Dreg in Tier 2, and you won’t ever find a Horror anywhere below Tier 3.
   
2. Biome: that’s the maze’s environment. We won’t detail them here as we’re still focusing on the Dead slums biome at this point, but different biomes look and feel different, and are home to different enemy factions.
   
3. Size: mind mazes can be small, medium or large, and that impacts the number of floors therein.
   
4. Traits: as we’ve briefly mentioned above, patients have personality traits that alter gameplay in the maze. This is material for part 2 of this devblog, but here are some example traits for the sake of clarity:
   
   • Bully: enemies push you 1 tile away on hit
     
   • Harsh: you’re afflicted with Fracture. Fracture causes you to take a small extra amount of damage every time you take damage from other sources.
     
   • Jealous: enemies inflict Slow on hit. Slow increases the Action Point cost of every movement.
     
   • Pompous: the mind maze contains a higher amount of Elite rooms. Elite rooms are home to stronger enemies.
     
   • Hoplophobic: the mind maze is haunted by Remnants of War.

Most patients in Wantless are procedurally generated. What kind of patient you’ll encounter depends on the area your ship is docked in, and your reputation in these lands. Reputation is increased through successful transposition.

We’ll refrain from throwing more detail here, lest this devblog becomes a book, but we’re bound to write a devblog about Areas & Reputation before long!

The UI

Now here’s a peek at the patient UI as it’s currently implemented (polish and visual iterations are obviously in order):

1. Waiting room: the number and rarity of patients you greet depends on the Alterthought’s current capacity and your reputation in the current area. Patients are listed here as toggles you can click.
   
2. Selected patient editorial information: portrait, designation and a short trivia description. They have no impact on gameplay.
   
3. Rarity: colors and shapes let you know if your patient is of normal, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary, or unique rarity (more on “unique” in a minute).
   
4. Traits: the gameplay-impacting personality traits. More part 2.
   
5. Mind maze difficulty: the indication here depends on your current progression vs the patient’s actual difficulty value.
   
6. Mind maze size: small, medium or large, with a matching number of floors.
   
7. Mind maze biome: the maze’s environment as briefly described in the “Mind mazes” section above.
   
8. Currency & experience rewards: how much currency & xp you’ll earn by succeeding. They’re proportional to difficulty, patient rarity and maze size.
   
9. Item rewards: you can usually choose a number of rewards out of a greater number of options. These numbers, along with item quality and rarity, depend on patient rarity, difficulty and maze size.
   
10. Transpose button: when you’re ready, brace yourself, and dive in.

Patients are also displayed on the Alterthought’s hub as silhouettes. These are currently placeholders and will be replaced soon.



Unique patients

We’ve covered procedurally generated patients, but there’s another, arguably more important kind of patient: unique patients.



These are patients with hand-made characteristics, often hand-made mind mazes, unique traits, and more importantly written stories that progress through multiple areas. You’ll encounter a unique patient multiple times before you reach the end of their story, and their difficulty evolves with your own capacity.



They may reward you with unique items, and some of them are fundamental to progress through the main storyline. They’re part of how we tell this world’s story.

We’ll cover unique patients in fine detail in part 2, alongside traits.

You did it!

That’s it for Patients part 1, hopefully it’s enough to get the big picture!

Thank you for making it all the way down here, we’ll see you in a few weeks, and in the meantime we’d be happy to have you on the Discord server!

Stay safe, hydrate, take care of yourself and your own ♥

Hi! How are you doing today?

We’ve mentioned skill crafting a lot in our communication so far, and it really is one of the key features in Wantless, so we thought it would be a great topic for a 1st deep dive. Right before that, a brief development update so you can learn about what we’ve been doing:

Our small 2-men team has been hard at work upgrading the game’s look & feel to make it presentable for Steam and social network. A lot of content is already functional in Wantless, namely procedural patient and mind map generation, turn-based combat, skill crafting, travelling, shopping, even the talent tree to a large extent, but a lot of it still has that prototype look. Communication milestones are a good time for such updates.



We’ve also dealt with a lot of actual communication and admin groundwork, organizing Drop Rate Studio’s paperwork and accounting, and of course, creating the Steam page.

People now have a place they can go to learn more about Wantless, and that’s paramount!

We hope to get back to full speed development from next week on, and our next steps are to keep working on gamefeel, environment and enemy variety, animation and the introduction of VFX, so core gameplay can be showcased more extensively.

With that out of the way, let's get Neural Shaping!



Neural Shaping is a skill crafting system, its output is a brand new skill you can use.

Ok but, what’s a skill?

A skill is an action you can take during turn-based combat, other than basic movement. It applies its effects on targets caught in its area of effect, at the cost of some resources.

To help us walk through this together, let's introduce a simple test-subject skill we can play around with: Pain shock. But we might as well call it Bob to track it through its metamorphosis.



This is the simplest a skill can get. Here’s what you’re looking at from the bottom up:

1. Its effects. What the skill does, and who it does it to. Bob currently has a single effect: dealing some pain-type damage; and it only affects enemies (you're not hitting yourself with this).
   
2. Its form preview. That’s the skill’s shape, its area of effect. In this case there’s a single tile highlighted, and it's right next to the character, so we’re looking at a melee range skill that only affects a single tile.
   
3. Its range. You can see it in the form preview section, but it’s not that easy to visualize for longer range skills (distinguishing between 7 and 8 tiles at a glance requires more visual acuity than I’m capable of, I can say that much). This skill has a range of 1, meaning it can hit up to 1 tile away from the caster, that’s melee range. A range of zero means it can only be targeted on the caster, and anything higher than 1 is considered ranged.
   
4. Its cooldown. You’re used to this one, it’s the number of turns a skill remains unavailable for after being used. Bob currently has no cooldown.
   
5. Its cost in Action Points (AP). Action Points are your main resource, and you can spend up to 8 each turn (they’re restored at the beginning of each turn). This one costs 2, which is pretty low as it lets you use it up to 4 times in a single turn.
   
6. Its name is procedurally generated according to its shape and effects, although you can customize it at will.
   
7. Its icon is also generated and is composed of 2 parts:
   • The frame is generated according to the types of effects you skill has. Red stands for damaging effects, and there are colors for support, buffs, debuffs/afflictions and utility.
     
   • The icon on the frame is customizable, and you can pick yours from a large set. These are currently placeholder.
8. Its Discipline cost. Equipping a skill reserves an amount of Discipline from your limited pool. Stronger effects, longer range and larger area of effect increase the Discipline cost, while higher cooldown or action point cost reduce it. If a skill costs more Discipline than you have available, you won’t be able to equip it and bring it to a map (you'll still be able to craft it). You’ll increase your total Discipline pool through levelling and acquiring perks on the talent tree.
   
9. Its Awareness cost. Awareness is a special, limited resource you earn by slaying enemies on a map. Unlike AP, it isn’t automatically recovered every turn, and you won’t get more than a few on each map. You can choose how much Awareness your skill costs, from 0 to 3, and each added Awareness point cost drastically reduces the Discipline cost of your skill (currently, every added Awareness point divides Discipline cost by 2, but that's subject to balancing). You’re essentially saying “This skill is beyond my current level, but I can still use it a very limited amount of times per run, as an ultimate ability”. Don’t forget that your Awareness pool is used across all skills: if you’re spending it on this skill, you won’t be spending it on another one, so choose your ultimate skills wisely. Bob costs no Awareness (it doesn’t look like much of an ultimate does it?).

You can equip crafted skills in the dedicated menu, as long as you have enough Discipline available. You can currently bring up to 10 skills in Transposition with you, but that's subject to change. We don’t want skill number to be a restriction, AP and Discipline costs should suffice.



So that’s what a skill is, and here’s our Pain shock (Bob) in action. Not very impressive, not very expensive, an overall reasonable, if unimaginative craft.



Now with skills out of the way, we can look at the components required to craft them: Synapses.



You’ll be looting them in battle, earning them as patient rewards, or buying them from the shop. Finding the right one for your dream build could become an obsession before you realize it!

There are 3 Synapse types:

1) Form Synapses determine your skill’s range, shape (or area of effect), and the number of effects your skill can have.


2) Effect Synapses determine what your skill does. There are lots of different effects in Wantless, and many more we intend to implement, so that could be anything ranging from dealing instant damage, to applying health regeneration buffs, poisoning, stunning, silencing or pushing an enemy away.


3) Efficiency Synapses determine how many Action Points it costs to use the skill, along with its cooldown.


You’ll need at least 1 of each Synapse type to craft a skill, and you could slot up to 5 Effect Synapses if your Form Synapse allows for that many.

Note that Synapses aren’t consumed on crafting, but cannot be used to compose multiple skills at the same time. You can always disassemble a skill to reuse your Synapses for something different.



The Discipline cost induced by a Synapse isn’t explicitly displayed, but you can swap them out at your leisure to see the impact on cost.

Let's look at some basic ways we could alter Bob's form and costs without changing its effects:



To help you visualize how this works in practice, here's a gif of the Neural shaper UI being operated. All you have to do is drag and drop your Synapses from the Synapse inventory to the proper slot, and hit the screaming CRAFT button when you're happy with the previewed skill.



Lastly on Synapses, and as is customary for loot and gear in RPGs, Synapses drop with a quality level, ranging from common to legendary (that's what the color code on Synapse icons means). That quality level determines the amount of modifiers, or affixes, your Synapse has. Though they're quite important to the system, we'll detail how these work in a dedicated devblog, as to keep this one reasonably concise.



Now let’s give Bob some more drastic makeovers to help it all sink in:



You can see Discipline cost goes all over the place. You get to choose if you're going to spend your pool on few powerful skills or many affordable ones. A balanced build is usually composed of at least some offense, defense, and utility.



But your late game build could be made of all sorts of crazy, unique combinations!



That’s it for this introduction to Neural Shaping. We’ll dive into more details on Synapse modifiers in an upcoming Devblog.

It's still pretty early in the development process, and we still have a lot of feedback, gamefeel and balancing work to do on this system. One of our critical next steps is to implement proper VFX for all of our effects in battle, as an example.

We hope to keep posting these Devblogs every few weeks to keep in touch, in the meantime let us know what you think in the comments, and join us on Discord to ask direct questions or give feedback about the system!

Take care of yourself, hope to see you soon!