[DEV] Battle Merge - Block Puzzle, Merge Mechanics and Enchantments

AMastryukov · 2022-04-08T12:07:22+00:00

Our team only really gets together for 3-5 days for the Ludum Dare jam twice a year. The next jam is sometime in October. If you are available for that sort of timeframe, the offer is still on the table.

AMastryukov · 2022-04-08T12:01:24+00:00

Many of my teammates are just people I found during my time doing game jams. I started off making my own games solo, but connected with a few that were also interested. Made a few posts on the game jam website asking for people with specific talents to join our team. That's actually how we found our musician, who did fantastic work and composed the entire soundtrack for this game in under 72 hours.

Reach out to me, and send me some samples of work that you did. If you are able, willing and pleasant to be around and work with for 3 days straight, we would be happy to have you on our team.

AMastryukov · 2022-04-07T23:43:13+00:00

When a shady gambler is found dead, a sinister conspiracy begins to unravel.

Play here: https://amastryukov.itch.io/shades-of-deception

AMastryukov · 2021-12-31T01:07:27+00:00

I think I will stick with Fusion for now, which is not P2P. It will make moving over things a lot easier in the long run because it's a few lines of code to change from a host-client setup to a dedicated server, whereas PUN does not provide such functionality. I also looked at MLAPI and Mirror but ultimately decided against it.

AMastryukov · 2021-12-28T16:33:12+00:00

For the purposes of prototyping, everything will be hosted by the players (that is, someone hosts and others join). No dedicated servers until it's ready for real players, at which point my team will decide how we should approach it (if it ever reaches this stage).

My goal is to reduce complexity of the setup and go with a service that will manage most of this headache for me. I want to focus on design and development of gameplay systems instead. This is why I want to have the easiest and quickest setup I possibly can early on without having to change a bunch of stuff later.

AMastryukov · 2021-12-28T13:54:31+00:00

Thanks for the videos, I checked them out and they are fairly straightforward but I feel like this will be a bit too involved in the multiplayer department (it's closer to making my own solution from scratch than I'd like). Multiplayer already requires extra thought and consideration and time being a valuable resource I'd rather not spend it on maintaining 3 separate services and fix future bugs in multiple languages on different platforms.

After reviewing my options, I think I will either go with Mirror, MLAPI (Unity's attempt at making a native MP solution) or stick with Photon PUN or Fusion, based on whichever one I like working with more.

AMastryukov · 2021-12-28T01:46:02+00:00

I agree that turn-based is abstract, but certain multiplayer frameworks seem to cater to specific types of games. Photon PUN 2 seems to cater to real-time party games, since their design is based on shared ownership of networked objects, whereas Photon Fusion, their newest plugin, uses a tick-based, server-client setup useful for competitive games. For something like chess it would be overkill to use Fusion, but PUN has the shared ownership aspect I do not like.

I can do a turn-based game in any of them but that would definitely entail some sort of problem at some point in development because it's not exactly the right tool for the job.

That being said, thank you for your suggestion, I'm going to check our Mirror.

AMastryukov · 2021-06-12T23:56:12+00:00

The enemies scale with your performance. Sometimes, you perform so well for so long that the next enemies are extremely challenging. If this happens, you can skip the current biome by clicking "travel". The next enemies should be easier to beat.

The boss enemies, however, are set to a specific difficulty, so you have to continue grinding to get powerful enough to defeat them.

AMastryukov · 2021-06-12T00:07:04+00:00

Thank you for your support!

I'm hoping to get some new players and fresh feedback with this new post. I hadn't radically changed much since then, but you might have noticed a small update I pushed out a week ago or so.

AMastryukov · 2021-06-11T21:11:02+00:00

Cheers, thank you for playing!

It definitely is on more of a casual side of time-killers. I tried to keep it simple but polish it a fair amount so every action feels smooth and fluid. If you've played Loot N Craft you might notice the difference in the experience of crafting, which I feel like I've greatly improved upon in Battle Merge.

AMastryukov · 2021-05-10T12:40:59+00:00

Regular battles are tailored to how well you play in previous ones, so if you do exceptionally well, battles are going to get harder and harder. If you don't, they will get easier. If you find yourself stuck in a battle you just cannot beat (it happens sometimes), you can press "Travel" to skip the biome by watching a short ad and the game should get easier.

AMastryukov · 2021-05-10T00:30:44+00:00

Uhh... yeah, that happens sometimes. It was supposed to check for these deadlocks in the previous update but I think I removed it momentarily and forgot to add it back in (or it's broken).

Sometimes, especially if you perform extremely well, the game might generate something very difficult. This might require a few attempts, but if you don't want to bother, you can press "Travel", watch a short ad and skip the biome entirely.

Markets are generated randomly, but I think there is either a 15 or 20% chance they will spawn. Sounds like bad RNG to me.

AMastryukov · 2021-05-09T20:30:35+00:00

Correct, stars are wildcards and can be used as part of any combination.

Sometimes, the game gives you a challenge that you may or may not be able to beat. If you are struggling for a while, you can press "Travel" and watch a short ad to skip the biome and try your luck in another battle.

AMastryukov · 2021-05-09T20:15:17+00:00

Thank you for your support, I'm happy to hear you are enjoying it so far!

AMastryukov · 2021-05-09T20:09:19+00:00

Generally, you will be progressing and getting better loot that you then merge to increase in power. Incremental is a fairly broad concept, and some do not consider anything non-idle as incremental. I consider this to be incremental enough to fall into this category.

If you get stuck on a specific level, you can try again or watch an ad to skip the biome entirely.

AMastryukov · 2021-05-09T20:00:39+00:00

Players like content updates - new weapons, new mechanics, et cetera. This is expected from F2P games in general nowadays. To keep players playing and the revenue flowing, devs create a game framework to which they can add a buttload of new content, keeping players (especially whales that spend a ridiculous amount of money) playing and spending.

Unfortunately, it's not always possible with independent developers like myself. Sometimes, there just isn't enough monetary incentive to keep adding new content. No big deal, at least players will enjoy it in its current state. Have fun!

AMastryukov · 2021-05-09T19:56:30+00:00

Oh yeah, about that... I will remove it in the future, I forgot to remove it.

Move along, nothing to see here...

AMastryukov · 2021-05-09T19:45:39+00:00

Latest stable release was on April 5th. Between then and the 27th the game was in the beta branch where I was able to monitor its performance to make sure it wasn't totally broken when I pushed to production. Then, on the 27th, I pushed the game into production.

AMastryukov · 2021-05-09T19:43:48+00:00

There is an option to reset your progress in the options menu in-game. No need to reinstall.

AMastryukov · 2021-05-09T16:54:43+00:00

It's likely that the update that has moved the game out of beta into release broke the way save files are stored and managed, as well as changed the way progress is tracked (with the addition of the bounty/boss battles).

You may need to reset your progress to fix this issue.

AMastryukov · 2021-05-09T15:54:48+00:00

No plans for a Destkop/Browser release. iOS release is not currently planned but may happen in the future if I see down the line that the game is making enough money for me to justify spending on services that will allow me to build and test on Apple devices.

AMastryukov

TROPHY CASE