Hello everyone! Another sub-zone update this time with The Ogre Caves leading into a reworked Ogre Shaman boss fight along with some tweaks to a number of core mechanics.

I ended up getting over being sick only to get almost immediately nailed with… more sickness! Yay! A bunch of stuff seems to be going around my sons friend group and though he managed to recover pretty quickly I was knocked out for an entire week.

Given that I'd already lost a bunch of time to the last round, I figured I'd just try to knuckle down and work through it. Big mistake! I ended up completely burned out even as my health was recovering. Ah burn out, my old friend, we meet again. Thankfully after 6+ years of doing this work I've mostly figured out how to deal with this. In the hopes that my experience may help others a little bit, I'll share some of my thoughts. If you just want to hear about the about feel free to skip ahead!

For me, burnout seems to be part of some natural, inevitable cycle. The majority of the time I feel 'fine' and its just business as usual. The fatigue and stress is balanced by motivation and enthusiasm and I just sort of plug away each day. Then there are those times of absolute transcendence where the muse is dragging my ass out of bed every morning or dumping ice buckets of inspiration on me in the middle of the night and I'm just compelled to work. I'll forget to eat, forget to sleep, and just work like crazy, totally happy and with no ill effects.

Of course for every high it appears to be some kind of rule that there must be an equal and opposite low and this is where burn out comes in. For me, burn out goes far beyond just fatigue or exhaustion and instead turns into a sort of mini existential crisis. Its like a little demon comes to roost on my shoulder and starts whispering in my ear non-stop. I'll begin to doubt the project, hate it really. I'll fixate on every terrible aspect of it and will begin to believe that I just don't have the skill or even the will to salvage it. I'll begin questioning why I ever decided to embark on this path since I don't even enjoy it and I'm actually pretty terrible at it. Maybe I've never enjoyed it and this was all just a big mistake and despite this being how I feed my family maybe I should just throw away the last decade of work and try something else? Really scary stuff.

Years ago this would have really crushed me but I've learned some things since then mainly that this is all just bullshit. Its not really me thinking those thoughts its just the burn out… or that little demon… seriously screw that guy. Regardless, I just remind myself that a month ago I was completely enthralled with my work and, as history has shown me time and time again, a month from now I'll be completely fine. So I've learned to just ignore all this doom and gloom, while still acknowledging that I'm burned out and then I can take steps to work through it.

What I've found works well is to continue working but to drastically reduce my working hours. I've found that completely stopping tends to just make it way harder to get back on the horse later. I think you need to keep a bit of the flame alive while you work through this phase. Then I'll just massively double down on all the little habits and practices that I maintain in normal times to keep my going. The sort of personal maintenance things that I think we all know about but maybe don't follow quite so diligently. For me this includes things like lots of light exercise, spending time outside and in nature, meditation, prayer, cleaning up my diet, cutting back on caffeine, locking down my sleep schedule really tight, avoiding electronics as much as possible etc. I'll get my whole day planned out and super rigid. I think of this as a sort of 'monk mode'.

Along with ignoring all of the negative thoughts and emotions I've found that this very rapidly tends to pull me back out of the pit and before long, almost without noticing it, I'll just start to gradually increase the hours worked until I'm back to normal. I think this process works so well due to a number of factors. First, all of these practices are just inherently helpful and so work together to create a really positive effect. Second, I think that focusing all this time and energy onto what is essentially a completely different project helps the other part of the mind relax and recover. I think that it also creates a very strong attitude of "I'm in control of this, I'm fixing this" which helps to combat the negativity. Finally I think it eventually just gets really boring and so pretty soon I'm naturally drawn to do something more interesting, namely getting back to work.

I'm happy to report that I'm now most of the way through this mess and so we should be getting back to business as usual for the next update. I hope this helps someone even just a little bit as I know how much these periods can suck. I'm curious to hear from you guys how you tackle this in your own lives or work. If anyone has figured out how to avoid this whole nasty cycle in the first place I'm all ears!

The Ogre Caves

The main part of this update is the 3rd and final (for now) sub-zone of The-Orc-Fortress, namely The Ogre Caves. This one was pretty easy since we already had most of the Ogre content and it just needed to all get wrapped up and placed before Thurg the High Shamans level.

I've added two new elemental ogres and 4 new stationary totems that are dotted around the caves. These totems either buff the ogres or debuff the player and so their AoEs create a sort of secondary terrain throughout the cave system. How you position and move in combat is really important here which I think works quite nicely with the ogres slow movement speed.

I've also updated the Ogre boss fight a little bit with him now summoning his wolves from braziers placed around his cave which makes it more likely for the player to get surrounded. I actually implemented a whole other ability where he would creates Freezing-Cloud walls between any 2 braziers (the white, ice variant), which bisected the arena in various ways. This is was actually pretty cool but I think I'm just going to move this to the Gnoll Shaman boss in the Ice-Caves rather than making the Ogre-Shaman so heavily ice themed. I'm open to suggestions for another, less icy ability to take its place.

Game Mechanics

Range Changes:
Based on the suggestions of A_Major_General I've changed the way that ranges are calculated to be more permissive. Previously the basic Pythagorean formula gave us ranges that were significantly shorter on the diagonals which was really noticeable with shorter range things like mage staves. A_Major_Generals formula works really well to clean this up and gives a very nice boost to all range classes whom I think have been feeling a bit underpowered for a long time compared to melee.

This also applies to enemies so this is not an unqualified buff for the player but I think its easy to just adjust ranges on enemy attacks on a case by case basis to fix this up. In any case the code is written in such a way that it could all be swapped back (or to a different equation) but just changing a single line so we can play with this in the future if needed.

Turn Order:
Another pretty major change that really should have been made a long time ago. Until now, the order in which enemies act was actually based on the order in which they were spawned. You would often get really weird movement when enemies were clustered together where say the guy in the back would act first, try to move around the guy in the front, and then the guy in the front would move. Enemies tended to sort of jumble around and move really erratically simply based on turn order.

The change, which was actually pretty easy to make, simply makes enemies take their turns based on their distance from the player. So the closest enemy will act first, then the second closest, so on and so forth. This immediately makes the enemy movement much more predictable and not as prone to weird jumbling. Though I don't expect players to explicitly understand this, I think its much more intuitive than some invisible 'spawn order'.

Hidden Safety Mechanic:
You who are reading this are now sworn to secrecy and we shall never speak again of this mechanic :P Suggested by Esty8nine in one of his streams and a surprisingly common mechanic in plenty of games of all genres, I've added a hidden safety check to stop newer players from being insta killed in a specific situation.

How this works is that if the player has more than 25% HP and is hit with an attack which has a damage roll that could either kill or not kill the player, the game will always force the roll to not kill the player. This always leaves the player with just a sliver of health and so basically provides a chance to use a potion or other consumable. We can fiddle with the exact numbers if needed as I don't want this to turn into some kind of meta exploit tactic that expert players make regular use of. I look forward to Random595 demonstrating how this is a meta exploit tactic that he can make regular use of :P

Misc Updates:

Talents:

• Burst-of-Flame (No-Consume): Removed the damage penalty as I'm trying to make most of the upgrades be pure… upgrades.
• Burst-of-Flame (Base): Damage: 14DMG => 18DMG giving it the same damage per mana as Fire-Ball.
• Burst-of-Flame can now target Fire-Glyphs
• Flaming-Battle-Sphere 5DUR => 6DUR. Still planning on moving this over to a summoner class eventually and giving the Fire-Mage a Tier-3 ability that can create flaming clouds which will synergize really nicely with Burst-of-Flame.
• Added Flaming-Battle-Sphere (Long): 6DUR => 10DUR
• Power-Shot (Fast): 6CD => 5CD and gives +1SP on kill shots
• Freezing-Cloud: 4DMG/4Turns => 6DMG/3Turns. A decent buff to compensate for its inferior targeting compared to poison cloud.

User Interface:

• I've begin to add damage indicators to various abilities when targeting. Still need to refine this quite a bit and have not covered all the abilities. I'm planning on adding a lot more stuff like this to make it easier to gage the effects of various actions. This can be disabled in options.
• Fixed the HP/MP/SP numbers below the player sprite jittering a bit when moving.
• Blood-Lust now highlights the blood when targeting.

Items:

• Soul-Reaper: 2 handed => 1 handed as we already have a two-handed life tap blade.
• Fish-Scale-Robe: 1SP => 1DEX, part of the general plan of switching a lot of the Tier-3 items back to attributes.
• The shield created by Staff and Mace of Shielding will now never fade though it caps at 30HP.

Dungeon:

• Moved the entrance to Branch-II to level:3 of Orc/Elves so that it doesn't interfere with the sub-zone.

Bugs and Crashes:

• Fixed the level gen crash in Click-Clock-Keep
• Fixed a crash when trying to pick up the ability icon of a talent that you have not learned.
• Fixed one of the vaults for the Snake-Charmer boss that would not trigger drop walls when his glyph door was opened.

That's it for now. Next update will be The-Dark-Temple sub-zone of The-Palace-of-Shadow to finish up the sub-zones for this branch of the dungeon. Will be reworking the boss fight as well. I'm toying around with various ideas of using shadows or darkness in both the sub-zone and the boss fight. Thanks for bearing with me this past month and thank you all for your continued support and feedback!

Justin

Hot Fixes:

Hot-Fix 1.11.1
That's a lot of 1s! Fixed the level gen crash in Orc:4. Was caused by Orc-Arena trying to connect stairs to Branch-II after Branch-II got moved to Orc/Elf:3.