Final Crunch!
It’s the final weeks of Splice and Dice development! Time to hunker down at CTG HQ and apply all the finishing touches we can. This is an exciting time for us, but also a stressful time of obsessive internal and external testing, polishing, editing, and proofing.
Playtesters have been running a massive amounts of tests against the new pre-designed Tyrants to get their difficulty and balance just right. The feedback has been enthusiastically positive, and we’re very close to having the difficulty/balance/mechanics of all of them completely locked and loaded.
While we have no interest in making things so difficult they’re not fun, we’ve made an intense and concentrated effort to crank the challenge on these tyrants (encunters and final battles) up as much as we can – specifically in the realm of four player games. Case in point? Blobulous just received a new 2-in-6 chance Tyrant Die Skill called “Equilibrium” that instantly drops the health of every Gearloc on the Battle Mat to that of the current weakest Gearloc. It’s perhaps the cruelest measure we’ve taken against the power of a party of four, but so far has yielded very promising and challenging results 🙂
Here are a few other things we’ve made slight “improvements” to this past month:
- Amanight’s spore mechanics have been evolving slightly to make sure they’re an ever dreaded bit of pestilence that change the way you approach each encounter and the final battle.
- Oxide’s various mechanical parts were deemed a bit too non-threatening, so they’re getting a tune up as well. Oxide’s various parts now require two hits to take down rather than one, flipping to a damaged side the first time they take damage.
- Locgear’s Appeasement mechanic has shifted slightly, with some of them no longer moving the day counter along in order to make sure they stack and annoy you as much as possible.
- Leech now gains health in the final battle from every unit who loses it in battle instead of just from ATK dice (one playtester saw Leech come out in the final battle with NINETEEN health!).