forum.ferretdev.org

Oh hey Tchey. I remember you from the itch.io blog. Welcome to the forum, and thanks for trying the test build.

Yeah, I still haven't gotten to trying to fix that yet. I know, I know, it has been seven months. The good news is, with the Matter build finally wrapping up, we're at least getting closer to when I can investigate it.

Demon chooses its resolution automatically based on the biggest one it thinks you can support at start up, but does not currently offer a way to choose a smaller one. At your resolution, you'd definitely be getting the biggest one: 1152x864.

....whoops. Due to a typo, Melt effects had only 1/3 the AI evaluation value they should have had. Fixing this will probably fix quite a bit

Because I like pain, this next build is going to include some fairly significant balance changes, some of which actually don't have a whole lot to do with Matter:

1) Healing in general will have a lower AI evaluation, particularly for not very injured targets.
2) The AI will be more reluctant to do low accuracy actions.
3) Vapors will be allowed to continue hitting Immune/missed/etc. targets, but their success rates will be dropped one "level" (approximately -15% for most Vapors)
4) Some changes to Held (not sure exactly what yet, but generally needs to be toned down a bit)

This isn't all the next build will have, just the big ticket items.

::stares at the code for determining whether or not to show that little red "NA" on an ability icon::

...one day I really need to learn how to code.

Where can i read the general goals of this "Matter" update ? Not the patch notes, but the main idea, the concept, the vision...

Huh. Nobody's asked that before.

I've never posted it in a single, concise post anywhere: you'd be able to piece it together from looking at at blog posts going back to around August 2017 so and looking forward from there, but to save you the trouble, I'll summarize here:

The objective of the Matter build is to add a new ability type, Matter, to Demon. Matter will cover ground that really didn't fit under the domains of any of the existing elements: things such as acids, petrification, entangling, disintegration, and the like. The goal is for Matter to feel like it was always part of the game; thus, it will be as fully supported as all the existing elements such as Fire, Ice, Body, etc. Ideally, a new player would never be able to guess Matter was not always part of the game.

To this end, 20 new characters and nearly 80 new abilities are being added: the new characters will be spread amongst the entire game, and be the main way new Matter abilities are introduced into the game. However, several existing characters are also having their ability sets adjusted a bit to even out the distribution and help Matter be more smoothly integrated into the game as a whole, rather than being clumped only on the newer characters.

Finally, we should not forget all the other little details necessary to make Matter feel like an original part of the game: character creation options, demon modifiers, updated resistance tables for all characters that make some weak/resistant/immune to Matter.

As a minor aside, the Matter build also brings the total recruitable demon to count 153, which makes me happy for the irrational reason that the first version of Pokemon had 151 Pokemon. It's a nice little milestone to have passed.

In other news, I spoil you folks sometimes. Enjoy Joe, you don't often get UI improvements out of me this easily.

Nice! This is actually hyper useful. Sometimes characters are drowning in various status effects and it takes a while to figure out if they have any disabling debuffs that I would like to take advantage of. I hope you didn't forget to make some exceptions, like triad ward and lucky dodge that still can work even if target is stunned, paralyzed, etc. Does it also show NA on SP regenerating abilities if target is infected?
Did another 2 runs since the last post: one rests in tower 23 and another rests only half way there. Haven't encountered anything gamebreaking since then. Just one thing, looks like if you upgrade poison effect (caused by anything but vapor) with toxic vapor, upgraded effect gets shorter duration.
Looks like level shift among demons caused Breska and Jayle to appear more often, I fought them in both T23 runs. And both times Jayle had Medusa in her party, but I failed to link with her every time.

The exceptions work based on the abilities themselves: i.e.: If an ability works when "disabled", it will not get NA'd even when disabled. You can see it in the picture there: Panic disables many passives (Parry, Block Impact), but some things don't care about being disabled (Innocence and Warmth.)

However, the Infection bit does not show NAs. Those abilities still technically function, the function just turns out to not do anything. A small distinction, but one that'd make having Infection NA them a special casey pain in the neck.

I'll add your Poison bug to the list: thanks.

I know Medusa's a crazy tough link... it's definitely on the border of maybe not even possible, but I want to give it a little time before I consider a nerf. Unique recruitments should be tough.

Well thanks for the heads up because what I meant was - Medusa was dying every time under Jayle's control and I couldn't help it