Quick Coding Stuff
I know you’re all excited to see the results of last week’s poll but calm down, there’s an update to do first.
I am now cleaning up the various bugs from chapter 1 that have been accumulating. I may also take a shot at some QoL changes in the chapter. This is the “boring” part of game development, where each week I tell you about the exciting bugs I fixed.
Meanwhile, Koops fired out several new enemies, Giga got us a new talk sprite sheet for chapter 1 and is now working on the TF sequences (they’re special but I won’t spoil them even for patrons), Urimas is making sprites on pain of death, and even Wispy is back from vacation and promised… well nothing specific but I’m sure I’ll get more kitsunes soon.
Concept Art? Yes.
I asked noted fan artist BlueLily to design some costumes for chapter 3, because aristos can look cool even if you want to guillotine them. If you’ve played chapter 2, you know that Esmerelda de Artezzi is from Jeffespeir. Well guess what, there’s four great houses that run the city and they all have cool outfits.
Up first is House Cuorelli, better known as House Red.
But what’s going on here? Yes, part of the politics of the city is that a partirhuman cannot be appointed to an office. A workaround is that an existing office holder can be a partirhuman, but they can’t be re-appointed when their term is up. House Cuorelli is in charge of the city’s constabulary, so the sheriff here being transformed into a werefox means her political life is nearly over. It’s a popular way for the other houses to “humanely” get rid of their political opposition. You know, because assassinating them is viewed as barbaric.
Meanwhile, the city’s field military was controlled by House Ordinaci, or House Blue to most outsiders. However, an invading army recently conquered the city, and House Blue was wiped out. A handful of surviving members fled. Did they get turned into werewolves, dolls, and rubbery jesters? Yes but if you want to know more you’ll have to wait for chapter 3.
What about house Artezzi (Green) and Insiati (Yellow)? You’ll have to wait until next week to see those.
Stop Stalling and get to the Poll Results
Fine, geez. This is going to go question by question with a bit of discussion for each one. I made sure each question had an “Other” so people could give more complicated thoughts.
I just want you people to know that I have to hand-edit these replies in. I do it because I love you.
I am surprised that red robes got about 20% support for being flat out put in the game. I really thought that’d be a lot lower, because they act as beefgates that prevent you from running past enemies without engaging with the combat. WHI uses those to make sure the player can take on the frequent mandatory boss encounters, which RoP generally lacks.
They make a ton of sense in challenge areas, of which I can think of a few. Red Robes are just a formalization of the idea of a cutscene-miniboss. Equinox had a bunch of those, for example. Given a later poll question, Red Robes will likely get added to RoP in challenge areas or possibly an optional dungeon in chapter 2 themed around them. Get good at fighting, scrub!
As for the “Makes grinding too easy” schema, it makes it more convenient for sure but since you still have to beat the enemies, it only saves you a bit of time chasing down an enemy to wail on them. I don’t think it’s a huge issue in either direction, especially if they are confined to challenge areas.
For those of you who haven’t played chapter 2 yet, the crafting items are things like Light Carapace, Light Fiber, Light Leather, and then Tough Carapace, Tough Fiber, Tough Leather. There are also certain items that only drop from specific enemies, and only if you shoot them with Sanya’s rifle. Putting numerical tiers on things makes them a lot easier to understand and also easier to sort in your head. Plus, it also lets you know when you’re in an out-of-depth area (Westwoods is going to be Area 3, but it got released first so it’ll be rebalanced later).
The results are about what I expected here. The materials lose a bit of character by getting tiers but the utility is obvious. You’ll still need to get certain key items from hunting to make the best stuff, and those are uniquely named.
As expected the WHI interface is more popular by a lot. The RoP version does show the full crafting recipe for an item but anything more than 3 items and the recipe starts to get insanely long and requires in-screen scrolling. Highlighting what’s available and letting the player see what it costs with a click is a lot more intuitive. I’ve seen RPGMaker games that use this system and for once the UI works way better that way.
If you have an idea for how to make the UI even better hit me up. Until then we’ll go with the WHI version.
The results are pretty strongly in favour of a backport job for the other chapters. There is a sizeable opposition to just leaving them in chapter 2, which does make sense because chapter 2 is nonlinear and uses crafting to set equipment standards, so getting materials makes a lot of sense. Chapters 1 and 5 don’t need that sort of thing, though the Tellurium Mines fulfill that functionality since there’s always more stuff when the levels regenerate.
The strongest case to be made is to put them in every chapter even when they aren’t necessary, and make it a basic game mechanic. After all, chapter 1 is here to teach you how to play the game, even if it’s so short that you don’t need the extra stuff.
After a bunch of discussion with some utterly despicable Discord users (Pyxxis) and several upstanding Discord users (everyone else) I came up with a system. Green chests will continue to exist and will still provide the player with random low-level goodies like cash or gems, but most green chest pickups will provide Tokens. These tokens can be used to roll on charts of items, so you can choose if you’d like to roll on the weapons chart or the gems chart or the armors chart. Collecting more green chests (without resting at a campfire) increases your odds of getting extra tokens, rather than WHI’s method of giving you more materials per chest opened.
All of this token stuff is totally optional, you will find all the equipment you need from chests. I just like the idea of a playthrough being a little different each time around, and getting a lucky weapon or weird accessory from a roll makes that a little more possible. First time players will more likely find there’s a gap or two in their equipment and use the rolls to fill it because they missed the Werecat Bonus Area which has the really good accessories or whatever.
Tell me what you think of my really bad ideas!
If you didn’t play WHI: In that game, adamantite nodes appear in the overworld. Each time you rest (return to town) they reset but spawn in different locations at random. You could still get adamantite from chests but having dedicated nodes in certain areas meant the player always had a good stock of it without competing for other chest items.
And to the purple person: Chapter 1 will be limited to the first two tiers of adamantite, chapter 5 the first 3, and chapter 2 probably the first 3 with a bonus area having the 4th. You won’t be able to make max-tier gems in RoP until chapter 6.
Overally, people like adamantite nodes so I’ll add some of those. Unlike WHI I’m going to be a lot more choosy with where they are. WHI has a very linear layout so I needed to put them in the player’s path, and bonus areas like the beach and springs had a bunch of high-value nodes at the ends of the paths. In RoP, nodes will likely only appear in certain areas, like in the dry areas of Quantir and Arbonne, but not in Starfield Swamp. In chapter 5, nodes will appear in the Tellurium Mines and Serenity Crater. It will be a deliberate choice by the player to go looking for more adamantite if they need it, rather than finding it all over the place.
Chapter 2 will have a lot of nice caves to find it, and there’s a few quarries in Westwoods you’ll just love (beware the local wind elementals).
(I think that last reply got a little tripped over its own language)
In WHI, I removed EXP and made it so the player only gets money from battle, and can spend that money to level up their party. I did that because I thought it was interesting in terms of weighing cash against upgrades (gem improvements, equipment), level-ups, and skill purchases (there’s no JP in WHI). It also incidentally allowed certain players to beat the bonus bosses at level 12 so there’s that.
A small group wants to go entirely to Platina, no EXP. Most people want to keep EXP but let the player “sink” their platina to get more EXP. I think that’s probably the best idea, allowing players to spend cash to catch up party members who are behind (or focus all their resources on making Zeke level 100) or just get rid of excess money when they’ve bought all the stuff they wanted. It adds to the nonlinearity and make-each-playthrough-different too, particularly for players who know their way around and can get the best gear without spending money.
For those of you who want a low-level challenge, I’ll make a special option that zeroes EXP gain, just for you. It’s on my to-do list.
This one is pretty simple. Paragons act like Omega enemies in WHI do, but without the activator and random placement system. Instead, Omega enemies guard the best treasure in the game.
A majority wants to keep the paragons as they are and add some bonus supa-tuff areas where 100% of the enemies are paragons. Happy to oblige, it means I can put in some optional areas with cool items and you can get the ultimate challenge from groups of paragons. You thought fighting one gravemarker paragon was bad?
Paragons will also be getting a dedicated balance pass to make them a particularly tough enemy, rather than getting multipliers to stats.
Pretty overwhelmingly in favour of on-field enemy sprites. Hey, we need a make-work program to keep our spriters housed and fed, too!
(You and Urimas decide if that’s worth it though) <- lawl like Urimas has a say >:3
Pumpkin continues to be insanely popular, but Whiskey also has some “legs” as they say.
One respondent apparently got confused and replied with the name of a country. I will not be providing Poland Pix.
Here Pumpkin is seen trying to steal a bite of beef jerky.
Whiskey caught, gutted, and refitted these fish into fashionable footwear.
Generalized WHI Feedback Form
You can fill it out here. This one is just to find out what sorts of things people liked on a basic level. Did you like the skeleton bad end? What about the harpy one? Now it’s time for me to figure out which unique set of brainrots the audience has.
Curious Cat
Fan Art
This counts as fan art by HadezMuze because technically, Sweet Justice is a character created by Koops to represent me, and she’s in this picture. That makes it fan art.
I would have posted it anyway because it’s awesome and I love it but now I am technically not in the wrong!
Keep drawing stuff like this Hadez. Damn it.
The Link Pile
Rationally debate this post on the forums! Discussion thread for String Tyrant!
Witch Hunter Izana’s forums page! Get it on Steam or Itch.io! It has a free demo!
Pandemonium’s Steam Page! You can get updates automatically.
Maiden Sealed in Stone, a game Salty translated!
Buy String Tyrant, our gaiden game, on Itch.io! It’s on Steam too!
Ask us questions anonymously on Curious Cat!
Buy our merch on Redbubble and Teepublic!
Give us money on Patreon so we can make more monstergirl stuff!
Alternately, give us money on Subscribestar so we can make more monstergirl stuff!
DO NOT join our Discord and curse at me in person! Our testers might be cats, I can’t tell!
This post is so big that it’s actually causing the WordPress interface to lag. Ha ha ha ha.
Pandemonium Development 