Hello everyone! We hope you had a good April’s Fool. Here’s our update for what we were up to during March!
Covid
It goes without saying that March focused largely around the global pandemic. First of all, we hope everyone is doing well. The team has been in quarantine for about 3 weeks now, with some of us being ill during this time. We would just like to raise awareness that the situation is as it is, and it has marginally affected how much was done the past month. Everyone is doing fine though! And we hope you all are too.
Battle System Balancing
Since not much could be done the past month, we’ve been slowly focusing on the timed battle system. Right now things aren’t balanced very well to our liking, and although the debate battle system has gotten some streamlining and overhauls, the timed one hasn’t.
So when it comes to RPGs, how do you balance something like this? Spreadsheets are one thing, but that can get very complicated. Then what about playtesting? The team is small and there are so many combinations to account for, and then you factor into RNG, that there is just so much to check.
This is where unit testing & simulations come in.
Essentially, the plan is to run battle simulations based purely on numbers. No animations. Just execute the battle with some predefined setup and see if it passes or not. Then execute that a certain number of times, and make sure that it passes a certain number of times.
As we change and adjust things, we will unit test to make sure that we don’t accidentally break previous balances, or the battle system, as we test these things out.
We hope this will be completed by the June beta update, will help out with balancing in the long term, and ensure that battles are sufficiently difficult no matter how you plan to build your party.
What’s Next?
The team is still working on adjusting to our new way of life, so we expect things to be slow for a couple more weeks. In the meantime, we will continue to add content to the game and further refine things. We hope we have more to show in May. Take care!
March 2020 Progress Update