Out of Control Update (Feb 21 2025)

The plan was to give a quick update to Randomly Generated RPG, probably only take a week or so. Oops that didn’t work out. Most of the week was spent changing and killing a lot of abilities (both for players and enemies), and I made zero progress on the PvZ Heroes game. It feels a lot like my last semester of college, where working on this game just took over my life. One week later, while I’ve made a lot of progress, there’s still work to be done. The current goal is to get the update out before the end of the month.

Along the way, I made some changes to the gameplay. First, I got rid of accuracy. Buffing and nerfing accuracy didn’t seem that interesting. It didn’t sound fun for your attacks to miss. Another bad part is that accuracy means absolutely nothing on Angel. All of this made me just want to get rid of it altogether.

I also wasn’t so satisfied with the luck stat. The luck stat was your chance of getting critical hits, and you increased/decreased your percentage of that happening by like 10% or so. I ended up overhauling it. Basically: if you have 0 luck, you can’t do critical hits at all; at 1 luck you have a 20% chance; at 2 luck you have a 40% chance. If you do get a critical hit, you get +3 to your damage/healing. However, if you have negative luck, you instead have a chance of getting -3 to your damage/healing. This was a much more noticeable effect, and losing luck is actually bad now. 

As a counterpart to Locked (the new status effect that prevents your position/emotion from changing), I buffed Protected. In addition to blocking all damage, it also blocks all negative stat modifiers (power, defense, speed, luck). Speaking of speed, I'm committing to not doing my overhaul from last week. It still seemed too complicated and better for a different game.

The reason making abilities has taken so long is because I got stricter with the ability pie. Player abilities are allowed and not allowed to do certain things. I decided that, if both Knight and Angel can do a certain ability, it goes to Knight (and same thing for Wizard). That means Angel can only do things that neither Knight or Wizard can do (such as healing, or changing emotions and positions at the same time). Even though this new design restriction is not going to be noticeable for anyone playing the game, it’s still something I want to do.

As for the enemies, I also got stricter there. Their abilities must correspond to their core concept (explained in their bio), they can’t just have random abilities. One trap I've fallen into a lot is that I can easily have 3 abilities that fit their bio…but then what’s the 4th ability going to do? I've decided enemies must have 4 abilities (except that a handful of 1-star enemies are allowed to have 2), and trying to figure out the 4th ability has been difficult. I'm only down to 2 more to do though.

A few enemy concepts have evolved. For example, Archer makes players angry so that it can be happy and get an emotional advantage on them, and Wolf no longer jumps up and down, it now makes 1-star enemies stronger. But the one enemy I’ve struggled the most on is Astronaut. I’ve grown dissatisfied with their concept of “make players elevated and happy, then this becomes sad,” and it feels redundant (especially because Bat has now become the enemy that becomes sad and attacks happy players). Which means it’s likely that I’ll just replace that one completely, although what the replacement will do I’m not sure.

Finally I changed some cheats and challenges. Firstly, I didn’t like having both Stronger Players and Stronger Enemies. I turned Stronger Players into Weaker Enemies, which means they start with 2 less health. Stronger Enemies is now More Enemies, which means waves 1-4 have an extra 1-star enemy. I also considered having a 1-star enemy be a 2-star enemy instead, but having another 1-star enemy sounded more fun.

The Faster Player Cooldowns cheat was too good with the player abilities that granted extra turns, or stunned enemies. Now it’s Slower Enemy Cooldowns, which means when enemies use an ability, it gets another turn of cooldown (like permanent happy). Since luck is now different, I got rid of No Enemy Luck and turned it into something else: Knight can attack elevated enemies. Finally I turned Enemies Stunned into Extra Enemy Turns, which means when a new enemy is created, they automatically get an extra turn. I actually don’t remember what caused me to changed this, but I like it better.

Quite the lengthy change log huh? Especially for a game I mostly considered to be done many months ago.