Devlog #3 - Upgrade System, Name Change & MORE V 0.3

General

You can play this update for free here.

Hello again,

this update took again more time than expected. Originally I aimed for a weekly update, but I think every two weeks is more realistic. But nonetheless I think this update turned out quite nice. The biggest addition to the game is the upgrade system and the change to a roguelike game structure.

As you might have already noticed I also changed the name of the game to Horde of the Overlord. The original name was mostly chosen to fit the game jam criteria. What do you think of the change? With the new title I also had to redo the title screen and I think it turned out quite cool. 

Upgrade System

So lets talk about the upgrade System. It took a while to get it to this point, but I’m happy with the results. Before we get into the details here a screenshot of the result.

First of all, upgrades have a rarity that follows the classical theme of:

Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic and Legendary

When an upgrade is generated it picks a rarity based on your luck stat and your level. Afterwards the specific upgrade is generated. The system is open enough to create many types of effects, but currently there are only stat upgrades and more interesting stat upgrades ;) but I hope to add more types of upgrades. Especially for the legendary rarity I want to add more unique things.

Every stat has a rarity associated with it that determines the minimum rarity an upgrade needs to have to increase the stat. This allows for certain stats to be rarer. For example, the Luck Stat needs a rarity of at least Rare. It is also possible for an upgrade to increase a stat of a lower rarity. In that case the increase is stronger. For example, a common attack upgrade increases the stat by 0.2 and an uncommon upgrade by 0.4. To spice things up there is also another type of stat upgrade. It increases one stat and decreases another stat.

If you are unhappy with the choices you have, you can also reroll! When you reroll you get a new selection of upgrades, but you get one less option. This can be repeated as long as you have more than one choice. In that case you only have the option to skip the upgrade. This adds nice risk and reward options and to incentive playing risky you also have a slightly increased chance for better rarities if you reroll.

Level Up System & Run structure

So how do you get upgrades? Quite simple every time you level up you get one upgrade selection. But how does levelling up work in this game? You now have an exp bar at the top of the screen. If you destroy a building, you get a certain amount of exp based on the building type. I’m not quite happy with the current system as there is a static amount of exp you get per map. In the next updates I will hopefully find a better solution for this. To make balancing a bit easier (or harder we will see) I added a new type of building:

The city is a bigger village and also gives way more exp for destroying it. It only appears after completing the first map. The game now also follows a more rogue like game structure. Basically every map is like a floor in a more typical roquelike. Upgrades, level and exp persist from map to map, but your undead army gets reset. The enemy gets stronger in each map and the map gets bigger. Also new types of buildings will appear only in later maps. Currently there is only the city, but I’m planning to add some more!

Combat  System changes

There were also some bigger changes to the combat system. For one, there is a maximum size for player units. If a unit is bigger that the maximum it gets indicated by a red text and it will also move slower. After a short time it will automatically split.

I also changed the way flanking works. Now the flanking bonus no longer increases based on the number of units attacking the same goal, but on the angle of attack. So if you attack from opposite sites you get the maximum bonus.

A small change I made is that attacks now always make at least one damage. This gives the player always a chance to at least hurt the enemy. Even if their attack would be too low.

Conclusion

There were also a lot of other changes that you can see in the changelog or even better by playing the game. For the next update I currently don’t have a strong theme for what it will contain. I will see what changes will improve the game the most. So let’s what will happen in roughly two weeks.

If you are curious about the new features, you can follow me to be notified, when the update arrives. I also have a twitter account now and will hopefully post some interesting things. As always, feedback and suggestions are very much appreciated and would mean a lot to me.

 Thanks for reading this far and I hope you have a great day :D

Changelog V 0.3

• Changed: Flanking (see Combat System Changes for more info)
• Added: Particles for many things
• Changed: Music is now persistent through scenes
• Added: Stat System (see devlog for more info)
• Added: Upgrade System (see devlog for more info)
• Added: Level Up System (see devlog for more info)
• Bug fix: Villages will look for a new goal if there old goal gets destroyed
• Bug fix: Buildings only spawn units if they are big enough to spawn them
• Added: Max Player Unit Size
• A lot of balancing, behind the scenes changes and stuff i forgot to write down