Continuation after the game jam

Hi all,

Now that the game jam is over, I've launched the next release of Kurabiyem. This hopefully fixes a few issues that popped up during the game jam that people commented on and adds the framework for new features.

First - Font fixes! I've adjusted the cards to no longer be biscuit coloured and have a solid white/black font with no outline. I believe this has increased the readability of the cards.

There have also been a few fixes to some of the cards that didn't do what they said they did on the card. 

In terms of new features:

A Map

During the game jam, I really wanted to make a map akin to slay the spire. A lot of games in this genre use a map and allow users to work out what opportunities and which risks they want to deal with. 

I ended up following the method found in this video: 

By essentially having a random walk down each starting node, as well as some slight randomization of positions of the nodes. Currently to show the node is able to be clicked, I have dimmed the other nodes, however this is a temporary measure and will be adjusted later. The current map setup for this build is a very basic map, mainly to represent the change from the previous system where players would select from essentially dialogue boxes, which I didn't particularly like.

Some new events

One of the things I've been working on is the structure for game events. One thing I noticed over the last two weeks while building up this version is that my previous system could only handle doing one event at a time. I.e. you started up an event, that event did a thing, you moved to the next event. This was a bit of a problem, for there are plenty of events where I want it to have some sort of sub-event equivalent and give me the result back. Eventually, I landed on an architecture which allowed me to do this. Essentially, some events are now flagged to have some sort of ambiguous result that is evaluated at runtime. Based off of that result, a branch event transpires and points the game to the next event that should trigger. This allows events to do things like let the player select a card to remove from their deck and get some sort of event based off of that decision (Basic slay the spire example). In the future, I'm hoping that I can tie some basic mini-games into it as well as some time limited battles or battles that have different rulesets. For now, there's been the addition of some rest events that do the following:

• Add a status effect to the player before they start a battle (e.g. player gains 2 rage and 1 exhaustion for their next battle.
• Remove a card from their deck
• Gain some max health
• Gain a perk...

Which springboards us nicely to the next topic.

Perks

Originally I had built the perks based off of the CodeOtter slay the spire series, where they go over how a perk can work and provide a code example. A perk technically existed in the game jam version of the game, however I didn't really have a way to reward it to a player. I also wanted to swap out the relatively generic name of perks to something else. Currently there is one perk available in the game.

As you can see, this is essentially a placeholder (And yes, I do have the word perk and artifact completely muddled in my codebase as I try and work out a more unique name for these things), however it essentially gives the player a new perk. This can be claimed at one of the events (although right now you can technically grab multiple which isn't ideal). I have some ideas for perks/artifacts/<insert name here objects> that will pop up as time goes on and I've worked out how I want them rewarded.

Classes

So in the original game jam version, the player would be greeted with a choice at the start of the game, which was essentially a player selecting what deck they started with. This definitely wasn't my first choice, but I thought it'd be the easiest way to do things for the game jam. Now that I've had a bit of time, I've circled around to the concept of character/classes. 

In my ideal scenario, I'd love to have this be akin to the Mario Bros 2. character select, where you have a little spotlight pop up on the character you select and they do some sort of animation, and not the black void of nothingness. Maybe one day. This screen has essentially replaced that first screen you see that lets you select your deck.

Each class has its own starting health and deck. Later I want to add more things like a perk to select and some deck variations or a draft mode.

Battle Screen Improvements/Additions

The battle screen has been adjusted to have some features that allow for a bit more understanding of what's about to transpire:

Firstly, the enemies now have intents! You can see what they're planning to do on the top of their heads. Secondly, the enemies now have basic health bars for more visuals. Third (which can't be seen in the above image) is that when damage or healing happens, a number will pop up to show how much damage/healing has happened. Fourth is the weather. Although currently nothing occurs to change the weather, the weather icon has been added to show the current weather of the battlefield, which will be discussed in a later release. Fifth is that status effects that are currently on the enemy can be hovered over (as well as the players) and a description box will explain what they are, and with that segue:

New Status Effect

There is a new status effect that mainly resides in the mage deck. Time dilation. Time dilationallows the player to delay any incoming damage for as long as they have time dilation up, however all damage is accumulated as Time dilation refraction. 

Each turn, a stack of time dilation will be removed. Once all time dilations stacks are removed, on the next turn, the stacks of time dilation refraction will damage the one that has this status. This means that in theory, you could stack up as much damage as you wanted provided you could keep stacking time dilation to stave off the refraction. There is also a card that plays off of time dilation refraction, which drains the refraction stacks and turns them into damage for an enemy. I'm not entirely certain how broken this mechanic is yet, but I find it quite enjoyable playing as the mage and spending turns keeping certain death away via time dilation.

With that, I'll also include a list of the current status effects as there's not currently an in-game explainer apart from when you hover over the status when you or an enemy already have it:

There were a number of fixes that I added into this version that I didn't think to note; I might grab Trello and start putting them down so I have something more substantive than my memory to write up these devlogs on. 

What's next?

My current priority is to work on a larger enemy variety that are at least slightly smarter than the current set and some bosses. At some point the game may receive a setting change as I've been working out a story/plot for the game. I'm hoping that the next release will play host to the first boss, Raff the Ember Knight. It wont have the art but I'm hoping at least the concept I have in my head for bosses will be prototyped by next release, which assuming my schedule is uninterrupted, will hopefully be next Monday! I'm going to try and make releases a weekly thing if I can (I do also have my regular 9-5 which takes precedence). Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the current version!