Changelog for revision 8172

Major changes (these are discussed in detail below):

1. Added Emergency Mode.
   
2. Added Perimeter Shield.
   
3. Removed "Best Battle" and "Best Journey" leaderboards. "Best Day" is now the only leaderboard for Infestation (and it's called just "Infestation").
   
   For characters in the middle of an Infestation journey, the following changes take effect the next time they sleep or die.
   
   
4. Removed difficulty setting from Infestation. Battle parameters have been reworked and result in an experience similar to what you used to get at the hero difficulty setting.
   
5. Made sleeping remove all bonuses.
   
6. Made victory perks (formerly known as journey perks) in Infestation much higher (as high as they are in Doomsday).
   
7. Made characters dying in Infestation respawn at the last camp they slept in, losing only the camps they've captured since. Note that only sleeps initiated in the new version count. If your last sleep was with any previous version and you die, your journey just ends.
   

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Minor changes:

• Added fog of war to the world map.
  
• Made captured camps no longer stay visible in subsequent journeys.
  
• When you hover over a character attribute at the world map menu, pending battles now indicate how much their special bonuses contribute to that attribute.
  
• Removed the surrender option from the battle screen. It still exists on the pause menu during a battle and is now the only option to force an Infestation journey to end prematurely.
  
• Made battle music in Doomsday now depend on battle rather than camp.
  
• Improved the character idle animation slightly.
  

Bugfixes:

• If your character has a non-natural skin color, entering the "Modify character" menu inadvertently changed it to a natural tone.
  
• Updated audio lib to Soft-OAL 1.23.1 which seems to fix some occasinal audio glitches.
  
• Changing the Windows default sound device (e.g. by plugging or unplugging headphones) while the game was running resulted in audio output to stop until the game was restarted.
  
• World map camp tooltip sometimes said "not enough wave points" for captured camps.
  
• Cancelling a replay download that was initiated on the main menu caused the game to crash.
  
• Some tooltips for skill devices were misleading as they referred to outdated mechanics.
  

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Detailed discussion

►►► 1. Emergency Mode is finally here and it's huge! Initially, I only envisioned it as remedy for a technical issue with the leaderboards. However, the game's hiatus of over 30 months (due to RL issues, long story) gave me plenty and much needed opportunity to question and rethink a lot of game design decisions. What I eventually came up with fixes a ton of fun-killing problems all at once - but, ironically, not the leaderboard issue (see item 3).

The idea behind Emergency Mode is quite simple. During battle, your score charges an alert meter. Once you reach at least level 1, you're eligible to enable Emergency Mode from the battle screen. When you do, two things happen: you won't get any more score for the remainder of the battle, but the skills you equip in each wave provide individual, powerful bonuses. Basically, you trade some score for improved survivability.

This seemingly simple mechanic has far-reaching consequences.

• It lets you reduce the game's difficulty right when you need it. This is important because the fun in Myriavora depends a lot on hitting that sweet spot of difficulty where it's challenging but not frustratingly hard.
  
• The emergency bonuses are a lot of fun because they're powerful enough to turn a hopeless situation into victory. For example, all skills with cooldown period get action points as an emergency bonus and the cooldown is suppressed for as long as you've got action points left. Imagine spamming an ultra-level Energy Wave! Or Insulation Blanket firing multiple times in a row as you accidentally slight into a puddle of poison!
  
• Emergency bonuses are "themed", i.e. each skill provides the type of bonuses that match its use cases. For example, defensive skills provide health, attack skills provide energy, tactical skills provide upgrade points, and so on. This makes picking the loadout more interesting as there're now more possibilities to build individual tactics and strategies.
  
• And it's not just for beginners! Emergency bonuses typically come as a mixture of short-term and long-term effects. Which means you could intentionally sacrifice the score of one battle to improve your score in the following ones and come out with a net plus if done right.
  

►►► 2. If you're on an Infestation journey, you get access to a new feature called Perimeter Shield. In each battle, it becomes available one wave after you've engaged Emergency Mode. If the situation is so dire that even Emergency Mode is not enough to survive the battle, you may switch the shield on and end the battle immediately. You won't leave with a lot of score or bonuses, but you'll survive and sometimes that's enough to count as victory.

The Perimeter Shield is not available in Doomsday because I don't think it fits the theme. Also, Doomsday journeys are already quite short by design, so skipping waves wouldn't make much sense.


►►► 3. Steamworks leaderboards are limited to 32 bit signed-integer values, which means they can't handle scores above around 2.1 billion. In January 2022 it dawned on me that this would sooner or later become a problem for Infestation's "Best Journey" leaderboard. This is why I came up with Emergency Mode in the first place. The idea was to invent a reason (some sort of spider uprising or whatever) that forced Emergency Mode on players after they capture some number of camps, thus limiting the score they can achieve on a single journey.

However, it eventually occurred to me that people competing on the leaderboards probably gonna hate any arteficial limit enforced upon them, no matter how it's implemented or justified. It would be a pity if people started to hate Emergency Mode just because, from their perspective, it gets in the way of achieving a highscore.

I don't think there's a solution to this other than removing the problematic leaderboard. And honestly, why would Infestation need three leaderboards anyway when their's just one for Doomsday? Once I accepted the fact that I need to remove a leaderboard, I immediately knew that the "Best Battle" leaderboard had to go as well. Only "Best Day" stays in the game and is now simply called "Infestation".

So now there's just one leaderboard left for Infestation and one for Doomsday. I made a ton of small and big adjustments for gameplay and scoring to ensure that they eventually end up at roughly similar highscores. This is a clean and straight forward solution and exactly how I should've done it from the very beginning.


►►► 4. Infestation no longer has a difficulty setting. Rather, you're always playing at maximum difficulty, but you can adjust the effective difficulty at any time using Emergency Mode and Perimeter Shield. Which is an infinitely better solution compared to guessing, picking, and sticking to a fixed difficulty setting for an entire journey.

However, if your character is in the middle of an Infestation journey, you won't notice a change right away. You'll keep your old setting until the next time you sleep, die, or start a new journey.


►►► 5. + 6. When you sleep, you'll lose all bonuses. You only get to keep your gear and progress on the world map, of course. The old "journey perks" are now called "victory perks" and no longer survive sleeping. This enabled me to make them much higher - as high as they're in Doomsday. These high bonuses have been one of my favourite parts of Doomsday, and this change alone, as simple as it was, already made Infestation significantly more enjoyable im my opinion.


►►► 7. Dying in Doomsday has never been a big issue because a Doomsday run doesn't take long. You can easily do one in a lazy afternoon.

That's not possible with Infestation, especially if your goal is to secure all camps (which I suspect is what a lot of people are probably going for). Losing all progress of an Infestation journey already feels way too brutal and it's going to get worse the more camps I add.

Conceptionally, this was easy to fix. Since I already have a sleeping mechanic, the obvious solution was to make players respawn at the camp they last slept in, losing only the progress they've made since. And that's exactly how I implemented it.

However, on a technical level, this was everything but easy. The game simply wasn't prepared for any type of undo mechanic. It took me a week to get this to work even remotely, and then another very annoying week to fix all the bugs. But now it works great and that's all that counts.


That's all for now. Enjoy the game!