Hello everyone!
Glad I could come back with some new things to talk about and some new screens to show off.
The first item on my list today is what I've been doing with some of the monster intelligence. What I have been trying to accomplish here with Dungeons of Daggerhelm is turn it into a real bullet hell game that makes you really *fear* being hit by a projectile. So to make this aspiration a reality, I've been tooling around with some of the early monsters you'll encounter in some of the zones, such as in the Grasslands and a few bits here and there in the dungeons and Death Foundry.
The three monsters that I've been messing around with are the Slate Imp (red demon), Prime Slate Imp (green demon), and the Slate Bat (red bat).
The Slate Imps have quite a few changes, being that their movement is more centralized and complex, moving around at different angles rather than simple left-right-up-down directions. Their projectiles are also managed with a time variable instead of a random chance variable, increasing the steadiness of fireballs and minimizing unfair damage surges.
The Prime Slate Bats have the most changes. I added a secondary projectile, a large fireball, that blasts out slowly enough for the player to dodge if they are paying attention. The small and large fireballs are now also controlled by time variables, and their movement is also centralized, but they are tougher than regular Slate Imps to kill.
Slate Bats have only one change: they now shoot small fireballs at the player in order to add a bit more havoc to the bullet hell scenario. I will most likely change the color of their own fireball to make sure that the projectiles are not confused with one another.
Balance Changes
Lots of balance changes. Like, the last four days have been nothing but filled with balance changes.
Revealed to me via a friend's play test, the sorcerer was overpowered to the extreme. So overpowered that by level 20, her mana does not decrease with the use of her secondary attack (RMB). Her mana consumption has been increased as well as the level scaling to the mana cost to cast her spells. Even despite this, her basic attacks are still really powerful.
Overall player health, player mana, xp, enemy damage, and enemy health have been adjusted for testing. I am looking to find out the sweet spot for these particular values because they all impact each other. One slight change and they can throw the system out of whack. For example, if the level scaling value is changed by a mere 0.1, it can mean an incalculable increase of health at higher levels.
The same goes for enemy damage. If the player's health is lowered, but the enemy damage values aren't reduced to compensate for the player's stat change, the player can become overwhelmed by damaging attacks fairly easily. The opposite is true: the enemy could become too underpowered if their damage and health aren't appropriated for any changes.
That's as much as I'm willing to explain for now. Many more things have occurred over the last week, but I'll be adding them into another news article soon!
