MoteMancer News

MoteMancer's sandbox has a very high skill ceiling. There are multiple ways to solve logistics problems by design, and players will naturally gravitate towards solutions that are intuitive to them. Another part of the fun though is exploring the full landscape of possibilities, and slowly evolving how you even approach a problem in the first place.

There was a specific joy in playing an expert modded Minecraft pack, because it really stretched your ability to understand game mechanics. Don't have a flint and steel? You can light a nether portal by getting a standing flame to light an adjacent leaf block on fire with lava. That level of mastery is something that can only be earned through extensive experience, and it's something I hope to live up to in MoteMancer.



[h3]Think Outside the Hex[/h3]

The incoming Foundations system that changes the rules of the world presents challenges in its own right, but through curation of a few specific sets of them, I can present a problem to the player that forces a sideways solution.

For example when Chromatic Fields is active, every Mote Patch has a randomized element per tile. You can of course live with a sushi belt in the early game and store some motes in chests that you can hand feed to bootstrap yourself, and beeline for filtering grippers. But what happens if filtering grippers are removed entirely?

One solution is that elemental collectors will only target matching motes, and you can arrange a new suite of varied collectors in a space that will pre-filter for you. I love this example because many players find joy in creating their own collector shapes and patterns, and this keeps that puzzle going, even after a hundred hours of mastery.

Most of the Foundations were made with this in mind, but we can also institutionalize it.



[h3]Catered Worlds[/h3]

Upon restoring your first Great Portal in MoteMancer, you will return to the Library and be welcomed home. But from here, there are more worlds to bring balance to.



You will be presented with a choice of three worlds to re-enter, carrying over the enduring knowledge from the previous run, but starting fresh with a new set of challenges. The current design for this is:

• A guaranteed Shattered set, where a given element is removed completely.
  
• A guaranteed Clean set, where a you start on a plane with 3 Foundations.
  
• A completely Random set. (almost)
  

One key design decision though is, while the first two cards pull from a curated set, the population of them also follows specific rules designed to avoid repeating the shape of your previous run. Did your last run start on the Water Plane? Did you use Ancient Spindles in your last run? None of the new options will give you that choice.

The goal of this system is to continue as MoteMancer always has - give you multiple paths to travel, but ensure that each one provides a meaningful and interesting challenge to rise to.



[h3]A Cornucopia of Challenges[/h3]

Of course you can always make your own homebrew challenge, such is the nature of a sandbox game. But I'm happy that MoteMancer will provide both the ultimate freedom to choose the table you set for yourself, but also curated ones that can't help but raise your mastery. I'm also planning on having a dedicated Foundations area that links directly to the Steam Workshop, so fellow MoteMancers can eternally challenge one another.

Foundations is coming together into something that consistently challenges both how you think and what you build. I want to make sure those flows are smooth before opening the floodgates, so with that, back to the lab. 🌿

~CyanAvatar

Short and sweet today because I have a lot of things to do!

While working on Foundations, I read some feedback that talked about the pain of random resource distribution and (so far) lack of knobs/sliders for world generation. It's always been sort of on the todo list, but Foundations feels so much richer than simple sliders that I wanted to see if I could address the feedback in a more deliberate way.


[h3]New Foundation: Twinseed[/h3]

One of MoteMancer's core hooks (and initial challenges) is that every resource patch you find is already a choice. Do you use Motes of Water as themselves? Or do you grind them into Salt for other purposes? So when you find a patch of Life and Water next to each other, it's sort of like a cheat code. You do have to deal with intermingling on collection, and there isn't space between them to work, but there's still a certain joy to doing all that combination work right on site.

So Twinseed is a new Foundation that institutionalizes that setup. Every single Mote Field will spawn with an appropriate twin right beside it. This creates a series of yin-yang-esque patch setups across the world, which is definitely an advantage but also fits more deliberately inside MoteMancer's world building and alleviates one of the early onboarding challenges with the game. It subtly teaches you the structure of the world, instead of just saying "Mote Fields are twice as frequent".




[h3]Why stop there?[/h3]

The lesson I took away from that bit of feedback wasn't just "I want sliders" (though I'm sure some still do), but more: what other Foundations are new players looking for that might help them get comfortable with a complex hexagon-shaped sandbox?

Here is the set I landed on for now:

• Apprentice Kit - A Simple Chest appears on your first Plane that has a few early Elemental logistics tools that will allow you to get a feel for them and experiment freely before researching them.
  
• Twinseed - As mentioned above, makes your early bases a little easier and more proximate.
  
• World Veins - Mote Fields are smaller but last forever, removing the pressure to find new resource patches or the anxiety of them eventually running out.
  
• Prism Portals - Usually portals take Keystones to unlock which are a significant tech and time upgrade from Prisms, but if you want to get on with exploring Planes sooner, this one is for you.
  
• Ancient Spindles - Preplaces giant structures that prevent Entropy from spawning. Destroying them releases Rifts, letting you engage Entropy on your own terms.
  

I chose these five specifically because they all solve a specific friction point while still creating gameplay of their own. Like I could have made 'peaceful mode' but - Ancient Spindles achieves the same thing, honors the world kit, creates a unique geometry puzzle, and still lets you engage with the adversary if/when you choose to.

I have always been a stickler when it comes to 'choose your difficulty' in games, but that is largely because Hard is such a relative term and doesn't mean anything out of context. Here I can at least give you the shape of the knob you are turning, and the agency to choose your own adventure.


[h3]The Bigger Picture[/h3]

Foundations are predominantly meant to add depth to MoteMancer, but that doesn't mean they need to strictly be extra challenge. The above 5 will be shown during tutorial selection next to the choice between Life and Fire, and then when tutorials are turned off, will be part of the larger pile of all Foundations available. This makes for a clean targeted introduction to the system hopefully without overwhelming a new player, and greasing their wheels as they learn. Later once familiar, they will be able to confidently dive into all the additional puzzles that the feature provides.

Alpha testing on the experimental branch is still going strong, if you'd like to join the Discord, leave a review, or send an in game bug report with your feedback, I read it all :)

Happy Monday! Back to the lab 🌿
~CyanAvatar

I've had two ideas in my head from very early on: some way to do infinite research, and some way to have very loose meta progression. It turns out, I think I can thread both needles.
Happy Monday, let's get into the weeds.


[h3]Factory Roguelite?[/h3]
Even when I see those words together it's scary. Factory game playthroughs are often dozens of hours long, so the idea of mashing it with Roguelite mechanics seems silly. But then again, how many different times do people reset their factory runs or try for a new achievement or just a new approach to the game for its own sake? I certainly do, over and over, all the time.

So with that in mind the next question becomes - if you do subsequent runs, do you get to take anything with you? Initially I had thoughts like:

• Keep your spells. Cool, but what do i do with those nodes in the research tree? Do I make replacements? What do they do? It gets messy quickly.
  
• Players choose a few researches to keep. Also cool but same problem as above. Plus do you get to start research half way up the tree?
  
• Stacking passives that persist. This feels like it has the same problems as the above. Or does it?
  

So it turns out that while trying to get hybrid research to be more interesting, I realized that hybrids are actually a better place to have infinite research live than the pure elements themselves. Sure I could say 10% more Solar Power but is that actually meaningful when you could just build a few more Mana Leaves and Mana Canopies? What happens if we start kitting after Combinations? Can we make infinite research not undermine other parts of the game?




[h3]Enduring Renewal[/h3]
I think this might be a case where we can have our cake and eat it too. Let me introduce you to the 6 planned Infinite Researches:

• Life/Earth - Enduring Flora - Harvesting Flora grants you +1 additional Mote.
  
• Earth/Fire - Enduring Collection - Collectors have a 10% chance to perform an additional collection each cycle.
  
• Fire/Shadow - Enduring Ritual - Increases Runeshroom Ritual effectiveness by 10%.
  
• Shadow/Air - Enduring Reach - Increases interaction range by 1.
  
• Air/Water - Enduring Speed - Increases movement speed by 10%.
  
• Water/Life - Enduring Capacity - Increases Mana Capacity by 20%
  

The thing I like about this list is none of these can be gained in other ways through more building. Further, many players mention how much they notice losing movement speed and reach range when starting a new run, which leads us to...


[h3]Why not both?[/h3]
All of the above have a few important things in common: they are generally useful, they don't break game balance, they are especially useful in the early-mid game when you aren't fully teched out yet, and they accelerate your early play safely. That means they are perfect candidates for the initial problem for "What do we carry over?"

I also like that half are player-centric and half are base-centric, so you can choose which you want to chase. And Enduring Flora is both great for early game resource gathering and the Collector bonus from Mystical Agriculture (yes the +1 counts for both). Making an infinite research check all these boxes robustly is super challenging, and I'm pretty happy with this suite overall.


[h3]Wait did you say Roguelite?[/h3]
So the current plan is there are two ways to play a run. You can either go to the New Game menu and play any combination of custom foundations you like - create your own challenges and sandbox. Or, once you return to the Library from a playthrough, after congratulating you, the Master Alchemist will present you with 3 other worlds in need of your talents, each with a unique set of Foundations. If you do choose to continue the journey, your Enduring Research will carry with you.

I think these are in a sweet spot where you are happy to have them, not distraught if you don't, and just enough incentive to try a random run with a little boost. At least that's the hope, the Foundations Update is fast approaching, and you can try it for yourself very soon!

Back to the Lab 🌿
~CyanAvatar

Happy Monday!

Affixes/Modifiers have been officially renamed to Foundations, and they are the central feature in the next upcoming patch, planned for February. Today I want to share some of the thought behind Foundations and give some specific examples along the way. Let's get into it.

Adjusting world parameters is common in many automation games, and usually comes in the form of percentage sliders or other forms of scaling and tuning. I think in large part it works well, but I also think MoteMancer is uniquely positioned to change the rules of the world and maintain one of MoteMancer's biggest strengths - continually keeping the logistics puzzle fresh and interesting. Given that freedom to change rules, the main goal of a Foundation becomes making your journey and problem solving unique and personal.



Foundations are rules of the world designed to change what you solve, not just how hard a solution is. The first two sets are super simple:

• Starting Plane - you can do this already through the Gameplay Menu, but it was one of the foundational (ha) ideas that began this feature.
  
• Shattered Plane - Pick a plane to destroy completely. All research (including combo research), Portals, and Motes of that Element are removed from the playthrough. There will be some recipe changes to accommodate this, and it can even make some runs easier in the right circumstances, but removing Bastions or Void Chests even on its own has pretty far reaching consequences.
  

After that we get into some of the more holistic categories:

• Entropy - There are many ways to modify Entropy in a playthrough beyond just tuning. My favorite is Ancient Spindles, which will place a giant Spindle structure on every Mote Field at world generation. Spindles prevent Rifts from spawning, but take up a lot of space, so you'll have to puzzle around them for Mote Collection. You can of course destroy them, but you'll quickly find they were placed for a reason...
  
  Miasma is another fun Foundation, where the world will be covered in Entropy at the start and you'll have to carve out into the world to build. This was actually one of the initial thoughts for how to interact with Entropy before it evolved to what it is today. This feels more like a challenge mode than the correct baseline experience though, so it belongs here.
  
  
• Research - A large portion of your resources and problem solving go into researching new technology and working your way through the research tree. Elusive Knowledge forces you to think more about the logistics side by simply doubling the required ingredients for a cycle. Now even a simple research that needs Elemental Life and a Salt Prism requires two of each - and 4 Pedestals. This makes shared research arrays more demanding especially as complexity grows.
  
  
• Motes - Everyone likes to experiment with resource generation. Prismatic Fields is a fun option with a lot of nuance - The simple rule is that each tile will randomly choose between the adjacent motes (Water/Life/Earth for example) rather than a full Mote of Life patch. Early on this means simple collectors will create a sushi belt of motes, but in the mid game, each Elemental Collector only targets its own Motes, so you get pre-filtering but have a new logistic puzzle to solve by arranging the unique collector shapes with each other.
  
  
• Structures - These come in a few different flavors. Fling simply doubles the reach range of every Gripper configuration. This is super helpful in some cases, but also completely changes the way you approach others. Weakened Tether creates additional plane blocking rules - in addition to Water, both Air and Life structures will also be blocked on the plane of Fire.
  
  
• Global - Other simple rules with far-reaching implications include Naturalist - Flora is indestructible; Phased Pockets - you have a unique Player Inventory per plane. As usual my ideal rules are simple ideas with significant cascading implications.
  

And lastly this feature allows me to make my favorite game mode - Elementalist. Elementalist simply disallows the building of Salt Slabs (including undergrounds) and Simple Grippers, and grants you access to the start of each elemental research. MoteMancer began this way, but there was so much to learn that Salt became its own 'element' that tied everything together and gave people a clean foundation to build upon. I still like the way MoteMancer evolved, and this feature created a perfect avenue to pay tribute to the original idea.

Of note, while a handful of Foundations are mutually exclusive, most are not. Prismatic Fields + Ancient Spindles. Fling + Shattered Earth + Elusive Knowledge. A quintessential explosion of logistics puzzles with a very high ceiling for mastery.



I'm so looking forward to getting this feature into player's hands. People always tell you to make the game you want to play, and with the addition of Foundations, this is absolutely that game. Automation games for me were always a zen garden of problem solving and just taking time to think in the moment. Just as much planning as playing, reveling in flow.

Thanks for being on the journey with me, back to the lab. 🌿
~CyanAvatar


PS - If you have any ideas for other foundations you'd like to see, do discuss them here or leave a suggestion in game. I'm very much looking forward to the modding community running with Foundations, but I'm also happy to implement community suggestions myself!

I don't spend many of these devlogs talking about design philosophy (though it happens regularly in our discord). Today’s topic is worth talking through carefully, even for my own sake.

MoteMancer has two mid-game flow points that could be better:

• End-Game Structures - like Sovereign Manaheart, Slipway, and Cloudspring Fountain - require keystones from two planes, which in itself is not problematic, but it does mean you also need interplanar logistics of some sort to start researching them, which adds several hours at minimum.
  
• Automation puzzles on each plane can feel samey once you’ve already solved a similar pattern on a previous plane. The logistics puzzle is still unique, but the production chain itself can feel repetitive.
  

Both of these problems feel like there's a single solution to fix them together, but it turns out there is a lot of nuance. It wasn't until my 6th or so idea that I finally came to a solution that felt like an actual improvement rather than a side-grade.



[h3]Immediate consequences[/h3]

The simple starting point to solve bullet 2 from, above is to require combo-element Structures as ingredients. Easy. Let's take Life/Water as our test case - this means that Verdant Streams and Primordial Manawells would become ingredients for Verdant Deltas and Coral Pools. That solves our 'make something more complex than an elemental prism' problem, but already reveals two issues: requiring the automation of Manawells just to get Verdant Deltas seems a bit extreme, and even if we swapped Deltas and Manawells, it's a little weird because you think of Verdant Streams as a precursor to Deltas conceptually. We'll get back to that, because there's another issue lurking.

Should you get End-Game Structures on your first Plane at all? This is tough because I want players to enjoy using powerful Structures, but I also think that your first Plane already has so much to offer - you are learning 3 elements (not to mention the game as a whole), and visiting your second Plane should be a goal in your mind sooner than later in general. For the sake of argument, let’s assume visiting a second Plane should be required - how do we do that?




[h3]Exploring Paths[/h3]

All of design is tradeoffs, so let's talk through some of the ways to achieve our goal of second Plane:

• Require Keystones for the legs of research - Verdant Streams take Life Keystones; Manawells take Water Keystones. This is elegant because it naturally gates the later researches, and was my favored plan for a while, but has many downsides. You guarantee that you split the kits up for synthesis research - your first plane would get Verdant Streams OR Manawells, not both, worse you wouldn't get Verdant Deltas at all until plane 2. That can be fine, but then you need to assign which of the two pieces are most useful to one element or the other. For some this was an easy sell, like Fire rituals from Blazecaps belong to Fire, where Ritual size from Radiantshrooms belong to Shadow. Others are kind of iffy - does Earth want Burrowroots and Rooted Grippers as much as life does? Does gating either of them by a Plane make sense? Does gating even one of them behind Keystone research make sense? It feels like we are solving a problem, even elegantly, but making just as many new ones.
  
• Require researching Coral Pool simply but on each Plane - This would be something like a Life Keystone requirement on the Life plane and a Water Keystone requirement on the Water plane. This solves the not needing interplanar logistics problem, but now you have to automate the lesser ingredients twice, which taps back into the samey vibe we were trying to avoid. Plus it's a lot of extra UI to explain it.
  
• Allow research from multiple Altars to contribute - This is a really cool idea actually, where you have a global or phased Altar that can take ingredients from any plane and combine them into a given single research recipe. While awesome, this is a pretty significant paradigm shift, and feels better left to an Affix or something. Yay picking up ideas along the way to solving a problem though.
  
• Contextually change the recipe depending on your starting plane - So in this case Coral Pools would take Water Keystones (and the smaller Structures) if you started on Life, but then change to Life Keystones if you started on Water. We're getting close, this solves all the earlier tech and elegantly solves the last tech, but the kit would feel super weird. Why does this Ultimate Combo research only require one of the constituent elements?
  
• Requires Completely Restoring a Life/Water Portal - getting even closer now, this proves that you can automate Life and Water Keystones without requiring them together, and has a reasonable fantasy to it, but it's still a little detached. It's still a good option and feels like we're giving up the least so far, mostly what you pay is a forced pacing moment (restore the way back even if you are not planning on using it right now).
  

After exploring all of these options...


[h3]The Simplest Path might be the Right One[/h3]

What if we literally just say - Locked until entering a second Plane - and put a lock icon on the research itself. This has several nuanced benefits:

• Incredibly clean and clear UI.
  
• Plants a clear goal without a tutorial.
  
• Opens up Two End-Game Structures at the same time (Coral Pool and Cloudspring Fountain will both be available upon setting foot into Water). Giving you a little more to explore and enjoy.
  
• Ties back into how Entropy currently works, where traveling to a new plane changes the world state (and in this case, how aggressive Entropy and Rifts are).
  
• Leaves all the simpler structures free and clear to be categorized in whatever way makes sense.
  

This feels very clean and lives up to Shigeru Miyamoto's - "A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once." I think it's important to highlight how many ideas you can riffle through that seem good at first glance, but have undesirable cascading consequences as you think through them.

I guess I'm full of quotes today but I'm reminded of "I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one." Design is the same way - the simplest and most elegant solution often requires the most amount of time and thought.





[h3]Experimental Up Soon![/h3]

So this whole story is a long way of saying - I wanted to shore up this research and pacing problem before moving on to Affixes because its a significant structural change, and it's worth having it available for testing while building towards the full update. To that end, I'm also going to make the alphatest feedback channel in the discord public - making it private was sort of an old habit that no longer makes sense. This way you can see the conversations happening even if you aren't actively participating.

MoteMancer runs on community feedback so feel free to comment here or join the discord. And I just want to say that design is always 'the best idea I have right now' and is always open to improvement. The Experimental branch with new research will be up soon - look out for a minor patch update!

Back to the lab 🌿
~CyanAvatar