Rogue Fable IV update for 24 February 2024

Hello everyone. More of a modest update this week, just trying to clear out some of the stuff on my ever growing list of 'odds and ends'. So mostly just bug fixes, a bunch of little tweaks and bits of polish, some balancing and most importantly the first iteration of the levitation rework.

I'm planning on doing updates like this after every 3-4 regular updates just to make sure I'm keeping everything neat and tidy.

Levitation Change: Why?
This has been discussed in Discord quite a bit right back to the start of the project but simply put, levitation was way to powerful. More important then the raw power is the fact that levitation essentially removes a large amount of the games terrain tactics with no draw backs or limitations. Every run you essentially just got to roll a dice of whether or not you'd find a source of levitation and if you did, boom, suddenly a big chunk of tactics just disappeared and the game became substantially easier. There is almost no reason why any character, regardless of build would not immediately take a source of levitation.

So levitation was a massive binary power boost, with no drawbacks that just depended on luck whether you find it or not. It also grants this massive power boost by making large amounts of tactics irrelevant. Finally there was no real interesting decision to make here. Every character would always take levitation if given the option. Based on this I've decided to start tweaking how levitation works to start reigning in some of this excessive power.

Levitation Change: First Implementation
This is really just a first stab and likely doesn't go far enough but levitation will now be a stat that the player can 'accumulate' from various sources rather than a binary flag. Each item, talent or innate racial trait now grants +5 levitation and when the player moves over unstable terrain they automatically start levitating. A timer will then count down each turn, starting at the value of the 'levitation' stat, after which the player will stop levitating and any negative terrain effects will then apply. Moving to solid terrain will reset the timer. This is exactly the same implementation as how pits already work.

Levitation Changes: Possible Tweaks
From testing, obviously its a nerf to levitation but imo it doesn't quite go far enough. Interested to hear how everyone else feels but some possible tweaks I'm considering:

• Use smaller values for Levitation stat. For example if everything only gave +3 or even +2 all but the most specialized builds would still generally be looking to avoid unstable terrain as they simply couldn't 'float' for very long.
• We could make moving over unstable also tick the timer since currently the player can sprint all over it without ending his turn.

Ranked Mode:

• When a modifier like Deadly, Fast, Short-Cool-Down or Perfect-Aim is applied to an enemy, they also gain a 120%,130%,150% HP modifier. This helps raise the overall challenge level a bit without having to pile on additional modifiers that the player needs to keep track of. In fact, the change to HP can help remind more experienced players that the enemy has some sort of modifier applied. Furthermore giving them some extra HP allows them to survive a longer and actually make use of whatever modifier they have.
• This HP bonus will not stack so Deadly-Tanks + Fast-Tanks still results in 150%HP (at masters).
• We still have the Tough modifier which WILL stack (should this be the case?)
• Deadly-Toxic now applies to melee enemies with poison attacks.
• Boss-Regen modifier now gives bosses a faster than normal regen rate (otherwise its not noticable).
• Consumable-Lock is disabled when the player is on a cleared floor. Its annoying to use enchant scrolls or amnesia potions otherwise.
• Modifiers will not apply to dominated allies. From a balance perspective this is a no brainer otherwise every Ranked-Modifier simply becomes a boost to Dominate. From a lore perspective we could simply assume that Yendor is empowering his minions with these modifiers and so doesn't grant it to the players allies.

Player Balance:

• Increased rate of food consumption a bit again. Its still not tight at all and I don't necessarily want it to be but it shouldn't be completely irrelevant.
• Troll Food Speed 50% => 40% faster. Otherwise its too tight for the Troll. The goal I have is to get it so that a Troll in a non-ranked game, assuming he never rests, and uses shrooms very sparingly should not need to buy merchant food. So basically near perfect play in non-ranked should just barely allow the player to survive with dungeon food. Obviously non-perfect play and ranked modes will have a big effect on this.
• Summoned Skeletons have double regen (still isn't a lot), which should help them recover some health between fights without forcing the player to constantly wait.
• Added +1 base MP to all characters which should significantly increase their power level in the early game for newer players (they can cast 2 spells) without really changing mid to late game power balance.
• Reduced the base max monsters for dominate 2,4 => 1,2. Though dominate is almost always capped based on MP. This is at least still a step in the right direction to toning down what is likely still the strongest single ability in the game.
• When pulling an enemy adjacent to you with a whip they will now lose their turn (similar to knockback). This should make whips a lot more usable and I look forward to hearing all the ways this can be abused :P
• Centaurs now have an innate +1DEX. This could be +1SP. Really they just need a bit of a boost while I wait to do a proper reworking and starting with 2SP allows their innate SP regen to shine immediately.
• Mirror-Image 6MP => 4MP
• Re-removed those 6 extra items dropping in the later half of the game and removed another 4.
• A pretty big buff on most Tier-3 Equipment. Obviously connected to the previous point. I find that in the late game the player tends to find a bunch of stuff and like 90% of it is either useless or else is barely an upgrade. The vast majority of it just gets sold to the merchant. I'd rather have fewer items dropping in the end game but every piece of equipment that drops should be a serious contender for replacing something. I really want the player to go 'oh shit look at that!' when something drops in the later dungeon. Obviously since the dungeon is planned to eventually expand in size by anywhere from 25%-50% we'll end up with more drops anyway and this whole area will need to be continuously rebalanced.

User Interface:

• Ice-Lance: player can target anywhere on screen and it just shows the truncated targeting path (lots of ability targeting should probably be changed to work like this).
• Totally rewrote the whole keyBinding back end since it was a mess (everyone will need to rebind keys unfortunately).
• You can now rebind the Ability shortcut keys
• You can now rebind the Z (unsafe action) key.
• I'll tackle the other key rebinds the next time I do an update like this.
• The correct (rebinded) shortcut keys are now shown when you mouse over buttons on the HUD or mouse over dangerous terrain/objects.

Graphics:

• Added some first attempts at slash and cleave animations for basic attacks. I'll add an option toggle to turn this off for those who find it distracting.
• Sped up a lot of casting animations so that they don't pause combat as much.
• Redrew tents so that they look a bit better when you only spot the top half.

Bugs and Crashes:

• Fixed: Fire-Ball was warping with blinking enemies to their new tile.
• Fixed spelling: Reposte => Riposte
• A stunned enemy will now stop constricting you.
• Reflected Tunnel-Shots will now correctly deal damage to everyone on the rebound.
• Spawned enemies that fall into pits will no longer give exp (spanwed enemies are never supposed to give exp).
• Fixed that odd space between Encumbrance and :
• Fixed level generation crashes in Swamp and Iron-Forge and likely a bunch of other zones.
• Fixed: Completing a ranked game with Time-Limit and then starting another one that also had Time-Limit was causing the player to 'lose' while still in the character select menu if the previous clock ran out.
• Fixed: the players SP text was showing up in the scrolling backgrounds in the main menu.

Well that's it for this week. The plan for next week and at least the next 3-4 weeks is to start working on sub-zoning. So I'm gonna pick one of the sub-zones in my notes, draw some new tiles, add some new enemies, traps, objects etc. and insert it into the dungeon. So the next month or two should be pretty content heavy.

As always thank you everyone for your feedback and support and thank you everyone who has reviewed the game here on Steam! It helps a lot!