AAAAAANNNND SLAM!

I knew this was going to be a funny idea for a spell, but it has exceeded all my expectations. I simply cannot get enough of it. (Not normal conditions - I am cheating to get infinite uses and extra HP).

The Games Foxes Play

This week, I've just been mass producing new enemies and spells (they are called "souls" in the game, because lore-wise, you are channelling the memory of a deceased legend to perform one of the feats they were known for). A huge thank you to everyone who commented in my recent thread on this subreddit for cool creature designs, it has certainly helped with my inspiration. Some of the new additions include:

• Greedswept Felidol - A cursed cat statue that leaves behind gemstone rubble on a tile on death, which will steal the soul of any creature killed on it to reanimate the idol.

• Midnight Ragemaw - A pesky bat-like creature that has 1 HP, but constantly respawns on death until the only enemies left are other Ragemaws.

• Self-Erased Monk - A nasty spellcaster that can use a randomly selected spell among six different ones, from leaving landmines to dashing around.

• Rendfly Vermin - An extremely annoying fly that buzzes everywhere with insane speed, deals zero damage, but inflicts a "damage delay" effect on enemies. Basically, if I hit a "delayed" creature for 3 damage, they will only take that damage in a few turns. The sound effect makes me go crazy and I might remove it.

• Humming Paperweaver - My favourite. A completely passive enemy that leaves behind cute little paper pinwheels on the floor. If you step on one, the Weaver enters RAGE MODE, gains Haste, and INFINITE USES of that punching spell I initiated my post with.

I love that spell so, so much, in case that wasn't obvious. Here, I gave myself 99 HP (that's why there's red bars everywhere) and infinite punches, and had an epic 1v1 with a single 99 HP Paperweaver. I swear, this is still a turn-based game, I'm just mashing the keys very fast. In this scenario (warning: loud), I gave myself 999 HP, and accidentally discovered a bug that caused the Felidol enemy to get duplicated if slain by the punch spell. Fixed now, but hilarious to see. If anyone accuses me of slacking off, know that cheating at my game made me find a glitch I might not have found otherwise!

I made other new spells in addition to that punching one, but I don't want to turn this post into a novel anymore than it already is, and would rather like to talk about one of the design problems I encountered with the Serene Harmonizer gambling mini-game, which I described in my last Sharing Saturday post. To put it bluntly, there was absolutely no reason to actually shoot for a good result.

If the player completely failed the challenge, they would earn themselves a snarky comment from the Harmonizer, and... 4 souls from the "bad" tier, which was just an array in which I lumped all the spells I judged to be mediocre. Except they weren't actually mediocre, due to my design philosophy of not ever making anything that's objectively "weaker" than a counterpart. For example, is "charm the next enemy you touch" good or bad? It's bad if you charm some good-for-nothing run-and-stab-you melee dude, but it's outrageously good if you manage to charm a healer and earn yourself your own little private life support. Or an enraged Paperweaver. For the record, that charm power was considered to be part of the "bad" tier, because I made it when enemies were still uncreative and had their threat level based on numbers rather than power. Everything is just so, so situational, and "tiers" had no place in my game, so they were all thrown out.

Now, you are invited to "bet" an amount of souls from 1 to 4. In the actual game lore and descriptions, it's this extremely creepy process revolving around machines that expunge all trace of individuality and identity from the unfortunate prisoners. The souls will also express their disapproval in the message box (message varies depending on which soul it is) when you lock them up in the... "Soulscribes", as they are called. Metal.

Then, once again, you do a little arithmetic puzzle trying to reach a perfect zero. For every 3 points separating you from that goal, each soul you wagered receives a 1% Harmonization chance. Having a negative result is now extremely offensive and will instantly bring your Harmonization chance to 100%. For each soul, the Harmonization chance is rolled, and if it hits... instead of one of those legendary figures, you get a Serene soul. It's literally a clone of the Serene Harmonizer, and it will try to corrupt you from the inside by progressively assimilating your entire inventory into more Serene souls, until you root them out by force. Nasty. At least, they are pretty good in combat, letting you polymorph enemies into Harmonizer summons that fight for you Once again, cheating so I can use it every room, just for demonstration purposes.

I really like this change, because it rockets the creepiness and the horror factor of the Harmony into the stratosphere. Having these innocent souls watch you fill in the Relay while they tremble in anguish every time a Harmonization % trickles in is anxiety inducing.

Finally, my highly esteemed friend has been hard at work on the game's music. There's a new atmospheric title screen theme, and a snazzy "level 1" theme. However, the one I'd like to talk about here is the new theme song for the Harmony - the game's lead antagonistic faction. It starts as this very quiet, light and carefree music box tune, backed by an unnerving crackle of static. The latter represents the protagonist - and hopefully the player's - disgust towards the Harmony and its assimilationist ideology. However, every time their theme song is supposed to play, the game calculates how corrupted you are by measuring the number of Serene souls in your inventory versus your non-Serene souls. The more control the Harmony holds over your psyche, the more layers are added to the music box, which will now be doubled by xylophones, triangles and synthetic vocals. Eventually, the creepy drone in the background is drowned out by the sheer Harmonic holy power, demonstrating how enthralled the protagonist is becoming. In this video, I compiled together 3 excerpts out of the 6 different infection stages (see description for timestamps).

It's so, so creepy, and brings home that half-horror, half-tranquil atmosphere I was shooting for.

For this next week, I will be working on increasing room shape variety, from narrow corridors to massive battle arenas. For that, though, I will need to implement a system where not every tile in the room is visible at once, but things still happen out of Line-of-Sight. It's FOV without walls blocking vision - think DCSS's Ashenzari powers. My code will have to be really tampered with to make this work, and I hope it won't be too difficult.

The Games Foxes Play

Greeting once again to the community! Lots of things have happened this week.

First, I showed my game extensively to an esteemed online friend of mine, and quickly got him obsessed with the lore and mechanics. He now wishes to join me on my quest to make this project happen, in the form of making the game's music. It may not be in the league of big bucks orchestral AAA epic themes, but it certainly works with the atmosphere I'm trying to convey.

The theme I'd like to showcase here plays in the very first room of the game. Named "The Cage", it radiates with ominous drones, glitching computers and wailing sirens, immediately letting the player know that A) this is a high-technology setting, and that B) the game's universe is in a state of crisis. I simultaneously crafted the spawn room it goes with this week -- the World Seed, the prison the game's protagonist has been locked away with for their entire life. It's a tangled mess of neon green wires and machines, claustrophobically encased with impenetrable black steel, and watched over by a holographic messenger announcing the world's doom over and over.

Yeah, I know. It's a little bit hard to convey with my glyph-based art style, but I hope the writing in the examine descriptions and the OST will create that feeling of uncertainty and dread I seek to convey. Perhaps I will decorate the room some more with some extra decorative tiles!

Next up, I made a batch of new Souls (they are the spells of the game, basically) and enemies. I'd like to show off one of the latter in this post: the fabled, coveted and turbocharged BATTLESNAIL (actual name: Shelled Electromedic). This enemy cannot move on its own, and is fully dependent on the reactor placed on its shell, which randomly shoots BEAMS OF LIFE AND DEATH every turn. It is propelled in the direction of its lasers, and also heals all enemies/damages players and friendly units in the beam path. So far, it's extremely amusing to watch them dash around the battlefield and absolutely obliterate me. They're also invaluable when charmed, because they can then be used for self-healing.

Finally, I properly implemented the game's "gamble" system through which the player will obtain their items and powers that aren't just "tickle the enemy with your one-damage dash". It's a bit unusual, so I'll try my best to explain it as straightforwardly as possible.

• By killing enemies, you harvest their Souls. Souls come in 6 different basic types. Each type is worth a number from 1 to 6. For example, killing an animal will award you with a Feral soul, worth 2.

• In the Harmonic Relay room at which the "gamble" minigame is played, you are invited to sacrifice 6 "basic" Souls in exchange for 4 powerful, uniquely designed ones.

• Here's how you can sacrifice souls. First, start with the equation ABC - DEF = Result.

• You must draw two basic Souls, and attribute them to two letter slots. For example, I draw a 5 and a 2. I place them in C and E. Now, we have AB5 - D2F = Result.

• I draw two more. 4 and 4. I send them to A and F. 4B5 - D24 = Result. Finally, the last two. 1 and 4. I plug them in the last slots B and D. 415 - 424 = -9

In the game, this is an extremely good result. Why? Because you want to get as close to 0 as possible. You may notice here that the dominating strategy here is pulling out Souls that have the same number, or at the very least are close to each other. The only way to get to 0 is, in fact, with a perfect set of 3 pairs of identical Souls.

This is very intentional. The creatures overseeing this mini-game, the Harmonizers, believe that only in uniformity do we flourish. They will reward best those who adhere to the Harmonic Truth. In my example, I managed to pull out three Artistic souls, worth 4, and also an Ordered soul, worth 5, which are quite similar, and pleased the Collective greatly. Here's another example of the mini-game in action, this time in video. The Harmonizer at the centre has a lot of dialogue, and will comment on illegal actions, your final result, and inform you about the rules if you bump into her.

So, the entire game becomes this bounty hunt of sorts - of selective killing of the type you wish to devote yourself to. Now, some... parasites will naturally slither into your inventory because of the many AOE attacks available to players, which is what the game's "failure lets you remove mistakes" mechanic is for. I talked about it more in my introductory post.

Of course, there will eventually be an option to defeat the Harmony with their own tools... or to join them. Indeed, if you are unhappy with the outcome of the trade, you can ask for a reroll. However, it comes at a seemingly minor cost - the addition of a single Serene soul to your inventory.

Serene souls are quite powerful, letting you convert enemies to friendly Harmonizer summons that fight for you. The twist is that each use will transform a random soul in your inventory into another Serene soul. The more you rely on the Harmony's graces, the more the corruption within you grows (or purification, as the Collectivists would say)... until you become one of them.

The Harmony is central to the game's lore and themes, and I hope that even players who don't really care about the story will still be unnerved by these think-alike members of a hivemind forcing them to play in accordance with their assimilationist ideology to survive.