Fallen Down News

[p]Happy Thanksgiving!
[/p][p]This build finishes The Dragon story line with a boss fight. The art for the bosses cards didn't make it because of the holidays, but the fight is playable without them. [/p][p]
This build added art to:
Confrontation
Tower Foyer[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p](Either of them could easily lift the wagon, but it's awkward to balance)[/p][p][/p][p]The combat rework continues, with more cards getting improved. My goal is for all basic cards to have a special upgrade at the III level. I also want to totally rework the boot items, so that they change what movement card is generated for the character or something equivalent. Lots of work to do![/p]

[p]What changed:[/p][p]Added the Treasure Hunter story[/p][p]Modified Heart to Hearts[/p][p]Reworked combat[/p][p]Added art to Fixed Wagon[/p][p]Fixed several broken scenes[/p][p]
[/p][p]What happened:[/p][p]Several scenes were broken and unplayable.  They have been corrected. Thanks for the bug reports.[/p][p]
[/p][p]Treasure Hunt was supposed to have a follow up story about the actual treasure hunt.  That was forgotten and the story just moved on.  It was very jarring how the story was left incomplete.  Treasure Hunters adds the conclusion to that little tale.[/p][p]
[/p][p]The theme and vibe of Heart to Hearts was inappropriate for this game.  It’s been corrected to be more in line with the rest of the game.[/p][p]
[/p][p]Combat got a large rework.  HP on characters was largely increased.  Base damage was largely increased.  Scaling damage on cards was reduced.   As an example, Smite deals 6 damage, up from 4 damage.  Smite IX now does 14 damage,  down from a staggering 20 damage.[/p][p]
[/p][p]What does this mean?  Low level combat is basically unchanged.  Characters take about the same same number of cards to kill as they used to.  High level combat is no longer “have armor or die instantly”.[/p][p]
[/p][p]Speaking of armor, armor was changed in this as well.  Light armor now blocks more damage over all than heavy armor, but blocks a small amount each hit.  Heavy armor blocks less overall, but can block entire hits.  Super heavy armors gained the fleeting keyword, but block a lot.[/p][p]
[/p][p]What’s next:[/p][p]The card rebalancing is not yet complete.  Armor needs more work.  Traits like Tactical don’t scale yet.  Trainings don’t scale yet.  [/p][p]
[/p][p]Upgraded cards are boring.  We want to make them more exciting.[/p]

[p]Here's what changed!
Added the Enter The Lair story
Added combat background
Added art to the The Third World story
Increased arcade mode difficulty
Lots of bug fixes, including the max level bug in arcade mode.

[/p][p]
Our trust gray combat background has served us well, but it's time to add more color to the levels. We have a forest background and a sky background for world 4.

Arcade mode world 2 and 3 are harder than they used to be. Not too much, but it's possible to lose fights in them now.

The next update is going to be a huge one. Damage scaling is out of control in arcade mode. You should always take the max token weapons you can, and then melt your enemy. A gold token weapon card is literally 6 times more valuable then a normal weapon card. It's impossible to balance the game around this. I am going to flatten how attack cards gain damage.

I'm also going to change armor. Monsters will gain much better armor, but will also have the once keyword on their armor to prevent a stalemate. In general, armor will last as long as it used too, but will protect less per hit. [/p]

[p]This update brought two big things.[/p][p]
[/p][p]The first is that the upper route of arcade mode world 3 got its final route. The player can now trek across the world. The nodes shouldn’t be considered done. They need a lot of balance, but we have something on screen now. The worlds take a lot of effort to make. Making 25ish unique nodes, each with an alternate version takes around a hundred hours, and we have three world sets of that.[/p][p]
[/p][p]We still have so much work to do in arcade mode, but it’s great to finally have the route in.[/p][p]
[/p][p]The second is that Fallen Down has a problem. Lenette explains it best.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]
[/p][p]Cards explain their own rules well enough, but the final result of playing a card is very difficult to know. If a target has vulnerability, block, & armor with 3 durability, and stagger, how much damage will smite do? To fix this, I’ve added damage predictions. It’s a little UI piece over the heads of enemies before you attack. How does it work?[/p][p][/p][p] [/p][p]Technically, Fallen Down is very complex. The card engine code to resolve attacks is thousands of lines of code, with callbacks leading to and fro across the code. The concept of unresistable armor damage like Wreck does is around 200 lines of code by itself
[/p][p]Attacks start and go across stages. During any stage, events will be raised and resolved.[/p][p]
[/p][p]Pretty easy to understand and follow, right?[/p][p]Many effects have a limited number of times they can be used. To see how much damage something is going to do without using up the effects or damaging armor, we need to be able to simulate an attack. There are many status effects, traits, and card effects that need to be able to look at a given situation and make a prediction about how much damage they will add or remove.[/p][p]
[/p][p]Luckily, most things that need to make a prediction fall into a pattern. They need to know who is attacking, who is being attacked, and they can resolve the internal logic from there. Better yet, the really complicated things like Rosega’s Guardian trait don’t need this, because AI doesn’t show predictions. As a result, I only had to change about 30ish classes instead of the possible 90ish.[/p]

0.0.50 is now live!

Fleshed out notes will be available in a few days.

What's new in this build:

Added the 'Giant Skeleton' plotline
Added combat damage predictions
Finished upper route of world 3