Nyctophobia development progress - 2

 2024/Oct/20

Hello, this is the second development post.

I'll introduce you about the change in game design after the first development post, also with items that has been added.

1. Changed Points

After receiving feedbacks, I realized I was missing some points. The base of Nyctophobia is Vampire Survivors(VS), yet I was missing the fun of VS. My original design was trying to focus horror features yet based on VS, had Boss Ghost Monsters in the middle of the gameplay. However, the damage of player is useless against Boss Ghost Monster, but only player's Mental Point(MP) matters. On the contrary, MP does not mean something against normal monsters, although most of the game play will be against normal monsters. Only player's damage matters to them. I realized that these resources are not mixed well but playing separately instead, so I have changed the design. Also, I received the feedback that including oil resource can be too many resources for player to care of, making player unable to get used to the game in short play time(10~15min). Also made change on this.

- now Normal Monster also gives bit of MP damage, not only HP damage

- candle does not require oil any more. Instead, some or all Boss Ghost Monsters and ghost events can turn off the candle and make player unable to turn it on for a few seconds. In other cases, player can turn on and off the candle as they want. I'm also thinking of systems such as turning off the candle by player themselves to evade the ghost events, etc.

- still, player takes continuous MP damage if candle is turned off. Therefore, taking long time for beating Boss Ghost Monsters will result in increasing MBLv, increasing the difficulty to survive. Expecting this system to work as sort of time limit.

- now, to defeat Boss Ghost Monsters, player's ability to do damage is required. For example, some patterns such as specific objects are being spawned and player needs to break it while running away from Ghosts.

- Still player cannot do anything against normal Ghost Monsters. Player needs to run away. On collision with them, player takes some amount of MP damage.

2. Items

2-1. Fire Ball

Basic initial item. When monsters approach inside detection area, automatically fires a fire ball to the nearest enemy. As level increases, penetration count and damage increases.

2-2. Shoe

Player's movement speed increases. Gets faster as level increases.

2-3. Magnet

Same with original VS. Increase the range of item pickup area.

2-4. Electricity Field

Every specific time, attacks all enemy near player.

2-5. Shield

Cool down exists for getting a stack count. Per stack count, one collision against normal monsters can be ignored. Initial max stack count is 1, and as level increases, cooldown gets shorter and max stack count increases.

2-6. Madness

All weapons' damages are increase by x%*(current MBLv + 1). As MBLv increases, increased damaged will be applied right away. As item level increases, damage increase per MBLv increases. However, max MP decreases permanently as item level increases.

2-7. Ice Ball(creating)

Fires ice ball to the nearest enemy. On collision, creates a ice field, which makes enemies slow down. As level increases, ice field's range and slow rate will increase. Ice field disappears after few second.

There are other items as well, but decision of using them or not hasn't been made yet. I'll also introduce about those items once decision are made.

3. Other things

things I wanted to talk of, about development contents

- there was a bug that madness' increased damage is not being applied to the melee weapons right away. Hard to explain it with details, but fixed.

- there was a problem on shield, losing all stacks at once on collision even if there was more than 1 stack. This should happened since multiple collision had occurred in very short time, so fixed it by making player does not take damage for 0.1 second after losing a single stack on shield. Now only single stack is being consumed on collision.

- there was a bug on slow field, unable to classify the targets of slow field. It was due to a simple code mistakes, and has been fixed. Some specific Ghost Monsters will create slow field that makes player gets slower to interrupt player's escape. Other methods can be used as well.

- there was a bug that Ghost Monsters going back to their original position after repositioning. Fixed.

There were quite lots of things going on this week, and I was not able to proceed development any further after realizing the issue on my game design. Due to those, there were not that many updates in this week. I'll need to try harder next week.

Thanks for reading. Feedback is always welcome!