'RING OUT'

Elites/Bosses don't die instantly to getting rung out - they take 10 - 20% Max HP damage and get stunned instead.

'Ring Out' 2.8.0-alpha

The Gifs say it all. No need to even say anything - this shit is fun AF.

Other than that, you might've noticed the big changes in tile art and the randomly shifting tiles. Two other very big features shipping in this update.

Zone 2 Behind the Scenes

Still much work to be done before Zone 2 comes out, but just as a sneak peek, here's one of the new enemies coming to Zone 2: The Cyber Mutt. Feisty little buggers that use the new movement and animation frameworks I've built for entities moving forward.

Visual Update: Zone Presentation VFX

New* Mechanic: Mine Stacking

*Mine stacking was possible before, it just didn't show you how many mines were on one tile. Now it does, though mines are now limited to 4 per tile.

Small Interim Update

A small update to push out some minor visual and performance improvements.

Visual Update: Zone Presentation VFX

• The Zone map now cinematically presents itself when you enter a run, drawing out the map layer by layer from the end point.

New Mechanic: Mine Stacking

• What was initially a bug is now a formalized feature: The game will now visually display how many mines are stacked in one tile, up to a maximum of 4 mines per tile.

Visual Improvements: Explosions

• Improved shockwave visibility of various explosions and increased the base Tile Shake and Camera Shake values for some effects

Performance Improvements:

• Improved performance of the stage construction visual effect.
• Reduced frame hitches occurring from first time activation of certain VFX.

Lots of work going on behind the scenes involving Zone 2 - big framework updates to the way NPCs perform combat on the grid. Expect much flashier and choreographed movements for enemy move-sets moving forward.

'ASSEMBLY'

Major Visual Update: Stage Construction VFX

Now this one was hell of a doozy to work out. Procedurally animating the tiles of the maps to do this wasn't all that difficult all things considered - just a bunch of math and formulas. The main difficulty was figuring out how to get my Entities to react to the tile displacement naturally without just floating in the air or breaking their path finding, ai etc.

Since I'm working in pure 2D, getting all the sprite sorting to look correct while everything was getting displaced was a pain in the ass. This would've definitely been easier if it was 3D where you could just attach the entities onto the tiles in 3D space tiles and call it a day.

In any case, the payoff is immense - this effect adds a ton of visual flair to the game, and once the art overhaul comes in, it's gonna exponentially improve the visual caliber of the game. It also opens up design spaces for hidden stage sections that only get constructed under certain conditions - in other words, secret rooms.

So what's next on the agenda?

From here on out, I think there's only so much left I can do to improve the presentation layer of the game any further without a dedicated artist. The next two big objectives at this point would probably be:

• Finish The Soundtrack: The game still sounds a bit empty - there's no main combat BGM, although the boss at least has a theme, and there is the peace theme that plays in the Shop and Tutorial.

It's definitely something that needs to be worked on, however - I'm not too keen on actually doing it. I'll be honest - my skills as a composer has definitely rusted over the years - I've spent so much time focusing just on software and coding that getting into that headspace needed for composition is tough. It's frankly not quite as enjoyable as I once found it. I think I could probably still produce at the quality I used to, but it simply takes way longer than before. I still hold my music to high standards so I'm not willing to settle for lesser stock. We'll have to see how things pan out.

• Build Zone 2:

So judging by the medals - there's only been 2 players out of the ~300 players so far that has actually even beaten the Zone 1 boss.

(Shout out to @MrPurpleMrPurple and @franciscucho btw, MrPurplePurple if you're reading this, I gotta know what you used to to kill the boss in 35s and get the Now That's A Lotta Damage medal. Let me guess - Freeze Bomb + Knockout?)

If we go by that metric, then I should still be trying to improve Zone 1 rather than work on Zone 2 which would take a massive time investment, right?

Here's the thing - Zone 2 has to be built eventually anyway, and getting the Zone system architecture up and running is a core requirement for the rest of the game. I intend to build the Zone system kind of similar to FTL/Binding Of Isaac, where after completing a Zone, you could - depending on what you did during the zone - re-route to for example an alternate zone like Zone 1A/Zone 2A that offers different challenges and rewards.

Additionally, building new enemies requires a lot of prototyping, and due to all the new mechanics I've added into the game since the last actual enemy was designed, building out enemies designed for Zone 2 will in a way, retroactively pave the way for better enemies or reworked enemies in Zone 1.

Lastly, I do think that the 2/300 players beating the Zone 1 boss is partially a player demographics issue - there's nothing wrong with this but I do get the impression that Newgrounds, especially nowadays, has an audience that skews a bit casual on the games-related side and focused more on shorter, stylistic experiences - especially since front page games get very regularly cycled out.

Deck Fury is very much NOT meant to be a casual game to be consumed within a single play session. It's almost entirely systems and mechanics driven (i.e no story or context to speak of), and intended for a much more hardcore Deck-builder audience that exist in the Steam and PC ecosystem. I do believe the percentage of players who beat the Zone 1 boss will drastically increase once it actually releases on those platforms.

'RECKONING'

Your performance matters.

Scoring System Overhaul

As my previous devlog had pointed out, Deck Fury is as much a Score Attack game as it is a rogue-like. The previous iteration of the scoring system simply didn't spell that out. As such, the scoring system has been rebuilt from the ground to more accurately determine player performance and its effect on the final payout.

So how does it work?

To put it bluntly - metrics evaluation is complicated, probably more complicated than it has to be, but I love making in-depth systems, and the pay off is that generally speaking, the metric stars are highly accurate in reflecting your general play-style.

As a general summary without getting too technical:

POWER: Measures Lethality and Burst damage. The 5 main factors that get evaluated when determining your power rank are as follows:

• Peak Strike (Single Strike Damage)
• Peak Burst (Burst damage in 2s window)
• Alpha Turn (% of the wave you wipe out per turn)
• Damage Per Action (the average amount of damage you do per card used)
• Carnage (Multi-kills and Overkills, this factor is disabled on boss fights since there's only 1 enemy usually)

Design Notes: Power was the most complicated metric to design as I had to figure out ways to differentiate it from Speed so it wouldn't end up a 1:1 relationship. High speed still often correlates with high power, because if you're killing stuff fast, you're most likely going to beat the stage fast as well.

SPEED: Pure pacing and Par time.

So how exactly do you build a Par time evaluator in a game where deck composition, enemy composition, enemy count and encounter type drastically shift the amount of time it takes a competent player to clear it? You could painstakingly try to hard-code a par time for each spawn table by rigorous playtesting, but this is simply an unscalable approach the bigger the game gets, and can't account for different kinds of decks.

Theres a number of ways to do it, but for Deck Fury, it works like this:

• Expected TTK (Time to Kill): Enemies are assigned a baseline TTK based on how long a competent player would take to kill them in isolation.

• Swarm Multiplier: Fighting 5 enemies at once is generally much more demanding than fighting 5 1v1 duels sequentially. on waves with high enemy density, this multiplier pads on extra time to account for more difficulty positioning and overlapping enemy aggression.

• Layer/Zone Progression scaling: Early stages grant a small bonus time allowance to account for starting decks not being the most synergistic.

Par Time in a nutshell is adding up the expected TTK of all the enemies in a spawn table and then applying the appropriate multipliers. In order to get 5 stars in speed, you need to complete the stage in 70% of the calculated Par Time.

TACTICS: This measures defense and discipline - how much damage you take and how efficient you are with your movements and actions.

• Damage Mitigation: Pretty straightfoward - take no damage, high rating, take lots of damage, low rating. This is the primary pillar tactics is evaluated against, all other factors are bonus shifters or penalty shifters.

• Active Dodging: So active dodging doesn't actually affect tactics initially - in many situations its better to just move a single tile to outspace an attack. because of this, Active Dodging instead acts as a forgiveness factor, where if you take a bunch of damage, you get to scrounge back some tactics score by surviving through active dodges.

• Clever Kills (Environmental Kills, Friendly Fire Kills, Reflecting attacks): This acts as a pure bonus modifier, since sometimes there won't be any opportunities for friendly fire (i.e the boss) or other kinds of clever kills. Not getting any clever kills doesn't penalize you, but getting clever kills can help push your tactics score up if you end up taking damage.

• Movement Efficiency: In short, this factor penalizes you for button mashing and moving all over the place for no reason. It's a very generous threshold however - it doesn't really take into effect unless you REALLY push it.

So what's next on the agenda?

I've been working on a bit of a prototype regarding Stage Construction - a visual effect where the stage/arena constructs itself before your eyes. Proof of concept is there, it even has a few different construction options, however I still need to figure out how to get my entities to follow the construction of the stage so they're not just standing in the middle of the air.

My hope is that once this system is fleshed out, the loading screen could be skipped entirely when transitioning between combat stages, where instead the stage is simply deconstructed (then the loading is hidden in plain sight) and the next stage is constructed for seamless gameplay.

NEW: SANDBOX MODE

Unrestricted access to ALL cards and items!

Modify your deck and items at any time!

Spawn any enemy or object in the game!

Inspect NPC stats and modify them to your liking!

Go on, experiment to your heart's content.

Sandbox Mode is only available to those who have beaten the Zone 1 Boss at least once.

So what's next on the agenda?

Originally, I had planned to focus on finishing the soundtrack and improving the visuals after this update. However, since my time in the limelight on the NG front page has come to an end, I figure that I didn't need to stress about capturing players that much since there won't be many new players for quite awhile.

Instead, after analyzing player metrics as well as other sources feedback, I've realized there is a critical disconnect between player expectations and developer intent.

Deck Fury is as much a Score Attack game as it is a Rogue-like.

But most players don't seem to realize this.

Your stage score in this game directly converts to money, and the amount of Unlock Points you get at the end of a run is also dictated by your Total Score, amongst other multipliers. However, the game doesn't immediately make this clear. The more observant players out there might notice that the amount of money you earn at the end of a stage is always higher when you have a higher stage score, but the average player likely wouldn't even pay attention.

This is a problem, because the most fun way to play Deck Fury is to play as if you're trying to style on the enemy as much as possible - which also naturally leads to a higher score. Most fodder enemies are quite easy by design, and as you get past the initial learning curve of the game, survival becomes less of a concern until you hit Elite/Boss encounters and it becomes increasingly important to optimize your gameplay.

So what do you do about this?

That's the going to be the biggest focus of the next update. The in-game Score Manager is already incredibly granular, and the more experienced players will notice this - it tracks everything, the number of basic attacks, the amount of damage you did in a specific window, your number of active dodges, so on and so forth.

However, showing the player how well they did needs to be more obvious - a big score number is abstract, but a letter-grade coupled with tangible aggregated metrics like 'POWER', 'SPEED', 'TACTICS' grounds the experience in something personalized - therefore real.

In other words, I'll be taking notes from games like Devil May Cry and old school games like Advance Wars 2 to rebuild the scoring system so that it's something the player will care about.

Back from the dead.

It's been over 2 years since the last update. Most folk would probably think this project abandoned, which is entirely fair. However, it was more like... put on administrative hold, though I never truly stopped working on it. 

In any case, what matters is Deck Fury is still alive, and this update brings massive overhauls, new content, new everything really, turning it from the somewhat half-baked tech-demo from 2 years ago to something far more complete in experience, though there is still much to go. 

Let's get started.

Deck System Overhaul

In the previous iteration, the deck system was essentially incomplete - you could slot in any card you wanted into the magazine and there was minimal 'strategy' aside from card order to play around with. Cards were drawn randomly and discarded every single turn so there was no real way plan your plays ahead of time. All this has been changed with a number of new mechanics.

Capacity

All cards now have a capacity cost associated with them, and you begin with a maximum of 5 capacity at the beginning of the game, though this can be increased or decreased by items or other effects. 

Your magazine still has a maximum of 5  slots, however depending on the capacity cost of your cards, you may only be able to load 3 or 4 cards. 

Capacity is now the primary constraint, preventing you from loading 5 powerful cards into your magazine without drawback.

Overhauled Draw/Discard System

Previously, you would draw an entirely new hand every time you opened the card selection. This is no longer the case. Now, Once you've drawn a hand, those cards remain persistent in your card select until you decide to load or dump them (more on dumping later). The next time you enter the card select, cards are only drawn to fill in empty slots left by your previous turn or until there are no more cards in the draw pile.

Dumping

There is now a 'Dump' button in the magazine UI, which when pressed, discards all cards currently inside the magazine and forces a new draw immediately. This mechanic was implemented as a way to fix the lack of card cycling in this game, as there aren't any cards that actively draws or discards cards, which kind of wouldn't work with the way the game is designed currently anyway.

The dump button is your solution for when you have a weak draw, or want to fish for a specific combo in order to finish off a difficult enemy quickly. It however has limited uses, though you can increase the number of dump charges you have access to through items or events.

Card Attributes

Exhaust - once loaded into the magazine and confirmed, is sent to the exhaust pile and cannot be redrawn through normal means until the end of combat. Anyone who's played Slay the Spire should be pretty familiar with this one.

Fleeting - this one essentially inverts the draw/discard system. Cards that are fleeting will be immediately discarded on turn start if it is not loaded into the magazine. 

Modifier - this is a completely new type of card implemented into the game. Unlike regular cards, Mod cards cannot be used in combat and instead apply modifiers to other cards in the magazine. These cards require correct ordering in the magazine in order to take effect, though the UI will tell you when a Mod card is inactive and also show you which cards it is currently affecting. 

Using the White Capsule (If you know, you know) mod card to give Rain of Bullets the ability to stun. 

Shields

Previously, shields were essentially a very simplistic second health bar that blocked damage from getting to HP, though could be pierced with Pure damage. Now, shields play a much bigger part in combat and need to be paid attention to if you want to kill shielded enemies quickly.

• - Shields now regenerate 10% of their maximum value every second until cracked (reduced to 0). This regeneration is constant, so you need burst damage to get through high amounts of shields quickly, or use cards with the breaking element.
• - Cracked shields take 10 seconds to regenerate, at which point it will instantly regenerate to full.
• - Shields can be instantly cracked by cards with the breaking element. Previously cards with the breaking element only did 2x damage to shields. This makes breaking cards crucial when dealing with heavily shielded enemies.

Overhauled Map Generation

The zone generation system has been rebuilt from the ground up - zones are now far more visually interesting alongside being more interesting to traverse.

Meta Progression

Deck Fury now has meta progression! Unlock new cards and items to find in future runs by gaining (the very creatively named) unlock points, which you gain by simply playing through runs, win or lose. The amount of unlock points you gain is directly tied to your Total Score, thus if you want the most unlock points per run, you'll want to make sure you try to get those special point bonuses any time you're playing through combat stages.

Upgrade Tokens

Upgrades are naturally an important part of the player's power scaling throughout the game, but it's particularly important in Deck Fury due to many cards having multiple upgrade paths, some upgrades potentially drastically changing the functionality of the card and what it can do, allowing you to further specialize your deck or patch up a weakness.

You can now purchase upgrade tokens from the shop and occasionally find them through events, which grant you an additional upgrade point when at an anvil.

Event Stages

Mystery nodes are now worth going to! previously, mystery nodes simply selected randomly between a combat, rest or shop stage. However, now going to a mystery node is only way to enter Event Stages which are either mini-game stages or classic 'choose-1-of-3' events where you can get extra items, stats or money. Currently there's only 3 unique event stages, though there will of course be more on the way.

New Cards, New Items, New Enemies, New Visuals, New Everything

This post is already getting too long, but suffice it to say, there's a lot of new things since the last update. pretty much everything's been overhauled from the ground up to be bigger and better. There's simply too much to go through, but the most important changes have been shown, the rest is up to you to discover.