God Of Weapons News

Hello everyone.

It’s Tea from the Archmage Team again, typing this on August 6th, 2024 in our second dev blog hoping to keep everyone up to date on the progress here at Archmage Studios!

First, I want to address our last dev blog! Specifically, I want to thank everyone for their support and suggestions for the summon system! I have compiled the suggestions and brought them up with our devs and other designers for consideration! Additionally, there is one comment I think should be directly addressed!



RottingGem is right! Seal/Banish and other RNG manipulation tools have been all hotly requested features since our big update that vastly expanded our item pool! I just forgot about them since they’re mostly in a polishing state instead of active tweaking!

I’ll talk about what we have in a future update (maybe the next one?) but for now have some teasers before we go into today's topic?





Our art team goes hard, as always!

Anyway, let's move on to another hotly requested feature that has been in development for a long time!

[h2]Infinite Mode![/h2]
The logic and concept behind infinite mode is simple. Usually, if you do reach the peak of brokenness, it’s usually around level 16ish if you’re lucky. By then, you have precious little time to enjoy your power before it’s all over. Sometimes, we want to take a victory lap.



The idea behind infinite mode is simple: once you win, we’ll give you the option to keep playing. Once you step into Infinite mode, you’ll keep playing forever until you die!

So, what’s the hold-up?

[h2]The problem with infinity![/h2]
[h3]Testing takes forever![/h3]
Compared to a lot of the features we’re working on, testing infinite mode legitimately takes a really long time. You’ll have to run through the whole level 1-20 hoping you’re strong enough, then you go into infinite mode and just keep going until you die.

We do have dev tools, of course. We can revive ourselves, add specific items, and even skip to floor 20 if we want. The problem with doing all that is we risk losing touch with the actual player experience. We still need to balance infinite mode to be a fun experience for the player, and if we just skip to floor 20 and console in our perfect broken build, we are risking balancing it against console-wielding devs and not actual players.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]It’s balanced. I think?[/h3]
God of Weapons used a quadratic formula to control the difficulty between floors 1 to 20. Said formula stopped being reasonable past floor 20. We want to give you time to enjoy your victory lap before we drown you in enemies, and that means playing with an entirely new formula and hoping it feels good. And if it doesn’t, it’s back to doing voodoo in a spreadsheet.

On top of that, we only have so much spawn pattern from which to pull. It’s good enough for 20 floors, but one of our biggest concerns is that it will get stale by floor 30. So that means adding new patterns and making sure everything is scalable and fun.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]Infinite arms race![/h3]
Right now, we’re testing infinite mode mostly against weapons and systems the player already has access to in the main game. There are new monsters, and we can banish items, but it’s overall identical to what you have access to right now.

That’s not going to be what Infinite Mode looks like when we release it.

You’ll have new weapons and accessories. You’ll have the summon system to play with! You’ll have Gem to amp your favorite weapons up even further (that’ll be a fun blog)! You’ll have a whole new DoT System. All of these are in parallel development, so we can’t just test what they’ll do right now and how they interact with each other in normal play and in Infinite mode.

And so, it’s back to more testing!

Hello everyone.

It’s Tea from the Archmage team, reaching out to you in our July 26th development log. The first of many, we hope!

Firstly, I want to address a common issue that has been brought up to us many times and the very thing that has spurred us to write this blog: our silence and lack of progress since our last major update. We here at Archmages are aware that our work pipeline is different from that of our other peers in the indie scene. I just want to assure everyone still watching that God of Weapons is very much not abandonware. The entire team still works hard every day to push out our next major update!

Our pipeline prioritizes larger content drops over smaller and more frequent patches, and unfortunately, that means there will be periods of major content drought like this one. We are discussing the possibility of pushing out smaller hotfix patches in the future. But until then, we hope that these devblogs will improve our transparency and make the community feel more involved!


So, what exactly have we been working on all these times? A lot! But today, I want to discuss an entirely new system that has been a frequent request since our 1.0 release: Summoned minions!

[h2]Summon system![/h2]



The summon system is one of the many reasons I am convinced that I will wake up one day with a pillow on my face, courtesy of the devs. Turns out, adding friendly minions under your control is a really difficult task in the framework we’ve built. Still, our team of wizards have risen to the challenge, even if the code still mistakes minions and weapons occasionally.

Minions are an entirely different class of items, distinct from the weapons that bop your enemies and the accessories that raise your stat. Normally, each minion is attached to its own item that summon them, though there will be weapons that summon minions. However, there will also be weapons that summon minions as part of their special effects!

Additionally, to help solidify the identity of minions, they will have their own set of unique stats to scale from in addition to normal player stats: Summon Power, Summon Vitality, Quantity, Summon Cooldown, Summon Duration.

• Summon Power: this stat makes your minion better at their function. If it heals, it heals more. If it hurts, it hurts more. Simple, right?
  
• Summon Vitality: It lets your minion take more damage!
  
• Summon Quantity: You get more out of your summon items! If it’s 1 minion before, it’s 2 now. This is a volatile one.
  
• Summon Cooldown: The pause between summoning a new minion.
  
• Summon Duration: how long a minion will last.
  

Minions’ jobs are straightforward. Some act as turrets, staying where they are to provide covering fire for you. Others wander around and smash enemies. Simple on paper, right? Well…

[h2]Hurdles with minions so far[/h2]

[h3]Minions don’t do their job[/h3]



Minions are meant to fulfill the same job weapons do: killing enemies and protecting you. Weapons do that by killing enemies really quickly before they can get to you. Minions also try to do that, but they like to wander all over the place.

We’re playing with their aggression and attack/follow logic. If they’re too aggressive, they just walk off to punch people and leave you all by yourself. If they’re not aggressive enough, they just follow you around like lost puppies instead of actually attacking anyone and then they just get torn apart by enemies. Right now, we’re trying to find a good balance between these two extremes.

[h3]Minions drop like fly[/h3]

Unlike the player, who can rely on hitpoint, life steals, dodge, regen, and their own active dash to mitigate enemies’ damage. Minions only have their hit points, and they simply get torn apart. We have considered the idea of minion armor before, but we dislike the idea of adding so many stats for the player to juggle with.

[h3]We’re running out of UI space and buttons [/h3]



To put it simply, a summon item has its own stats that need to be displayed. It also summons a minion that needs to be displayed. Some weapons also summon minion, so they need to display their own stat and the stat of their summoned minions

Some items and weapons summon many different types of units, and we need to display all of them on screen for you to view. You need to be able to flip through the different summons from one item and see how their stats change as yours change.

We are struggling to find an elegant way to display all of this without turning this into a spreadsheet simulator (that’s our next game, actually)

Thank you for your attention and patience,

Best wishes
Dev team

Hi everyone,

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[h2]Time Treker[/h2]
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Best wishes,
AML team

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