Jul 6, 2019

Wildermyth - Worldwalker Games

Hi guys, it's Annie, the Wildermyth artist! It's also summer. Which means in Texas (where Nate and I are), the heat is slowly getting heavier...

the kids are around more...

and development hours become scattered and precious.

But we're plugging along with some stuff that we're pretty excited about, and we hope other people will be too! Eventually. When we release it. Which—some of it will be soonish, some of it will be later this summer, and some of it might be a little closer to fall. But in lieu of actually being able to release the content, lemme post a check-in on how things are going!

Soonish

While Nate and I are a little more constrained by our summer hours, others on the team have become whirling game-design dervishes (shout-out to our man Patrick here)! We've got a lot of combat clarity work happening, which means things like:

New VFX for interfusion, hopefully making the process a lot more visually clear.
A rework to "stunting," which used to be hard to understand and not satisfying. We've got some base changes to it, and more coming later (see below).
Increasing visibility of threats & stuff on the overland map, so that you can become more accurately terrified of what your enemies are up to.
More VFX/audio for things like flanking and shredding, upping that crunchy satisfaction factor.
Remember that stat called "wield" on weapons? And you're like, "What is that anyway?" It's gonna be simpler and make more sense soon.
Better balancing when it comes to getting recruits in events.

Later This Summer:

I've been in the Photoshop mines, crafting a bunch of new weapons for y'all. Like, a bunch. Like, I realized after doing all the math that I signed up for over 200 weapons, and what the hell is wrong with me.

This is my life now.

What we want to accomplish with Weapon Rework™ is this:

When you take a weapon up a tier, it feels like the same weapon, but cooler, as opposed to a totally different weapon.

But! And! Also!

We want room for fun weapon variation too, and that's where New And Improved Enchantments™ come in. Instead of giving you buffs against very specific monsters, enchantments are going to give a weapon a different visual "flavor" and a special effect on stunt (not just damage, but exciting other things like splash damage, refunding action points, and temporary HPs). So those all needed tiers too (multiplication is a harsh mistress).

The end result is that you get to feel like your weapon is more a part of your hero, since it can "scale up" with them, and you can customize the look of it more. Hopefully this also means that weapons can follow Legacy heroes a bit more than they currently do.

We're also thinking of a different way that you acquire (dare I say the word... "unlock?") these enchantments as well. Maybe creating some interesting incentives during missions!

I don't want to ruin the element of surprise here though. That wouldn't be in the spirit of the thing.

A Bit Later Than That

I know we've talked about our villains/over-arcing campaign stories before, and we're still chipping away at them. They're by far the biggest feature we've added to the game in the last couple years, so we're trying to take the time to get them right while making the whole system robust enough to be easily edited later (including support for players to eventually craft their own villains and campaign stories!!). We'd like to release two or three campaigns together initially, with more to come for the different monster groups, but we'll see what makes sense as we get closer to fall.

Doug has finished the writing/comics for a gripping tale of Gorgon menace, and is currently working on a mind-bending foray into the world of Thrixl. And I'm working on the script for a Morthagi mystery of muddled morality, though that's going a bit slower from down in the Photoshop mines these days.

Nate's implementing this Gorgon menace, and he's got some sweet map editor tools in a prototype-ish state, which means we can have more individually designed boss battles! (That's something we've really been feeling the lack of lately.) A lot of his programming infrastructure is done now, and it's a matter of just plugging everything in and crafting those custom encounters—including some exciting stuff we've never tried before with the Overland Map that will put additional time pressure on the heroes.

That Seems Like a Lot to Keep in Mind

It kinda is! Our To-Do schedule boards are long. But it all happens one release at a time. We wish there were more hours in the day to do it all!

* * *

For those on Steam: You can get in on the Beta action over on itch.io, or if you prefer to wait for the Steam release later in the year, wishlist us for more updates as they come! We try to make them entertaining.

Jun 19, 2019

Design Journal: Campaign Balance

Wildermyth - Worldwalker Games

Hi! I'm Jackson, a designer and QA tester for Wildermyth. I'm gonna discuss how we've made some significant changes to help balance both individual battles and the campaign as a whole. I'll start by explaining the difficulties we were having and how fights weren't feeling challenging in the way we wanted.

Background

So our difficulty settings are divided into two different categories. There's the Combat Difficulty, which affects base monster health, hero health, armor, and warding, among other things. Then there's Overland Difficulty. Overland Difficulty was having a much larger impact on Combat difficulty than we had anticipated. This was because the more infested tiles you had, the more cancleable calamities and incursions would occur. On the hardest difficulty, the number of enemies on calamities would start to increase exponentially. This meant that if you took too long playing a five chapter campaign, you could end up in these unwinnable scenarios where you're fighting six Gorgons at once.

Very Scary

Action Economy is one of the most important things to keep track of in a turn based RPG, and on the harder difficulties, the players would often see this economy being turned against them in the worst way. The player can only send 5 heroes at a time to a hostile site, while there's no real limit to how many enemies the player can face in a single encounter. As calamities increase, more monsters will be added to a single card and even though the same number of cards are being drawn every fight, there are just too many enemies to reasonably fight after a certain point.

The other issue with the way calamities were increasing in difficulty is that the real challenge of a particular fight all depended on where the fight took place. Some of the hardest fights in the game could be made trivial by doors and walls that the monsters couldn't bypass. Put the same number and type of monster in an a more open map and the heroes would have absolutely no chance.

The only way players could win these encounters was by using the monster's inability to destroy scenery against them. This led to combat being more about breaking the AI than tactical play, which isn't what we wanted.

Solutions:

So we had a bunch of ideas of how we could fix this, but we wanted to make sure the path we took would be what's best for the future of the game. We wanted to make changes that would not only fix the problem at hand, but give us more control over balance in the future.

Fewer Monsters per Card, More Cards per Combat
We didn't like how many campaigns could become extremely difficult even with a limited number of cards. We also didn't want certain monsters to be so prevalent in every fight. To solve this, we made it so most cards only have one monster on them. This means that a normal fight won't have the player coming up against a dozen Gheists at once. To keep difficulty up, we also decided to make it so a fight in Chapter 5 would draw more cards (creating more monsters to fight) than a fight in Chapter 1.

Even low level enemies can only have two or three units on one card now.

While solving the problem of overcrowding in fights, this also allows us a greater level of control when we balance difficulty levels. In the future we can have certain scenarios add more monster cards at the drop of a hat, and determine how many cards can be put into a single room. Another minor change we made keeps monsters from ever being alone in a room on a map like the tower. This is to keep heroes from burning through an otherwise difficult fight by picking off the monsters one by one.

Parties of More Than 3 Heroes Cannot be Ambushed
Infestations just weren't acting in an interesting way and would tend to drag out campaigns in a way that felt frustrating. We've changed it so only parties of 3 or fewer heroes can be ambushed on a tile with an infestation. We adjusted it so having a tile with an infestation on it increases the difficulty of the hostile site on or near that infestation. Heroes in groups of 3 or more can now spend time patrolling in an area to clear the infestation and reduce the difficulty of the hostile site. This gives players more choice in how they want to deal with obstacles. It might be faster to just go straight for the hostile site with your group of five heroes, but that fight's going to be a good deal harder.

More Calamities on Higher Difficulties
Once we changed ambushes, we needed to see more calamities on higher difficulties, so we made each fight on the hardest overland difficulty give out two calamities and instead of choosing from two calamities to cancel, the player chooses between four calamities. This keeps the game difficult, but gives the player more control in how the enemy improves. This also makes Legacy Points more valuable, which is what we've wanted for a while.

Chapter 1 looks pretty mean if you don't use Legacy Points to cancel some of these.

Having Lots of Heroes Means Recruiting Becomes Expensive
Legacy Points were also losing their value because players were just able to recruit too many heroes. If you played your cards right and got the right events, you could end up with 10 heroes by chapter five and still have more Legacy Points than you'd ever be able to use. We wanted to keep heroes valuable, while also making it possible to come back from rough fights in the first and second chapter. To do this, we created a scale, so the more heroes you have in your party, the more expensive it is to recruit more. We also added Legacy Point costs to recruits that came from certain events. This means that if you have 3 heroes, you'll be able to recruit more, even if legacy points are scarce.

Monsters Can Break Doors and Scenery
One of the most important parts of creating emergent gameplay, is ensuring that the enemies are able to participate in some form of counterplay. If the heroes have one ability that monsters are unable to defend against, the player will begin to only use that ability, and the game will quickly become stale. Monsters were unable to open doors and destroy scenery. This meant that larger monsters would quickly become trapped in their spawn locations, and if they didn't have a ranged attack, the heroes could just whittle them down while incurring little to no damage. It also meant that fights in an enclosed space, like the tower, became trivial. Heroes could just go room by room, clearing them out one at a time, and never having to worry about monsters in the other rooms.

We've changed it so all monsters can get through doors, either by opening them or by breaking them down. All monsters can now attack and destroy scenery as well. This should prevent the player from breaking the game, while also closing the difficulty gap between open maps and tower maps.

Monsters Can Alert Allies and No Longer Spawn Alone
The second part of giving monsters a chance on these sectioned off maps is allowing them to call for help. We added in Alarm as a free action for all monsters. The ability lets them alert all monsters within a 10 tile range or the heroes. The monsters in other rooms will then begin moving towards the heroes and a real sense of urgency is created.

Overall, we just wanted to make the difficulties feel more consistent, give monsters the opportunity of counterplay, and increase the tools we have to adjust balance in the future.

Thanks for reading! Please let us know what you think!

May 14, 2019

Design Journal: Villains

Wildermyth - Worldwalker Games

I'm gonna talk about how we're designing a major new feature we're calling Villains. I'll start with some history and background to cover the motivation, and then I'll get into our proposed solution (that we've started building), along with some of the risks and pitfalls that we hope to avoid in the process.

NOTE: very mild (trailer-level) spoilers below.

Background

Something we've had a lot of trouble with, ever since the beginning, was an overarching story.

At first we had this vague sense that you were sortof "settling" the land, making it safe from monsters, that sort of thing. And once we went down the procedural heroes and fights path, we didn't want to marry ourselves to a particular overall storyline either. Here's why.

Right now, if you play the game 5 times, you'll get a different cast of heroes each time, and you'll (hopefully!) see new and different events each time. That's cool! But if we had a set plot with scripted events, then those would quickly become boring. That's why our "overarching" plot is as thin as possible. There are monsters. Stop them. It's enough to point you in a direction, and that's all it does. It's intended to melt into the background after that.

This isn't a story. It's not pretending to be.

But ok, it's not super satisfying. One of the big goals for our game is to be a kind of storytelling tool, so that players can play out their own unique epic stories. But, so far we've simply ignored or handwaved the whole main motivation for being heroes in the first place. Why are you here? What do you want? We just rely on genre tropes and it's not satisfying.

A long time ago we had an idea for a cast of Villains, that maybe you'd pick one, or randomly get one in each game, and they would provide the story for that playthrough. We tried going down that road and we had to stop, because the story we were creating was brittle, it couldn't handle a hero dying partway through a plot arc, etc.. It took a long time to write and it wouldn't take very long to play, and once you had played it, you wouldn't want to play it again.

We used to have NPCs who had personal relationships with specific heroes, and would guide you through the plot

So we abandoned that route and starting writing events that could be triggered randomly, when the heroes arrive at a hostile site, for example. (This is pretty much the approach that FTL uses, along with having a very thing overarching plot.) That's where we've been focusing our efforts over the last couple years, and it's paid off. So now we have a game that we can play over and over again, which is pretty great.

Ah, the essential choice!

But, the downside is that our overall campaign doesn't really feel unique or important. Fight some monsters, fight some different monsters. Ok. What can we do about that? This is one of our most requested improvements, so we've got to tackle it.

Alternatives

Here's some of the stuff we thought about.

Procedural Chapters
Our first thought was to see if we could come up with more interesting chapters procedurally. We'd define a bunch of different chapter goals, and each campaign you'd get a handful of them, and that would make it feel different, right? Well, maybe. But probably what would happen instead is the second time you got the "rescue the npc" chapter you would recognize it and stop paying attention to it. And also, a mish mash of different things happening, and then a big final battle isn't a story. It's a history, maybe, but not a story, because it's not connected; it doesn't make sense from start to finish.

Simulation Driven
Another approach is to deepen our simulation. What if we modeled more things in the world, like town population, human and monstrous economy, and so forth. Then the monsters could do things for simulation reasons, and that would create a natural tension, and generate story, right? Again, maybe...? But you'd need a pretty deep simulation, and even then you'd (trust me!) want some kind of "storyteller" to make stuff happen at dramatically appropriate times, to keep the conflict at the right level, etc.. At the end of the day it's difficult to imagine building an economy so detailed that it could organically generate a goal like, "we have to beat the Gorgons to the legendary spear!" Which, let's be honest, is the kind of goal that would be perfect for our chapters.

Legacy Monsters
Another approach is to leverage our Legacy mechanics. What if we had legacy monsters, who could serve as mini-bosses and eventually villains? Ok, that sounds pretty damn cool. But! There are design problems also, like, how is a legacy monster created? Is the player incentivized to do weird things in order to get the legacy monsters they want and avoid the ones they don't want? Those incentives are going to clash with story incentives and that will probably feel shitty! But if we gate narrative progress on unlocking legacy monsters, then we need to make sure you're unlocking some. And, if you don't have any control, then they're not really yours, are they? These problems might be solvable, and I do want to revisit legacy monsters some day. But the last problem is, a monster isn't the same thing as a story. If you have a real mean deer, that's cool! But that doesn't necessarily make a good chapter goal, and it definitely doesn't translate into an overall story. We would still need to solve that problem.

Villains Again
We reconsidered our old idea to have individually hand-crafted, bespoke artisan villains. Now that the bulk of the game is (broadly and hopefully) doing the job of character development and hero progression, what if we write a set of villains that can replace those loose "chapter goal" screens from before? If we leave the bulk of the game in place, and really just make villains about the chapter start and capstone fight, then suddenly we can tell one complete story, with interesting plot points along the way, but it's still really different every time you play. Unlike our previous approach, we're no-longer trying to connect every fight. We just want to set one or two goals per chapter that drive the story forward. That's the dream anyway. Let's dig in some more.

The Design

Let's talk production. In order for this to work, we need to be able to write new villains faster than people can get bored of the game, basically. We kindof figure if we can release one villain every month or two, and each villain is satisfying for a whole campaign, then that's a great start. If we have 5 villains when we hit 1.0, people will have to play 5 campaigns to see all the story, and by then we're working on villains 6-8. This is the cold hard math of game development, you guys!

So then, we took this idea and developed it some more, and laid down some guidelines for ourselves, for how to write villains.

Here are the rough outlines.

Unlockable
New players will have access to one story, which will start with current tutorial material. Completing this will unlock the next batch of villains. Subsequent villains might require a number of legacy heroes at a particular tier, or have other unlock conditions. This allows those stories to, for example, start you off in a dramatically different situation, with a handful of seasoned veterans and 12 calamities on the board. It should open up some fun stories.

Failing Chapters
You will be able to fail (some) chapter goals without causing a game over. This allows us to have a much broader range of chapter goals, like, "rescue a hero and bring them to the final fight" or "complete this task before year 12." Chapter goals can be story-driven, and failure will have consequences, which will probably be fairly uniform (e.g. extra calamities).

No One Hero is the Main Character
You can have a "special" hero for 1 chapter at most. This rule is important because heroes can die or retire, and if the overall plot depends on a particular hero, that won't work. So, you can have a chapter 1 goal to keep a particular hero alive, but you must allow the goal to fail, and therefore you can't require the same hero in chapter 2.

Give Structure and Meaning
Villain content won't change or replace the bulk of our existing content. Villains are there to provide meaning and structure that spans the whole campaign, but don't need to be involved in every single fight. We think the meat and potatoes we've got in the game now is working well, so we won't be breaking it. Complexity-wise, expect each villain story to have one or two big choices, which might be about whether you succeed or fail at a chapter goal.

Roadmap

The first villain took about a month to write, and has not yet been integrated. We'll need to build some tech for that, but we don't expect tech to be the blocker for long. We expect subsequent villains to be pretty straightforward, tech-wise. We plan to turn the feature on when we have 3 complete villains. We may or may not disable the old-style campaigns at that time.

Risks

Are we building the right thing? Maybe this isn't what you want. Maybe it will take away from the sense of a story that you own completely, and make Wildermyth more like all the other RPGs out there? I worry about that! Maybe this will make the dynamic writing and procedural storytelling that we do less obvious, and will ultimately ruin the game? What if we have five villains, and when you play them all, you're done with the game? Maybe we'll want to preserve and/or even expand a "simulation mode" where there is no one set story?

...we have no idea I guess! But we think if we can produce new villains fast enough, then the upside of having more stories will outweigh the downsides of moving away from some kind of procedural purity. Time will tell! But let us know if you have a guess one way or another!

Secret Goals

In the course of building Villains, we're going to need to build a bunch of special maps, and we'll need to build a structure that makes it easy for us to string stories together over a whole campaign, easily handle failure, etc.. Those things aren't too far away from what the game already does so I'm not too concerned, but I think it opens up some really cool possibilities.

What if anyone can write their own villain? What if you can build your own battle maps, and string them together with your own comics? That's the thing that I'm the most excited about, and what I think really convinced us that this was an exciting direction. Can we make tools that will allow you to really and truly tell your own story, that anyone can play through with their own heroes? I think we're alarmingly close to being able to answer that question.

Thanks for reading, and let us know what you think! We're listening!