This is part 7 of my making of an Idle Game. And here are some of the things that I have worked on, am working on, will be working on, and will not be working on.
Guardian 2 Storyline
After pushing out v0.72 and having cloud save download, I could finally move on to other more exciting stuff. With only about a month left before school starts, I hope to at least get Guardian 2 out. That would also mean that I want to wrap up on this game and hopefully finalize the content. This also means that with the release of Guardian 2, content generation for the game will come to a halt soon. I’m not sure if I can juggle schoolwork and Enchanted Heroes simultaneously and even so, it will be extremely exhausting for me.
Anyhow, here’s a picture of the new boss that I just drew. It will be part of the Guardian 2’s storyline. You may get to fight him.
As you probably can tell by his looks, he will spawn somewhere in a forest zone.
There will be some new really minor storyline related items. This is a new item that may look familiar to some players because of the item that this was inspired from:
I actually feel like improving some of the monster art, especially the bosses. Perhaps when I have the time to, I will be replacing some of the monsters.
UI Change
Some days ago I had a chat with one of my friends who was providing feedback for my game. He drew up a mock of how the UI can be improved on a sheet of paper. I think it would be great if the game could have this new UI, but it frankly is a lot of effort.
As much as I like to think that it’s just shifting things around as and when you like for fun, it is really not that straightforward.
I probably won’t have time to work on this and I may not even get to doing it since it is really quite a lot of work and this by the way, means that there will need to be two separate UI layouts for the mobile and WebGL versions, again, this can get messy if not done well. Furthermore, when I built this game I didn’t intend to have the game be able to support dynamically switching UI elements around like that.
Anyhow, here were some UI improvements I made for the game recently.
I noticed many people wanted to see their maxed upgrades remain in the shop, so I made them retain in the shop but move them to the bottom so they don’t block or make it troublesome to find unpurchased upgrades. I also made them greyed out a little. (See the above screenshot of the comparison between normal shade and darkened shade of the upgrade)
I also added a border around skill icons to signify what class the skill originated from.
I think this is the cleanest way to do it and to easily distinguish a buff/active skill. I might thicken the border since it looks pretty small.
Minor Skill Balancing (and the MP regen problem)
Skill Balancing is something I may never get to work on because of how little time I have left before school starts on 23rd July.
But I rolled out a minor skill patch. I actually have a BIG list for skills. But I may not have time to implement all. I may roll them out in minor patches, or not at all.
Here was the first minor change – the mana cost of Resurrect.
On the right, you can see the old absurd values, and on the leftyou can see the new values. The cost of resurrect was too high to make it useful especially in higher levels, so it was decreased. It was also capped at 75,000.
On the other hand, I want to solve the problem of “priest has lack of mana”, which appears many times in comments. I realised this is happening because the EXP cost needed to upgrade the skill falls much lower than the gold cost required to upgrade the earring’s MP regen. I think most people didn’t get that it was better to save your EXP if upgrading a skill means that it takes your toll on mana – I guess I didn’t design the mechanic well so it isn’t easy to tell straightaway that you should level down your skill if that happens. I guess trying to add a bit of ‘MP or resource management’ and adding some strategy on what your skill levels should be at didn’t exactly turn out the way I wanted to. Oh well.
Ideally, just when the cost of the skill gets too high, you should be able to get enough gold to upgrade your MP regen, but right now the skill’s EXP cost does not scale fast enough to keep up with the gold cost, which makes it easy to quickly upgrade a skill and before you know it – BAM! It’s costing loads of MP, loads more than how much MP you actually have.
Final Boss?
When making this game, I had planned for a boss every 100 zones, up to the 500th Zone. Unfortunately I was not able to design them all in time and only created the Warlock and the Zone 200 boss. To wrap up this game, I may add a final boss. The final boss will either replace the current Zone 200 boss or be a new Zone 300 boss.
Adding it as a Zone 300 boss is going to take a lot more time as content and story needs to be developed. Though I have a story script that is being developed for Zones 150-250, it takes time to add all that in and implementing such stuff is a real time killer. If done wrongly, the game turns out being grindy and not very fun. It is easier to make it replace the current Zone 200 boss, but it depends on how much time I can dedicate to this game.
The art for the final boss was done long ago, but did not get added into the game due to the lack of time. I may or may not be adding a boss at or after 200. But if you do see it, it might not be a good sign since it means that I will stop updating this game once the final boss is out.
YYZ 