Last week was all about PR, customer service and whittling down a horde of bugs, but now things are finally starting to look kind of normal around here! As such, we’ve actually gotten some “new” stuff done.
A couple of days ago we added a feature which we’ve mentioned before on the blog but never got around to implement, namely the memory room!
Many of our bosses drop items just like regular enemies, and will eventually also drop cards. This creates a little Collector’s dilemma, where if you don’t get every drop the first time you defeat a boss, you’ll have eternal holes in your item codex for all eternity! That is of course unacceptable in a modern society, and that’s how the memory room came to be.
For every boss you defeat in the game, you’ll unlock a statue in the Memory Room. By interacting with it, you can then choose to relive the battle in order to farm items you didn’t get the first time around.
Currently, the feature isn’t very balanced since the boss drops are both strong and worth a lot of money. That worked well when the boss items were rare, but less so if you can fight them an infinite number of times! While the economic aspect can be solved by making the items sell for less money, the issue of having easily farmable but very strong items is a bit more tricky.
There are a bunch of ways to deal with this, though. One is to simply add a fee to battle memories, so you can’t fight over and over without cost.
Another is to adjust drop rates when in a memory battle. Boss drops have pretty high drop rates to compensate for the fact you only fight a boss once, and we’d like to keep it that way for when you meet them on your natural journey through the game but obviously it doesn’t work when you can farm the bosses.
A third option is to rethink the drops which bosses have, and only focus on either flavor drops (style hats, furniture, etc) or crafting materials that require at least another rare material. That way we’ll prevent having boss farming be the be all end all way of getting certain gear upgrades. We’ll play around with it until we get something that feels nice!
Marino, our Gary of the game, has received quite a make over! The main reason for this was that the old sprite looked a lot like the officials of the Collector’s Headquarter, something we wanted to avoid to set him apart more.
Since Marino is a recurring character, he needed to be able to do more interesting stuff than just walking around being smug. Below are a few animations foreshadowing things to come!
