Echo #48: Inventory, challenges and rewards

Posted by Phoebii on Aug. 29, 2016, 4:12 a.m.

This week I have improved inventory!

Now when you fill the inventory, it becomes bigger, that means items will never be lost because there’s not enough space in the inventory!

Filling inventory creates new inventory page. Removing all items from last inventory page, deletes that inventory page. And there’s a limitation – if you want to start new mission, you cannot have more than 3 inventory pages. The inventory is infinite, but your computer’s power is not!

After more than 10 pages created, FPS severely drops when adding the new item to the inventory, this should be even worse for the slower computers.

I could probably optimize inventory system to allow having 100 and more pages without any lag, but I would need to completely rewrite inventory system and I don’t want to do that. It would take a lot of time and 3 inventory pages – that’s 198 slots! – is more than enough, for now.

I wanted to make inventory kind-of-infinite, because the modular difficulty system will reward player with a lot of items at the end of the mission.

Here is the challenges that the modular difficulty system will offer:

Armoured Minions

Minions will have 50% more armour.

Deadly Minions

Minions will deal 25% more damage.

Deadly Encounters

​You will have a chance to encounter dreadnoughts.

The Assault of the Modified

There will be more modified minions.

The Rain of Fire

​Every 10 seconds the missile will be fired at you from the bombardment station. Find and destroy bombardment station to stop this.

Risk for Reward

XP and parts earned in this mission will be lost, if your spaceship will be destroyed.

Suicide Mission

Doubles required kill count for kill missions, doubles escort distance for the escort missions, doubles ruin data required for resurrection missions, doubles guardian kill count for the boss missions.

Only the Strongest

Swarmlings will only spawn with the big enemies, probes or scions will not spawn.

Every challenge/difficulty system module that you will accept will increase reward that you will get if you will complete mission with increased difficulty.

1 Module used

1 amplifier, 1 optimized part

2 Modules used

2 amplifiers, 3 optimized parts

3 Modules used

4 amplifiers, 6 optimized parts

4 Modules used

6 amplifiers, 3 advanced parts, 3 optimized parts

5 Modules used

8 amplifiers, 6 advanced parts, 3 optimized parts

6 Modules used

10 amplifiers, 6 extant parts, 6 advanced parts

7 Modules used

12 amplifiers, 12 extant parts, 6 advanced parts

8 Modules used

14 amplifiers, 12 extant parts, 12 advanced parts, 6 optimized parts

If you have never enabled hard mode - amplifiers are the items that you can use to upgrade spaceship parts. Upgrading makes the part as powerful as the part from the next tier. E,g,: upgraded generic part is like normal optimized part.

Of course, this is just a plan, just a bunch of ideas, so I don’t really know how will this look in the end! But I hope as cool as I imagine it now!

Next week I will continue improving inventory and items.

I will make amplifiers stack-able, I will make amplifiers for properties that don’t have amplifiers yet, I will merge apocalypse/carrier/goliath/nomad ability unleash chances into universal ability unleash chance, I will improve tooltips and maybe I will even start working on the modified enemies. (Does anyone remember sniper veterans?) After all that, I will be ready to work on the modular difficulty system!

Until next week!

Comments

Jani_Nykanen 8 years, 3 months ago

It's time to ask this question again (because I know people want to know this)… how many copies you have sold?

EDIT: SteamSpy says 536 ± 1,049.

Gift of Death 8 years, 3 months ago

Quote:
EDIT: SteamSpy says 536 ± 1,049.
So… Between -513 and 1585? How does one sell digitical copies of something in negative quantities?

I mean for physical copies you probably could count unsold stuff like that.

But on a more serious note, isn't not being allowed to talk about the sale amounts part of the deal with Steam as a seller?

Jani_Nykanen 8 years, 3 months ago

Quote:
But on a more serious note, isn't not being allowed to talk about the sale amounts part of the deal with Steam as a seller?

Steam lawyers will never visit this site, so they'll never notice.

But yeah, if it's against something, then don't do it.

Phoebii 8 years, 3 months ago

Ignore SteamSpy data, it's pure nonsense.

I guess it's safe to say that it's still around 100 copies sold.

Major updates (those that put chosen news article on front page) don't help much.

Sales don't help much.

Wishlists don't help much.

Giveaways don't help much.

Social networks don't help at all (could be that I just don't know how to use them #introvertproblems)

With all these combined I get sale or two per week on average. Some weeks are just dead.

Now the only hope is that my publisher will get some attention with PR and youtubers.

But hey, I'm pretty happy with this, I get about $100 per month and that's, like, a lot better than not making any money =P