Son of a Witch: Devlog and general discussion

[bigosaur]

A couple a days ago I started to work full time on the next Son of a Witch update. I'm currently preparing all the art pieces for the hell level:



The plan is to make it an optional area which you can reach if you collect all the ingredients for a ritual in the catacombs. Going through hell would alter the story a little bit and allow you to take an alternate route through the game, skipping the ice level. I'm still not clear on all the details. I have a lot of possible ideas, but need to test them first. In any case, it should be the most challenging area of the game.

The update should also come with new weapons, pets, scrolls, potions, items and I plan to add more heroes using Jubal's skins. Those will all unlock by completing some quests in Hell.

[Jubal]

Oh wow! Let me know when things need testing

Will you have any additional rooms for current levels? I think one or two of them could maybe do with extra possibilities for special rooms, which would help freshen up the replayability.

[bigosaur]

Oh wow! Let me know when things need testing

Don't expect it to be soon. I plan to add a lot of stuff, so it will be a month or two before it gets anywhere to "beta" stage.

Will you have any additional rooms for current levels? I think one or two of them could maybe do with extra possibilities for special rooms, which would help freshen up the replayability.

I didn't really think about it, but I have added it to my list now. The list of possible features/fixes/changes has about 230 items currently, so something will probably have to be discarded or I will have to work on it for the next 6 months

We shall see. I love working full time on SoaW again. It just feels good when you know there are so many players waiting for this update. So, maybe I will add more stuff than usual.

[Jubal]

Hm, yeah... I think personally I'd put increasing variation in rooms/enemies higher than increasing options for e.g. weapons or potions by way of priority - I tend to feel that I get a good amount of diversity in equipment, and that quite a number of things require unusual combos to really work so I don't get to use them much already (like for example the weapons that do damage to you, which are really hard to make work without vampire blood potions). The occasional chance of variant enemies or slightly more room options I think would add more - especially the dungeon which only & always has the wolf wheel thing, and the desert which doesn't really have any unique special rooms.

But anyway, I'm just one person & I'm sure other people are giving you thoughts too!

This also reminds me, I made at least one or two more skins I've not released yet...

[bigosaur]

especially the dungeon which only & always has the wolf wheel thing, and the desert which doesn't really have any unique special rooms.

The idea behind the dungeon one was that prices in shops are high and you might need to gamble if you see an item you absolutely need but cannot afford. Although, with Monkey pet and Steel boots not slowing you down, it became much easier to rob dungeon shops than before, so maybe a couple more special rooms would be a good idea.

The desert has the altar room, but yes, that's about it. I guess I never "finished" that level properly. I will have to add something there.

[Jubal]

Yeah, I almost never get to the dungeon shops without either a truckload of money I'm happy to spend, or at least one way to defeat trap spikes. It occasionally happens, but it's quite rare now, so I think that definitely more options could be added.

Yeah, I guess my ideas from the old thread still stand for extra rooms. Maybe also some heavily trapped 'ruined temple' room where you either need excellent timing, pets, bombs, or some mix of those in order to reach a particular reward (a kinda Indiana Jones minigame almost)? Actually, looking back at the old thread, I didn't really realise & remember how many things now in the game were suggested there - general's sword, king cobra staff, Cow Cody, etc

Another thing which I think I mentioned ages ago is whether "rare enemies" would be a way to give some fun variation/random tactical complication without too much work. So you have a small chance of spawning a rare enemy somewhere on a level which is basically a reskin of something else with a single difference ability.

• Goblin Captain - like the goblin shielder but can move.
• Knight - like a really down-powered version of the Violet Knight
• Fire bandit - like the regular poison sword bandit but with a fire knife OR Shadow Thief - has a fade-out skin so hard to see/aim at, and deals 20dmg when it jumps on your back.
• Less sure about skeleton variants one could do as just reskins...
• Berserker - ice level spearman but has unusually low health and high damage.
• Maybe a poison sword version of the duellist on the last level?

I could happily make relevant variant skins (and would have done already if I had ). I know you have tons to do so it might be too much of a stretch though


Also I found another bug - at least sort of - recently while playing with friends. We went to the special gold shop from the second level, bought all the stuff in it to get the coin to get back, then killed the Bushido which got us another coin. However, we'd only taken two players and the other had all the keys. So we zipped back with one coin, brought the player with the keys back... then we were out of coins and trapped and had to give up the game. So maybe the teleport to the special shop needs to only be accessible once to stop players trapping themselves there?

[bigosaur]

Another thing which I think I mentioned ages ago is whether "rare enemies" would be a way to give some fun variation/random tactical complication without too much work. So you have a small chance of spawning a rare enemy somewhere on a level which is basically a reskin of something else with a single difference ability.

• Goblin Captain - like the goblin shielder but can move.
• Knight - like a really down-powered version of the Violet Knight
• Fire bandit - like the regular poison sword bandit but with a fire knife OR Shadow Thief - has a fade-out skin so hard to see/aim at, and deals 20dmg when it jumps on your back.
• Less sure about skeleton variants one could do as just reskins...
• Berserker - ice level spearman but has unusually low health and high damage.
• Maybe a poison sword version of the duellist on the last level?

I could happily make relevant variant skins (and would have done already if I had ). I know you have tons to do so it might be too much of a stretch though

I guess I could do that. I have promised everyone that the update will be in January, but it isn't really set in stone. Don't bother drawing anything yet, I will try to do it with simple color swaps and giving them different weapons than standard.

Also I found another bug - at least sort of - recently while playing with friends. We went to the special gold shop from the second level, bought all the stuff in it to get the coin to get back, then killed the Bushido which got us another coin. However, we'd only taken two players and the other had all the keys. So we zipped back with one coin, brought the player with the keys back... then we were out of coins and trapped and had to give up the game. So maybe the teleport to the special shop needs to only be accessible once to stop players trapping themselves there?

It's a tricky one because you can also get another silver coin in the forest as well. You can also make a mistake and use the coin in the treasure room and get teleported into the "remote" shop and stuck there. The whole point of having both the shop keeper and his guard drop a coin was to allow players to make one mistake.

Maybe I should add some kind of statue that teleports players to the start of the level, so you can always leave the area.

I was already thinking of having a similar teleport statue: there would be 2 (or more) per level, one in the post-boss room as well. When you discover them, you can teleport between those rooms. Maybe they could be in shops and at the post-boss room. Or maybe in treasure rooms.

[bigosaur]

I just finished the pentagram that takes you to hell:

Fixed some old bugs as well, mostly related to online multiplayer.

Starting to work on demon enemies Monday.

[Jubal]

Ooft, that is a lot of resources. Will you need to have found a blood runestone, or will donating a health bar also do it?

[nenadragon]

Hard mode <The King doesn't drop the sceptre>

blood runestone,Maybe change to reduce the upper limit of health by 66??

[bigosaur]

Ooft, that is a lot of resources. Will you need to have found a blood runestone, or will donating a health bar also do it?

A blood runestone will be guaranteed to be dropped by one of the bosses on levels 1-5 or found in the gold chest. I will have to filter out some treasure room configurations where it's hard to get to the gold chest (like where you need to teleport, etc.) so that it's doable every time.

[bigosaur]

Hard mode <The King doesn't drop the sceptre>

Ohhh, I forgot about that! 

I'm preparing some changes to the way it works. Sometimes the Evil Princess will rule the kingdom (this starts showing up once you kill the king for the first time and bring her the scepter) and she will have much heavier army around her. So maybe in hard mode I will make her show up every time instead of the king and she will drop the scepter always.

blood runestone,Maybe change to reduce the upper limit of health by 66??

Doesn't really work for the Pyromancer. Other heroes that start with 80 wouldn't be affected as much. I tried lowering it to 40 (this was my first idea, to have some kind of "Demon Mark") but, after some testing, I found that having to bring an item from earlier levels is much more interesting.

For example, if you get a bloodstone in the forest - do you use it to free up inventory space, or wait to see if you'll find another one. Similar tradeoffs are with mana and coins. Spend to have more chance in hell, or collect to have enough to activate the pentagram. I tried 5 runs so far, and I had to play the Heads or Tails thing twice to have enough gold, so it's challenging.

I got this idea from Spelunky where you need to collect multiple things to unlock the special ending and so far these requirements give me the same feelling I had while trying to do that in Spelunky. Needs more testing, of course.

What I want to avoid is players just sitting down and beating Hell on their first try. It would make months of development useless.

[Jubal]

Ooft, that is a lot of resources. Will you need to have found a blood runestone, or will donating a health bar also do it?

A blood runestone will be guaranteed to be dropped by one of the bosses on levels 1-5 or found in the gold chest. I will have to filter out some treasure room configurations where it's hard to get to the gold chest (like where you need to teleport, etc.) so that it's doable every time.

That would seem to significantly drop the utility of the teleport staff. Could you create a third sort of chest for the isolated/teleport needed chests in treasure rooms maybe?

[bigosaur]

That would seem to significantly drop the utility of the teleport staff. Could you create a third sort of chest for the isolated/teleport needed chests in treasure rooms maybe?

Maybe I didn't explain it well. When I wrote "filter out", I meant regarding the criteria where to place the blood runestone, not removing such rooms altogether. Those rooms and walled off chests will still exist as they do now, it's just that any blood runestones in them won't count as "being present" when the game checks that at least one blood runestone is available.

It would work like this:

1. the game generates levels as usual
2. the game checks for bosses and gold chests on levels 1-5 to see if there's a blood runestone somewhere. Chests which are hard to reach (require bombs, teleportation, etc.) are ignored.
3. if there is no blood runestone, the game adds 1 blood runestone to a random boss

[Jubal]

Ahh, OK, filter out in the script, not from the game. Got it!