Things you want to see worked on in the polishing phase between Temple 3 and 4.

[Own]

SoG is going into a general-game-polishing phase after Tai Ming hits standard, apparently. What areas of the game do you think need a little loving in that timeframe?

- Housing. (Is almost finished!)

- Arcadia redo. (Being worked on.)

- Mt. Bloom & Tai Ming Arcade areas. (Being worked on.)

- Making Arcade less of a hell-on-earth experience for 3 and 4 player parties.

- Competitive, random daily arcade runs.

- The planned new Zelda-like potion system.

- Fixing the 'players using all potion types at once' problem by adding a 3-5 second cooldown between potion usages.

- Adding a notice board to Evergrind, for adding more character to the NPCs / giving players a heads-up on things as they progress through the story. http://secretsofgrindea.com/forum/index.php?threads/evergrind-notice-board.5230/

- Adding more context specific game over messages outside of boss battles. Bag should only generically berate the player when these messages are satisfied. (Ex: Character dies with nothing in the armor slot? "Were you born without any survival instinct? Go to the armory and buy a shirt!" Dies to a Halloweed? The use-your-shield message.)

- Adding missing sounds earlier in the game. Dad's opening cutscene laugh is the only unvoiced laugh in the game. Hearing the harmonica playing would be a nice touch too.

- Fixing pets. Max level 10, and making them not just be generic. The reason for them all being generic was something along the lines of not wanting someone to feel like they had to use one or another, but the current format favors getting rabby or slime and using that the rest of the game. There's no reason to switch from your first pet at level 5 to a present later on, unless you really like wasting a ton of resources. Say, jumpkins give an extra +1 atk speed per level independant of what you level them for, bees +1% crit per 2 levels, chickens +1% HP.

- Adding bosses to the hall of memories, even if they don't drop anything, or if the 'Bosses gain 5 levels per kill' thing isn't planned. Just being able to rebattle them harder and harder would be immensely fun.

- New talents, particularly for wizards.

- Buffing weaker spells.

- Debuff shadowclone to the point where battle requires more finesse than 'Stand still + Mash Z to win.' Even flamethrower requires constant movement and dodging.

- Add all the missing bosses / mini-bosses to the beastiary, if only for completion sake, letting players know just how many enemies are actually in the game. Sentry, Marino, Black Ferrets Trio, Toy Machine, Bossling, Living Rune Block, Queen Bee, Elder Rabby, all three Season Hydras, all three Mimic bosses and Enraged Giga Slime. Also for adding a Kill/Death counter to each one, letting you know which enemies were your hardest to beat.

- Adding at least one more support skill and removing the rest of the locks, because all those locks look bad. Would preferably like for support skills to cap at 5, too, to discourage wasting gold points on them.

- Adding in the mechanic that teaches 5 silver points unlocks silver charge, then gold points can be put in.

- More skill-based achievements (i.e: Perfect guard 10->25->50 different types of attacks) even if they don't necessarily have rewards prepared yet. You could just give the player 'Reward Token #1 - This will turn into an item in the future!', though... maybe some people wouldn't like that.

- Adding in at least a small entrance screen for the area to the fourth dungeon to kill the last 'not in the game yet' message.

 

[KoBeWi]

PvP.
Not like it's important to me, but I wonder if there isn't a cheap way to implement it. I imagine that you could make an enemy class that is a player wrapper. So you could have an enemy, whose AI is replaced with other player's input, and all methods and states normally for enemy, would be called for player inside the class (so, a wrapper). That sounds relatively easy to do, and even if it's not best way, if it would work, players would have some PvP to play with.

I actually tried to make a mod that does this, but I failed to fully recompile the game's code, and I couldn't start working on anything if if the game source didn't run

 

[Teddy]

Time to put on the rambling hat

I actually think PvP will be one of the most work intensive features yet to be added to the game

As you say very basic PvP would be quite easy to add (in fact we had PvP back in the day), because apart from some adjustment on target selection, all I have to do is to add other players as valid targets for attack collisions.

But then the players would play against each other with the same ruleset as versus enemies, which means stuff like... every basic attack triggers hitstun and invincibility time, most players would be dead after one spell, the host would have a massive advantage, etc.

We have some dreams that PvP might have potential to be somewhat interesting and not just a joke feature (which it totally was when we first had it in), so we want to take care in designing the feature. I'm talking about stuff like... how much less damage should stuff do vs. players? Should players withstand knockback better when damaged by other players, to avoid stunlocking, or should stunlocking be allowed for combos but there's a "clinch" system with knockback+invinciblity that resets the battle? If so, when should this system trigger? How should debuffs be handled? Are they as strong vs. players as vs. enemies? Etc etc.

As for network latency issues, of course these can't be completely negated, but I think I could erase quite a bit of server advantage without significantly harming the experience by adding a delay on when the server's attack hitboxes actually ran (so the animation plays but the hitbox is registered some milliseconds later, which is exactly how clients perceive things). Some delay could be equalized that way, and some delay could be equalized by clients fast forwarding through buildup frames. These things would, of course, scale depending on the latency and have a cap where the game gives a warning that the latency is too high. It's theory crafting but based on my work to improve enemies throughout the game, I think it could be somewhat effective within certain ranges.

But yeah, that system is a completely different beast to tackle than a basic "4 da lulz"-solution, and so the feature has been put on hold for the foreseeable future!

 

[Own]

- Adding in a +5 level difference warning for hosts. If someone hosts a game of SoG at level 5 and someone level 20 joins in, it would be so nice if chat popped up with a message like, "Playing SoG with higher level characters will remove any challenge from bossfights. Consider using a lower leveled or new character!" When people level 25 drop into level 1-5 games to show off and ruin every enemy and boss they come across instantly, it's sad times. ):

- Alternatively implement an overlevel scaling-back system. Every level over the host a character is, reduce all sources of damage, DEF and HP by some %?

- Add a 'Pet Food' icon to items, similar to 'Crafting'. So we can see what items are 100% vendor trash.

- Fix all the spelling/grammar errors in the Flying Fortress? Or elsewhere that have been reported.

 

[KoBeWi]

we had PvP back in the day

Secret command that enables this?

 

[Teddy]

- Alternatively implement an overlevel scaling-back system. Every level over the host a character is, reduce all sources of damage, DEF and HP by some %?

That's what the mythical "Mentorship" option is supposed to be doing whenever it finds its way into the game

Secret command that enables this?

Currently no, but the code is still in the game so I might give it a quick inspection and if it "works" let people play around with it!

 

[res7less]

I'm not very much of a mage player, but objectively I agree that mages need to get some love at last, be it spells or talents. The problem I see with it is that it's very likely only going to be temporary, because the skill trees aren't complete yet. As soon as they're complete, another rebalancing will be required, so all the "core" changes to mages (and other builds) will be needing new reconsideration. Perhaps mages could get a temporary solution that doesn't take too much time to implement but holds until the skill system is complete and everything can be done proper. Something like flat damage buffs or EP cost reduction for the least used skills. Frost especially needs some help against bosses as there are not benefits at all as frost has lower damage than other schools and bosses can't be frozen. Perhaps giving skills that chill guaranteed crits on chill-immune targets on a successful chill or something along those lines. The third Mimic phase was great as frost, though.

Personally I'd also like to have some more achievements, but that definitely should be one of the last things to be added to the game. It's nice and all, but as long as there are more essential things that require attention, achievements should have the lower priority.

Another thing that's lacking are treasure maps. There are way more zones since the last treasure, so new treasure hunts should be a thing. To be honest, though, this is a task you could actually outsource on the community, with an official "Give us treasure map riddles!" thread and all. Afterwards you could pick the ones you like and implement them to save yourself the time to think of those yourselves. The treasure map mechanic is very gimmicky and doesn't need that much experience in game developing to be good - I'm sure some people here can come up with some decent riddles for the new zones.

And lastly something, that I would personally like: the grand opening of the Evergrind City Library. <3 With books on Evergrind history, the Goddess, funny stories, old newspaper articles, diary outtakes and other great stuff to read about. Gimme, gimme!

 

[Own]

I think a bunch treasure maps have been done for the past 1-2 years, it's just there's never been time to implement them. Or they don't have enough treasures associated with them. I remember seeing some for Temple of Seasons ages ago.

 

[Own]

Oh! I almost forgot, going back and adding elite mechanics to all enemies that don't have them. Do Toxic Tulips have an elite ability? If not, seeing them uproot and run around spewing poison on hit would be amusing.

 

[NicholasIV]

I wouldn't mind if there was a balance option in the games menu, since you're planning on changing some skills. I would really like the ability to keep using the old versions of them. Since it's already in the game it shouldn't be too much of an ask yeah? Maybe disable achievements with the imba skills toggled on.

Some sort of healing ability would be nice, aside from better health drops/more frequent health drops, and the proposed potions mentioned here might fill out the support spells nicely. I'd be fine with a gain 1 health per level on hit, heal for overkill damage, regeneration (or regen aura for multiplayer/summoned allies), or an on cast heal with respect to matk. The shield support skill and haste support skill I feel are on the under-powered side, perhaps a mana reserve permanent effect would make them better, or make them last for the current screen instead of on a timer.

 

[Own]

- Making the green slimes spawned by Gigaslime during the exam award EXP. Because people who aren't so good at videogames can be stuck here for well over an hour, unable to leave and grind levels. This is the 'you can't leave during the 'Triple Black Ferrets' battle problem but even worse.