April Development Log - Challenges, New Enemies, New Traits

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April (and March) Development Log

I am back, with another Aetherdale development log. I'm going to call these logs rather than updates from now on - it fits more closely with what this is, rather than implying some functional update to the public-facing game. I also may change the interval at which I post these, although I'm not sure about that yet. Sometimes there just doesn't seem to be enough to present, or my mind blanks on what I've done for the last month, even though progress is still being made towards a complete game.

    For the most part, March and April have been a matter of fleshing out the gameplay loop. It's hard to describe concisely but there's just a lot that needs to be done to make this feel like a game, rather than t the world's least impressive tech demo. Some of those things are what the sections of this development log will be about. My hope is that I built them in a way that allows more rapid development down the line, but time will tell.


    

Challenge Tablets

Or maybe Ancient Tablets, or Trial Tablets, or Elemental Trial Tablets, or some other name along those lines. These are runic stones left by an ancient civilization, predating even the Ithindar. When activated, they will spawn higher level elite enemies of the element they correspond to. Should you defeat all of those elites, you'll gain a trait which also corresponds to that element. These traits are as follows:

  • Fire Challenge - "Catalyze" - upon killing an enemy, it explodes, dealing fire damage to nearby enemies.
  • Water Challenge - "Bubble Shield" - places a watery shield around you, which has a chance to absorb incoming damage.
  • Nature Challenge - "Unyielding" - every so often, when low on health, you will gain a surge of health regeneration to bring you back to nearly full health.
  • Storm Challenge - "Voltage" - attacks have a chance to create chain lightning
  • Light Challenge - "Seeking Spirits" - every so many seconds, emit a seeking Light projectile at the nearest enemy
  • Dark Challenge - "Shadow Step" - every few seconds, become invisible when you dodge

A challenge tablet

These tablets provide a little bit more risk/reward dynamic to the game, and also more to do in each level (which is the game's biggest weakpoint at the moment, in my opinion)






More Elites Finished

Just being harder to kill isn't enough to make an elite enemy a proper threat. I touched upon Water/Storm elites in the December log, but the elite enemy system was practically in its infancy back then. I've since given Nature and Dark elites effects too:
  • Nature Elites provide a buff to all (non-player) creatures around them that significantly increases health regeneration.
  • Dark Elites get an absurd amount of lifesteal, meaning if they git a hit in on you, you're going to be in for a long fight.
These effects will also make Challenge Tablets a much greater threat. Having five elites spawn from a Nature Tablet and heal each other and everything around them is a significant problem if your damage per second is subpar.


Ithindar Vanguards (and the Danger System)

This guy took me wayyyyy too long to finish, and is probably singlehandedly responsible for there not being enough content for a March dev log. The Ithindar Vanguard is the frontline of the Ithindar empire - they get in their enemies faces and disrupt them as much as possible while their backline allies deal damage from afar. It's main weakness is that it doesn't do much damage on it's own.

    You won't encounter these guys right away, though. Alongside the Vanguard's development, I reworked some of the enemy spawning code to be mindful of how long the run has been going. There is now an invisible "Danger Level" which ticks up each time you move to a new area, and for each second you stay in one area. This may be tweaked to also take into account the number of enemies killed. 

    The main thing the danger level affects is the number, and type, of Ithindar spawned. Shortly into a run you'll begin to see Imps, the little invisible guys with daggers, followed by the Rangers featured in the last update, followed by, eventually, the Vanguards. By portal-skipping across Aetherdale, you are effectively increasing the Ithindar's awareness of a disturbance, and drawing more of them to contest your presence.

    I would eventually like to expand this mechanic to be something almost like a GTA "wanted level", where you can attempt to manage how covertly you're going about your quest. Although I'm not even sure that would feel good in this game. If you have thoughts on such a mechanic, or suggestions for it, please submit them via the Discord feedback bot.

An Ithindar Vanguard, missing only a few last graphical adjustments



In Summation

Thanks for reading the dev log. If you are free to playtest at any point let me know, it's very helpful to get people's thoughts on the gameplay. In-person playtesting is ideal right now but I'm working on getting Aetherdale's Steam multiplayer up to the same standards as singleplayer. There always ends up being a few elusive bugs when I prioritize adding content over making it multiplayer-stable.



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