Dev Log — January 2025

Hi everyone!

This month's dev log has been delayed because, between the holiday post and not getting the usual amount of work done in December because of the holidays, I didn't feel like I had enough to report on. To avoid this becoming a rolling issue each month, I will be postponing a progress update to February and instead focus on sharing some of my latest inspirations from other games I've played. Maybe this could become a yearly tradition as well!

Path of Exile II

It's no secret that the itemization in Battle Mages has been largely inspired by Path of Exile, so when Path of Exile II was released in early access and I heard they have made changes to how they approach itemization and crafting from the predecessor, I was anxious to see for myself.

I feared they might have come up with some ingenious new direction I'd wish we had gone with for Battle Mages, not unlike my experience playing Last Epoch, which has a great take on crafting that has inspired my approach to foci in Battle Mages. But it turned out Path of Exile II had taken crafting in the opposite direction of what I want for Battle Mages.

For those unfamiliar with Path of Exile (PoE), the game largely revolves around finding a good item base to craft on and then using items to roll and reroll it, as you wouldn't want to build a strong item on a poor base. Players largely didn't bother with picking up yellow (rare) items late-game, unless it was on a particularly rare base, since they were likely to be of poor quality.

Seemingly to solve this issue, PoE II doesn't allow you to reroll or remove stats on an item in a convenient or meaningful way, so rolling bad modifiers on an item essentially bricks the base and you need to find a new one. It's also a lot less convenient to craft items with many modifiers on them, meaning finding an unidentified rare item (which can have many modifiers) on a good base has much more potential than it used to have in PoE. The issue is that in Battle Mages, we want players to be able to conveniently move magical modifiers from one item to another, meaning the two design philosophies are polar opposites, which is both a relief and a bit disappointing.

Vendor Recipes & Upgrade Paths

There are many changes to the economy in PoE II from PoE, and it's in many ways an entirely different experience. I'm happy they have removed vendor recipes, which were inconvenient and arcane knowledge to many players, but they also removed upgrade paths from vendors, which helped stabilize the value of common items relative to what other items you could trade it for at a vendor, not unlike what you can do in Battle Mages.

As an example, in PoE II you need an item to allow for more support gems to be linked to your ability gems, with a different item for 3, 4, and 5 support gems, respectively. Since there is no way to upgrade the lowest tier (3 sockets) to a higher tier (4 or 5 sockets), the market for that item has completely collapsed. Any late-game player will find numerous items for adding 3 sockets before they see one for 4 sockets and hundreds before they see one for 5 sockets, so everybody in late-game needs 4 or 5 sockets, and nobody needs 3 sockets.

This is quite frankly poor design that fuels disparity between casual and hardcore players, since common items that casual and new players rely on for trade will continue to gravitate towards being worthless, while rare end-game items will gravitate towards being priceless, or to put it in other words; the curve for new players will continue to become steeper. Upgrade paths provide a safety net by making sure common items will always be worth a fraction of a more desired item, ensuring its usefulness and scarcity, since players will have to match the offer from the NPC, lest the item be sold to the NPC instead.

Gold & Player Market 

PoE II has introduced a sort of market where players can trade items in bulk without having to deal directly with another player. However, players still need to make awkward trades for anything else.

They also added gold to the game, which is an awkward NPC-only currency that seems like a compromise with how Diablo plays. They even added a would-be Deckard Cain who will identify your entire inventory for free. It is more convenient than PoE and it suits the game to become more welcoming to new players and less tedious in general. But I do believe the market and gold systems we have in Battle Mages are superior to those in PoE II, which I think we can be proud of!

Magic Find

One very interesting consequence of the changed itemization between PoE and PoE II is how it affects the usefulness of Magic Find, which was largely useless in PoE, because it helped you find more magical items, but as earlier established, players often couldn't be bothered to even pick up magical items and were more interesting in finding the right base (magical or not), maps, and items similar to talismans in Battle Mages, for changing said base item.

Increased Quantity of Items Found was another modifier in PoE, which increased the number of items dropped (excluding maps), which was widely considered to be immensely powerful, and throughout PoE's lifespan, many sources were continuously nerfed because of how powerful and sought after it was.

Since PoE II actually relies on players finding magical items, Magic Find, which used to be useless, has now become incredibly powerful, and exponentially so. Maps, or Waystones as they are called in PoE II, are items that open instances or "dungeons" that can be altered and crafted on like any other items, providing additional challenges and rewards. In PoE, creating maps with more challenges and rewards was cheap, meaning you were limited by your ability to overcome the challenges, rather than by your access to magical maps.

In PoE II, however, the same currencies you would use on a map in PoE to make it magical are immensely rare and expensive, making it a non-viable strategy, so you have to rely on finding already magical maps by stacking Magic Find, making your ability to run challenging and rewarding maps more limited by Magic Find than your ability to run said maps. Since better magical maps also provide the aforementioned powerful Increased Quantity of Items Found and Magic Find, the benefit of Magic Find becomes exponential.

That is to say, players who are rich enough to afford expensive gear with all your bear necessities and Magic Find, will be astronomically more rich, further fueling the disparity between casual and hardcore players. It beckons the question of what you want to reward in your game, and what is fair. It's generally believed that we want to reward time spent, skill, and also chance (hence, critical hits and rare drops); but should people who spend 10 times the time be rewarded a thousandfold? —This to me seems wholly unfair and soured my late-game experience. I already thought it was a very minor issue in PoE that those who were rich enough to enchant their maps would in turn become even richer, but this is taking it to a whole other level.

That is not to say PoE II isn't a good or enjoyable game. I had a great time playing through the story and I much prefer the pacing in PoE II to the pacing in PoE, and the sequel is both beautiful and engaging. To me, it seems like a natural succession to the first game, with some immense quality-of-life improvements and technical feats.

Balatro

Another game I played recently was Balatro, which I hadn't heard of before the Video Game Awards. Balatro is a rogue-like card game where you play using traditional playing cards and playing hands known from poker. It's highly inspired by poker, without being poker, which I found highly interesting as the planned minigame I have for the PvE overhaul is inspired by the minigame in I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, which likewise, revolved around playing poker hands as a puzzle.

Unlike poker or Balatro, I Was a Teenage Exocolonist doesn't use traditional playing cards, but instead, you build a deck through the game that represents your memories and experiences growing up, starting with some weak baby cards. How you play and what you do will influence the cards in your deck, and as you grow up, you will become more adept at different activities and challenges that will further influence the game and story.

For our minigame design, I swapped cards for dice that can instead be affected by your character's status effects. Say, if you are suffering from a disease, addiction, or some other detrimental effect, these will be represented on a dice that will trigger their effects when used, forcing you to weigh the benefit of using a potentially high-rolled die against the potential effects you suffer from using it (or sometimes, when you don't use it) to add an element of flavor that better fits Battle Mages and make the best choice more complex as you progress and accumulate status effects.

The issue with this design, however, is that the more dice you have, the more the sum of rolls will gravitate toward their average. This, I found, meant you had to balance around tiny fluctuations in rolls, as high deviations are rare, and in turn high success thresholds would become punishing. Balatro has the exact same challenge, since traditional playing cards pose a similar challenge of the sum of a hand gravitating towards its average the more cards you draw, and they had a clever yet simple solution to it by applying multitudes.

In Balatro, you get a score for each card played (2-10 give their respective value, face cards give 10, and aces give 11), but combinations don't just give you a bonus to your played hand; they also multiply the result. Say, three of a kind gives you a +30 to the score of your played hand, and then multiplies it by 3, meaning it essentially gives you 3x the value of your hand, and adds 9 cards numbered 10. This gives them much more room for balancing, and the multitudes negate the standard deviation to achieve a more even spread that feels more impactful and fair.

Balatro has its own issues and is deceptively advanced when you start playing it, but once you begin to understand the different odds and variables in the game, it becomes very deterministic and not really any different from playing Solitaire.

This is not something I can necessarily solve for our minigame, since any game such as this is reliant on chance and making the best of what you are given, so if you are given crap, you can do crap to no fault of your own, and if you do great, it will always have some element of luck.

Thankfully, Battle Mages has the benefit of the minigame not standing alone, but having a game and world built around it where you can use the things you get from it, and help give emergent context to the minigame, similar to in I Was a Teenage Exocolonist.

So it doesn't really matter if the planned minigame for Battle Mages can be quite deterministic because being able to see the best possible outcome faster is a skill that alone allows you to get more cool stuff in less time, which you can then use in and outside the minigame. Battle Mages is also designed around losing being a reward of its own (don't threaten me with a good time, sort of deal), instead of feeling like a downright punishment. Since Balatro is more of a rogue-like than a rogue-light, losing means you are back to square one (it's Solitaire). What do you get from playing Solitaire fast? —Playing more rounds of Solitaire...

Balatro has another interesting concept, which is its tags. Tags are sort of an alternative reward you can sometimes choose, which can alter the content of the shop that appears between each challenge. I had originally thought that players in Battle Mages would be able to pick a room, similar to Hades, where they can see the general reward and/or challenge type of the room, but I do like the idea of sprinkling alternative rewards that force an outcome for the next intermission or room selection. An example could be that picking a certain room says the next room selection will ensure a vendor, Moira, Hilda, or some character who could teach you a new spell or recipe, as one of its options, adding an additional layer for players to consider while allowing them to better plan ahead beyond the challenge immediately ahead. 

Similar to Hades and many other rogue-light games, challenges in Balatro become increasingly more difficult as you progress, but your deck, in this case, is expected to grow stronger at a similar or faster pace to keep up and overcome the growing challenges. This works by resetting to zero between runs and growing from there each time, sometimes with accumulated benefits that make future runs easier over time, which is then offset by optional challenges.

In the case of Battle Mages, and as it happens, ascendency trials in PoE II, which is the only other case I know of, your character starts high and accumulates negative effects over time that make progression harder, with challenges remaining virtually the same throughout. Instead of growing stronger to overcome growing challenges, you start strong and snowball into submission, and better stats mean you start stronger so you can snowball for longer!

Interestingly, during ascendency trials in PoE II, you will sometimes have the possibility of gaining massive boons, often by risking your entire run, but that can drastically improve your chances of completing a whole run, which is something I found very inspiring and I'd like to use in Battle Mages as well!

For the minigame I have planned for the PvE overhaul in Battle Mages, it was always the plan that you could chain certain events to progress individual storylines within a run that would eventually culminate in a mini-boss encounter that poses a big threat, while progressing through many encounters will eventually have you face a showstopper boss that is a much bigger challenge. Previously, players were expected to try and avoid confrontations like mini-bosses to improve their odds of defeating a showstopper boss by conserving their energy, but I find it much more intuitive and interesting if players are given a massive boon for defeating a mini-boss, drastically improving their chances against a showstopper boss, despite their accumulated negative effects, if they manage to defeat the mini-boss against all odds. That way, if you can defeat multiple mini-bosses in a single run, you might end up with a very lewd/slutty but ultimately powerful character with massive potential against a showstopper boss! —Or you can attempt to converse your energy and snowball slower; that will still be a viable strategy as well

Spell Icons

I also have a few more spell icons for future content to share with you this month! I'll have more of these to show in the next dev log as we're working on a bunch of new icons and inanimate forms for the game! This month there's a theme to them, being mythic and polymorph of seemingly similar forms.

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That's it for this month's dev log! It's taking a while to complete the upcoming update, but that's because I've essentially worked two planned updates into a single big update, unlike how I usually bite one update into two when they get too big, so there're a lot of exciting changes coming, including a complete removal of the turn-timer!

Thank you so much for all your support and hopefully, the new launcher, website, desire system and much more will be ready for release in the coming month! Love you all❤️❤️

Cheers,

Tinon