Hello everybody!
Another busy week, with a good amount of progress! I can now finally talk in a bit more detail about the gameplay tweaks and changes I've been making- up until recently they were still very much a work in progress, but now many have been implemented and are working nicely I think I can finally share with you some more specifics...
So part of the deck-building revamp was re-working some of the residential mechanics. Residential buildings collect points, which makes them some of the most important cards in the game. In the preview version there were a range of point-collecting buildings ranging from the basic house, the 2x variants (townhouse, duplex), the 3x (tenement) and x4 (apartment tower). Here's some of the changes I've made to them:
-Houses are pretty much the same, but due to the new system of gaining character skills, the automatic addition of house cards has been changed slightly (more on that soon- it'll be easier to explain when I outline these changes in a future dev blog update).
-Townhouses also remain the same. They collect 2x points but are also automatically added to your deck instead of houses after a certain point. They were quite essential to being able to stay in the game, and I didn't want to leave that to the randomness of the card screen. Plus- houses became next to useless towards the mid-late game, why punish the player by giving them loads of boring houses when you can have townhouses instead?
-Duplexes used to be identical to the townhouse and collect 2x points. The original idea was to have another double point building to increase the chances of being able to acquire them through the card screen. This isn't really needed any more, so the Duplex card has been changed to be similar to the house (x1 score), but it starts with a score of +2. It's also a 'one shot' card -of which there are now many- which means the card is removed from your deck after it's played. To compensate, it's now also more common and has a lower cost.
-The 3x and 4x cards I felt were a bit too powerful, especially as repeating cards. To compensate I've removed the 3x card completely. I do have some (currently 1) 4x card- but it's a legendary one-shot card. Quadruple points is super powerful!
But in addition to this I've implemented an awesome new concept- 'tower' buildings. Tower cards can be built on top of each other in addition to being able to be built on empty land. These can be really useful as any player of megacity or the preview version will know- space quickly becomes the most important resource in the game.
So the residential tower card is essentially like a house, but it also gives +1 to itself, and you can build it on top of other residential tower buildings (stacking up to a maximum of 6). Of course there are some unique graphics to visualize the stacking:
And why stop at residential towers? I've also implemented the same concept with the 'office block' building- you can build it on top of itself to save space and build an office tower. I'm currently trying to figure out an industrial version -perhaps the storage silos from a few updates ago.
These have proven to be some great additions/changes so far. Success in-game is more under your control now, and the player has some interesting new options available to them. The super powerful 4x point buildings will still be available for ridiculous scores, but they will be rare and limited- best use them wisely when you come across them!
I'll share some of the other key changes in the coming weeks.
