An idea I had early on in EBF5’s development was the option to “sidegrade” equipment by changing one main aspect of it – like elemental properties. This would allow crafting items to still be useful after everything was fully upgraded, and it would allow you to use your favourite equipment in more situations. Sidegrades could be obtained in the form of crafting recipes, so that would create more treasure to find. It’s also a mechanic that players can completely ignore if they are not interested in customising their characters to such a degree, so it need not complicate the game.
Anyway, I realised this idea probably wouldn’t feel good unless all the different versions of equips had their own graphics to distinguish them, and that would be too much work.
I did play around with this idea a bit with the Alternative Equips mode in EBF5, but that took things a bit too far and gave equips all new stats, and things got a bit silly. I think changing only one important aspect of an equip would make it much simpler for the player to remember what is what, while still making a big difference in battles.
So now I’m testing out some alternative equip graphics for the original idea. Turns out the idea was viable after all…
In related news: I’ve been redrawing some EBF5 icons for drawing practice. My style has changed a little bit – there’s almost 10 years between these icons!
Hey everyone! It’s been 3 weeks since Find Matt’s Cats launched, so here’s an update about future plans.
The launch went about as well as it could have. Sales are fairly strong and there hasn’t been a lot of serious problems to address. Most of the bugs are quite minor, or were already known about from the demo. We’ve recovered about 58% of the development costs so far – if you assume an average UK salary for me and Ronja. That’s not bad.
I also pushed out a quick update that added many quality-of-life features that players asked for, including more options, Windows touchscreen support, and some level design improvements.
The main issues that need to be fixed are:
• Steam cloud was supposed to transfer save data from the demo to the full version of the game, but this doesn’t work. I’m not sure what I did wrong, but I’ll need to look into it. Players can still move the “saves” folder manually though.
• There’s a memory leak and the framerate will get choppier in very long sessions, even on fast computers. This is tricky and I really need to go through all of my code carefully to solve this, or at least make it less bad.
• Mascots can have two faces in some levels! I think the cats with non-standard faces don’t display correctly when hats and accessories are involved. It’s harmless and looks funny.
• The desktop version of the game requires more modern hardware than the web version we published on Newgrounds. We’ll try to make an offline version of that web version at some point, so it can be a backup option for players who otherwise can’t run the game. Maybe it can be a beta-branch on Steam.
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Since the launch went well, I can start teasing some leftover ideas that I will consider adding to the game. Please tell me which of these you like the sound of, so I can plan accordingly:
• A level editor! I think this would be viable and quite fun, even if it doesn’t include all of the features the official levels have.
• More levels! I want to add an 8th level to every world, which uses mostly existing art assets in ways that currently don’t appear in the game, or expands on ideas that weren’t fully explored. For example: more underwater levels! (Which type of levels did you enjoy the most?)
• A new final world! I want to finish off the game with a more memorable final world. I don’t want to spoil what it might be, but it’s gonna be visually different from everything in the game so far.
• More art assets? I’m still drawing more items whenever I’m in the mood, and sneaking in a few with every update. I’m improving some sprites I’m not happy with, but I think what will be the most impactful is adding more references to other games.
• More customisation options? Is there enough, or would you be interested in more? I certainly enjoyed creating rare cats. I think I might struggle to come up with more special effects for cursors though.
• More dialogue? Is there enough lore in the game? I know most people skim through the dialogue quite quickly, but some players were really into it. I could write more if there’s a demand for it. But it’s a hassle since it also needs to be translated into every language.
• A fourth difficulty option? I have an idea for a “Simple” difficulty option that requires less brain power. The goals would be a large number of the same item, like “5 turkeys, 7 pigeons, and 10 bees”. Required interactivity would be low – you could see most of the goals without clicking on stuff. I’ve heard from some parents that this would be a fun way to play the game together with a young child. Maybe this is what “Easy” mode should have been.
