New year, same mistakes!

So remember a couple months ago when I was working on the Bread Ruins story climax, and said "okay, it's not good when I need to hold back content and quality of life improvements because I'm working on new story stuff"? Well, I'm back in that situation and have learned nothing from my previous mistakes! :D

One of my smart, genious and totally not fallible plans going forward was to structure NPC plotlines more like Dark Souls NPCs or the Majima Everywhere system from the Yakuza Kiwami games - that is, encounters with a character are sprinkled over random corners of the map and you won't see someone in one place unless you've met them in a prior place (unless the encounters are totally unrelated and you can get them in any order). The idea being, I can just add new steps as they're done, and if a plot thing is not ready yet when it's time to release an update, I just omit the next step - win-win from a development point of view.

Some characters already run on this sort of system - Terse, Eugene, Cheester, Cyrella and Pisston. However, turns out it's a lot harder to make the area plots work like this, since they require you to do levels in a certain order and those levels in turn NEED the story bits to be in them. Perhaps I would've needed to do things in yet another way, working on levels sneakily while doing regular updates but having them stay inaccessible until EVERYTHING is done and only at that point I actually let you go into them?

Either way, I'm sure everyone's still busy going through their Christmas-inflated backlogs of actually-completed games at the moment so hopefully waiting a couple more weeks for the next Burgertale update isn't too bad... hopefully I'll have it done in two more weeks, but I'm not going to make any promises. See this devlog not as a new year's resolution, but as a lump of coal that you got because I was naughty! (that's how it works right?)

Bigger and Better [Citation Needed]

Remember when I said "the movie world is the largest one so far"? Well, I also didn't learn anything from THAT and made the main level of the upcoming update even larger than that! Derp. No wonder these updates take so long...

Highlights include bomb puzzles, funky slopes, a science lab, an infinite corridor, a non-euclidean maze and two boss fights. You'll even get a new movement ability!

It's not the only new level either, since there's one optional level (the angry sun one) and there will be two other critical path levels (the royal castle and finally the level the Assault on Cowboy Town BGM was meant for, where you stage an assault- yeah, you get it)

One of the new bosses I've finished the brainstorming phase for - I always do this kinda thing on physical paper to avoid distractions.

Since it's just meant as a miniboss to make it feel like you EARNED the upgrade, I'm planning to speed up the actual implementation by having it mostly reuse the attacks of the basic clown enemies, but souped up to be harder by just tweaking some parameters (like the number of shots). This kinda thing can be overdone, but in small doses it's pretty neat - from the developer side you can make harder content by just copypasting the code and changing a number, and from the player side you're tested on your mastery of a mechanic by doing things again but harder this time.

The Upgrade Problem

So one thing I've kinda realized is how much the mobility upgrades suck - the wall jump is used to get to higher places (and is a bit of a disappointment because of how easy it is to stick to walls and lose your speed when you didn't intend to), the slide is used to slide under clearly marked slidable gaps, the snowball is used to break snowball blocks, the ground pound to break groundpound blocks, the underwater dash to break anchor blocks... ideally you should be working the upgrades into your moveset instead of them JUST being keys to open designated doors, but I've been doing a really crappy job at that so far and might need to rethink a few of them (or make them optional).

Another upgrade problem is that spell MJ costs are a bit high - I'm not sure I've gotten the balance right here because with too much Magic Juice, spellboosting becomes trivial and you can just fly past all movement challenges (and also there's no reason to use melee weapons) but with too prohibitive costs it's pointless to use anything other than the regular bullet spell. I'm still trying to figure out the right balance; right now there ARE build options to help with this (e.g. Orb of Midori for a 50% recovery speed boost, Witch Hat / Labyrinth Badge for more spell damage) but I might just end up adding a lot more mana shards - the main thing I used to figure out the max limit to upgrades was the number of icons that fit in the HUD and the mana cap was based on the size of a bottle covering the entire height of the screen (the old HUD option), but with the pie diagram being the canon HUD and unbounded by physical constraints, nothing's stopping me from letting that number go WAY higher than 256 in the end.

Another thing you might've noticed (if you managed to solve the puzzle to get the Vampire's Mirror in Steamboat Dracula) is accessories boosting a single spell a lot - I'm thinking about adding more of those just to pad out the accessory roster (I'm starting to run out of generic ideas) so you'll be able to boost your favorite spell to a more viable level if you're ready to give up a whole, precious scarf slot for it.

The Crystal Burger Problem

Another problem is that I kinda forgot about Crystal Burgers - when levels have a story event as the main goal it feels kinda weird to just hand you a CB afterwards and have a perfunctory escape, so I've not done that (for instance Frie's Rest / Bread Catacombs does not have ANY Crystal Burgers) but when a world has THREE such levels back-to-back I realized it's weird that the game stops caring about its main collectibles. I might need to put CBs into some of these levels after all even if the escape is just an expected formality, so the main plot doesn't end up as a completely disconnected, optional thing?

Speaking of upgrades, one of the new quality-of-life improvements is showing other major collectibles in the statistics menu, so you can tell WHERE something you're missing is located. I was a bit torn on adding this since it basically spoils the mystery, but ended up figuring that given how large levels are, it doesn't narrow it down that much after all.

One of the final things you can find in the endgame is going to be an accessory that just reveals all uncollected collectibles on the map, making 100% a snag - of course that's going to be the singular hardest thing to obtain in the game though, you gotta EARN it ;)

In retrospect, maybe this means the Eye of Madness needs to be buffed a bit since its special effect was telling you what collectibles were uncollected in a level - I might need to roll back this new collectibles data and only show it if you have that accessory equipped? Heck... a game balancer's job never ends...

Stay flippin' and stay tuned, folks! Once it's ready, this WILL be the largest update to the game so far. And hopefully, I can keep it that way for the future as well.

/Yal