The final fight and some thoughts on game structure

As always, this update is live now and can be played for free in browser at https://isochronalgames.itch.io/timelinegame. Updates like this will be coming out every week, so please follow if you're interested in seeing future updates!

Two new cards and a reworked warlord fight this week! I've also included some thoughts about how I want to restructure and rebalance the game now that all the fights are in, so if you're interested in that stick with me past the change list.

-Modified the art for the warlord, with background cutouts and colours consistent with the rest of the warrior fights.

-I changed a few numbers on the warlord fight to keep him challenging after all the new ways to gain power, but the largest change is to his AI - he will no longer summon Shieldbearers infinitely, instead if he gets up to three he will instead kill one in a Sacrifice.

-That gives him a powerful new status called Critical, which doubles your next attack damage. That means his Fragile Strike will now deal 30 damage, so best to avoid letting him get to that point!

-The player also has access to the Critical status through the Prepare Blow card. At four ticks to double the damage of an attack, it's worth it even with a Slash but with a larger attack it can be a real winner!

-The second card is lot more unusual and again takes advantage of the unique timeline structure - It's also a fear based card, since this is a Halloween update! Startle inserts a Cower card after the enemies current card. Not only can you use this to buy some time, but it can also throw off the pattern of enemies that sync up with each other like the Riptears.

And with the redone Warlord I've done all the fights I'm planning for the time being! Not only is that exciting as a milestone, but it means I can actually start balancing in earnest.

The balance of the game has gotten more and more off as I add these fights. Each one gives more and more money, which means more upgrades, and as I've added different upgrade options that money goes further and further. That can be tuned with more playtesting, but I also want to start moving towards what (I think) the final structure will be before I start spending a lot of time balancing.

A lot of deckbuilding roguelikes have attrition as their primary difficulty driver. Each individual fight is unlikely to take your healthbar from 100 to 0, but the rarity of healing means that you can get worn down by a series of bad fights. There's no real problem with that, it works well, but it's not the way I want to go here. I want every fight to feel like it has a chance to kill you, but that has its own balance implications.

My current plan is to arrange the last nine fights into three 'encounters'. That's largely why I have themed them the way I have - you'll have the Dino encounter, the Bot encounter, and the Warrior encounter. The Ogre will probably get repurposed as an optional tutorial fight, and the Ninja will most likely be dropped altogether, at least for now.

HP will remain across all combats in an encounter, so there will be some element of attrition, but between encounters you'll heal up fully. That way I can balance each encounter assuming the player will be at full HP at the start of them. Deck upgrades will be accessible between combats, with the exception of card choices, which I plan to offer for free after every fight (so even during an encounter you'll still be doing some deckbuilding).

This is all just my current plan and is subject to change, so please feel free to offer thoughts and suggestions in the comments below!

In development - I'm hoping to get the fights in sets as I discussed above, but I'm not sure how much work is going to be involved in that. In general the structure of these updates is going to get a lot less consistent as I move from a content creation to a restructuring phase, but I'll still be posting something weekly!

Gifs in this were created using ScreenToGif - thank you ScreenToGif!