Development Blog #3: Pickups and Meaningful Boosts

[h2]Pickups and Meaningful Boosts[/h2]

Howdy again, I wanted to dive in today and rattle off some item pickups that build your character up and keep them going. I'm also gonna go into the development balance of ~how~ strong those pickups actually are - not insignificant but not easy mode. So let's go.

[h3]Assorted Pickups[/h3]

#1: Cheese

Cheese is an early-game weapon pickup. It is a straight-forward dependable weapon that seeks out the closest enemy and clobbers it in dairy goodness. Additional pickups of the cheese wedge allow it to pierce more enemies. It's a low damage output, only 1 damage, but it is a guaranteed hit.

#2: Bell

The Bell is an incredibly helpful and simple pickup. Every Bell raises your base damage by 1. In the case of a Bell and a Cheese together, you are doubling it's damage output. Very nice and good for you.

#3: Duster

The duster is another core stat builder. This one increases your chance to Dodge an enemy hit by 10%. You'll likely be taking tons of hits so even one duster pickup can mean the difference between success and being a loser.

#4: Stache

Stache increases your Intimidation. This is a more unique stat to Beef Cat Ultra and it effects the radius around you that enemies will be intimidated by you. By default your intimidation is 0. So enemies just run right up and smack you. But a Stache gives you 64 Intimidation, or a 64 pixel radius around you that all enemies will be affected by Intimidation. This will slow the enemy down or even make them run away from you!

#5: Watering Can

The Watering Can plants a little flower garden in the map every 10 seconds. It looks cute and adds some nice blue flowers to your battleground. Enemies walking on you garden suffer minor damage for being jerks. 0.1 damage. Unaffected by the Bell. Which doesn't seem useful. But the Gardens also spawn coins every few seconds. Once you have several Gardens spawning coins, you'll be raking in the level-ups.

This is just 5 of the currently 30ish items in the game, a value that will grow a bunch as development continues. The idea is to have plenty of basic easy to understand items alongside some really strange ones that change the way you interact with a run, like the Water Can (do you play more sedentary to cultivate a close crop of coins?). This all boils into the larger change I worked on this week.

[h3]Make Pickups Fun[/h3]

This should feel obvious but balance and fun are a tight rope to walk. Originally, the Duster and other core stat changers adjusted a stat by 5%. Which helped a build and meant unique things would trigger here and there, but I wanted pickups to escalate the power trip faster. So I went through this week and nearly doubled every single passive pickup's output.

The issue I had is that whenever I had a choice between a new weapon or a passive pickup, I chose a weapon. The passive pickups just didn't have enough oomph. They do now. The Dropper, which used to give your weapons a 5% chance to poison an enemy now has a 10% chance. The Bracer, which reduces your weapon cooldowns, went from about 5% to around 8%. And the rate that the Watering Can planted Gardens decreased by around 2 seconds.

These changes gave a lot of life to these passive pickups that make them a lot more alluring. It speeds the game up slightly, it makes the power trip stronger, and it decreases the sometimes brutal difficulty we had as a match lasted close to the end. The chaos is more manageable if you know what you have and how to use it the best.




So there we go! A nice brief look and discussion of several pickups. This specific format of devblog will likely be used a couple more times to continue to show off items. Next week, I want to show off some different gameplay though that isn't just your standard Survivors style. Our stab at turning the Gauntlet formula into an auto-battler will be on the hot seat! Thanks for reading! And as always, if you like what you see - please wishlist, the algorithm will be happy!

Kyle