Short update this week since I'm still deep in the rework for my new patch.  This week I've been playing A LOT of vampire survivor clones to get a better understanding of what mine is missing, and I think what I've come to discover is that I need to return to form a bit.  There was a lot of things that the vampire survivor games do by default that I have not quite been doing.  This week has been all about trying to install those pieces that are essential to the genre.

Art

This week has been light on art. Ref finished the level 3 boss and has begun to draw the spritework for the second level 4 elite (the first one already being done for marketing purposes!) Here's a little teaser.

This orc mother is running the show.  She carries her goblin kids on her back and likes to throw them out to help her fight.

Music

On the music side of things, Juan sent me the last track with a couple minor changes and I'm honestly in love with it.  This one is really cool and bloodborn-y. I can't wait to show it off.  I think he just needs to master it and we're good to go!

Programming

Ohhhh boy. On my side, I've been doing so much stuff I don't even know if it's making it better any more haha.  I really hope so, as I think this game needs some real polish.  As I said before I've been reviewing a lot of vampire survivor games and trying to learn from the best (shout out to Soulstone survivors, jesus this might be the best game in the genre).

The things I learned are: 

• - You NEED better progression systems. people want the new shiny thing
• - You NEED new characters, because gating the powerups behind unlocks is not fun
• - You NEED to make it more replayable and show of your games strengths
• - You NEED more synergy between combos.

Now these aren't exactly revelational pieces of information, but I somehow convinced myself I already had these or simply that I could substitute these elements with other things.  I was wrong.  Just because you can unlock and pick weapons, does not mean I can skimp on making less characters.  Same with replayability. 20 minute rounds are just too damn long, I need to break it up in some way that the fixes come quicker and promise more.  

So what have I been doing.  Essentially, I rebuilt my enemy managers to do different play sessions based on difficulty.  Early stages are only 10 minutes now instead of 20, with quick, exciting matches to get you hooked.  However, I've also restructured resource distribution so it's based on bosses killed.  This lets me control the flow of things the player unlocks and make it so that they need to hop back in for another round.

Now to address replayability, I've been making new enemy managers for each difficulty level.  Difficulties 1 -3 introduce a new elite and new final boss in each round, get longer, and also obviously, drop more loot.  I think this is a nice way of making playing want to replay each level, and to get them excited to try a longer round.

Finally, I've also been reworking the rewards shop.  Before, all you had to do was unlock achievements to get weapons, and buys the upgrades willy-nilly.  Now there is a shop that lists all of the weapons, and upgrades available, and adds an achievement requirement before you can buy them.  These achievements are things like > idk, kill the first major boss on level 1, or (and this is the important part) play level 1 again to kill the second major boss at the end of the second difficulty.  This technique makes it so that if players want to unlock new items, they are incentivized even further to play another round.

Next Week

Next week I will continue working on this refactor. There are plenty of other little things I want to do.  For starters I need to make more playable characters and add them to the shop.  That will be fun! I've already been polling people on my discord to see what sort of mechanics they'd like to see in new characters.

I'm also going to spend a lot of time rebalancing the enemy managers, and hopefully start playtesting this progression system.  I really really hope it works out, because all of these changes feel right.  I just hope the general audiences agree!