It's now exactly two weeks after the release of Nowhere Prophet and from where I stand it looks like I managed to deal with all the really big issues. A lot of bugs and problems are fixed (I'm sure there are more so please keep reporting what you find) and now it's time to look beyond simply repairing things and to making the gameplay experience better.
Coming Updates
So, what's foremost on my mind there?
Equipment Powers A number of the equipment powers are clearly better than the others, skewing equipment and limiting the choices because some are clearly better. I'm looking at the unit spawn and refresh items for example.
During prototyping I tried out a number of variants of the equipment system. One where items had a number of uses in each fight, or a general number of uses per item. A version where power use cost energy (different based on the power) but I removed all these things that to keep the system simple.
Right now though it feels like the Tool Power design space would benefit from having Energy cost added back into it. Costs could be used to balance some of the powers of course, but this would also make a wider variety of powers possible in the future: Stronger powers for higher costs.
In general I think this is something that will improve the play experience, so keep your eyes peeled for that. We're currently discussing the ramifications of this in the discord #workshop-chat channel. Come join us!
Better Follower Filters This is the quality of life update the game needs the most right now. I'll ultimately have to see what makes the most sense but my current thoughts are:
Remove all filter buttons on the screen directly. Only keep a button that opens up a filter menu and a simple text-box that allows you to search card names and text. The button opens a small overlay menu where you can select your filters:
Show Wounded/Unwounded
Show Common/Rare/Legendary/Mythic
Show Factions
Maybe this overlay could provide detailed statistics on your current deck and thus free up the space of the stats area in the screen to be used for a "remove all wounded followers" button that turns into a "remove all" button when you have no wounded followers.
I'm also thinking about the ability to make some of your followers as Favorites. You could then filter by Favorites, and they would always be sorted at the start of the list. Also when healing favorites in your deck and not in your deck would be prioritized before all others giving you some more control.
Here's a (arguably VERY quick) mockup of what it could be like:
What do you think? Any good ideas on how to improve this? Am I missing anything vital or important?
If so, join the discord and let me know!
Comeback Content Another thing the game could do better is to allow players to come back from having lost board control. To that end I'm looking at maybe modifying some existing cards or adding new ones that make the game a bit more forgiving if you fall back.
An example would be a card that stuns all followers. This isn't something you would ever want to use when you're leading, but when you're behind it can give you enough room to put some of your units down in a safe environment. This would allow me to put the price of the card down a bit, which means it doesn't eat up all your Energy budget for the turn.
I have a few ideas for pieces of content like this but as always I'm curious to hear your thoughts!
Update Schedule
So with these changes coming up next, how will these roll out?
Well the current plan is to keep the Preview branch active for this. Ideally I'd like to update Preview at the end of each week and then give you all time over the weekend to play and test. If nothing unforeseen catches fire or explodes then the update could go live to everyone after the weekend.
Preview Update: 1.00.014
And in line with that today marks a new update to the preview branch. This one is mostly bugfixes, some balancing and interface improvements. As usual: If it breaks nothing major it will go live early next week, so give it a whirl!
Balancing • Improved states for opening the gate with follower count was reduced to 25/50
• Armored enemies have a tad less armor
• AI now properly evaluates and targets obstacles with Taunt
• You gain Focus as normal on Doomed difficulty now
• Juggernaut cost increased to 5 (was 3)
• Decoy changed to 2/4 (was 1/4)
Interface • Followers in Combat now only show the "multiple effects" icon if they actually have multiple icons to display
• Critical enemy buffs are marked blue in pre-combat screens
• Event buildings leading to potential boss fights are marked red in locations
• Focus value display changed in edit deck screen
• Crypt Gate events split and put on the map and into the location
• Chance labels in event options adjusted to be more accurate
• Added visual effect to unsummoning of units
Bugfixes • Brain Drain can now target obstacles as expected
• Coordinated Swarm now also potentially targets the enemy leader
• Battlefield Sense no longer triggers if Energy is full
• Quickly unsummoning a unit with a fury effect no longer creates a stuck card
• Can no longer spam ESC to quit out of Mulligan while game is still setting up starting state
• Can no longer sneak illegal attacks in during animation (queueing an attack while kennel master is off the board and before his dog has appeared now leads to no action happening)
• Route Generator now no longer creates multiples of unique locations (gladiator camp, boss locations)
Alright, and that's it for today! As always, thanks for reading, thanks for playing and thanks for speaking up!
- Martin
Day 7: The big update!
A lot of bugfixes and tweaks to the AI and balance here we are with the first sizable update to the game outside the preview branch.
Version 1.00.011
After the initial hotfixes that just helped make the game more stable, this one will make it feel different. The AI has regained its smarts and the enemy decks have been tweaked to be more even across the different factions, and also to ramp up more smoothly without punishing you too much (it's still a dangerous world) in map 1.
Thank you to everyone who played in the PREVIEW branch and helped me finetune this. Double thanks for those who filled out the form.
Speaking of: I'd still love to hear your feedback on the difficulty changes. So if you play, wether in PREVIEW or not, please do take some time to fill out the difficulty form. Your collective experience will help me make the game play even better in the future.
Continuous balance
So now, with what feels like the first solid update out of the door, what's next?
I'm obviously not naive enough to think the game is now perfectly balanced so I'm planning to spend more time on this, which is why the form will be really helpful.
I've also already noted down a bunch of cards and effects that may be too strong (I'm looking at you Stim Set!) or too weak (Hello Sabotage), so if you have some thoughts, please let me know!
Next steps
And in the meantime I will finally have to the time to look at some of the pesky bugs that have been popping up. A number of people have experienced the game soft-locking: It stops responding and no longer works as it should. Usually quitting and loading the game solves that issue so these bugs weren't super high priority right away, but they are too annoying to not take a closer look.
Then beyond those I'm looking at some quality of life improvements. Improved filter and sorting options in your follower screen for one. And I've also scoured the forums and my brain for more useful suggestions.
And beyond that, I'm already thinking about new content for the game, possibly some new cards and convoys? I'm not making any promises yet, the stability and quality of the game comes first since anything new will disrupt the status quo so I want to be careful.
But there's more to come! So thank you everyone for playing!
- Martin
Changelog
AI • AI evaluation bug fixed: Later moves in a sequence had inflated scores, making even bad moves look useful
• AI decision system improved and more responsive to prioritization and unit positioning
• AI is less allergic to having obstacles in the front column position
• Enemy AI cleverness is affected by level (Ai is worse on lower levels)
Balancing • Enemies
...• Enemy levels on map 1 changed to 1-2 (was 1-3)
...• Enemy levels on last map changed to 7-10 (was 7-9)
...• Enemy levels on crypt map changed to 10-12 (was 9-10)
...• Enemy decks adjusted to be easier on lower levels
...• Scion Bloodhand deck adjusted: Fewer charge followers in early maps
...• Scion High Priest deck adjusted: Only one Bodhisattva, no more danger of cycling them constantly
• Cards
...• Unconquered Ascetic: Lost Shielded keyword
...• The Tireless changed to 4/3 (was 3/6)
...• Mounting Pressure cost increased to 6 (was 5)
...• Frazzle cost increased to 4 (was 3)
...• Bold Strike cost increased to 4 (was 2)
...• Shade cost increased to 3 (was 1)
• Miscellaneous
...• Reduced number of nodes in later maps slightly
...• Reduced rest at initial crash site to 3 uses (was 5)
...• Finally added rest options to the Crypt Gate (3 uses). You can now take a breather before diving in.
...• Battery rewards reduced slightly across the board
Interface • Improved visual quality of intro logos
• French translation updated
Bugfixes • Soothing Shadows no longer triggers on moved obstacles or constructs
• Coordinated swarm no longer triggers on dead drones moving and no longer hits dead targets
• Defy Death is depleted on trigger, not on turn start
• Hedgehog Drone is depleted on trigger, not on turn start
• Battery mutator no longer has second player start with 10 Energy
• Wounded followers on the enemy side now start with 1 damage
• Rest button no longer vanishes on 4K displays
• Restarting game after loading a game no longer throws save game error
• Crypt Knowledge follow up events can no show up in the Crypt (no stars crashed into the Crypt)
• Surrender events in combat are now properly loaded
• Various minor text and event issues fixed
Day 6: Rebalancing Preview
A new week has dawned, and there's still plenty of work to do!
My changes last week made the AI smarter and the game harder, so now the game is moving down a bit. Since the AI is a frequent point of criticism I really want to update the main game, but since the AI and the balancing go hand in hand I want to make sure that it plays the way I want it to.
A lot of the changes I did were to the enemy leader and convoy decks. My goal was to make the first map a tad easier while making the later maps a bit harder. But these changes are a lot more complex than simple HP adjustments so I need some help!
Feedback form
So to that end: If you play in preview, please let me know how your experience went!
I've set up another Google Form since the last one was very useful! If you have any time to fill it out I'd be very grateful
Oh, by the way, here's a look at the before/after stats of the boss form!
As you can see, the green "just right" sections grow larger compared to the length of the columns. While this is just a small sample of players it still is a good sign that these changes were a good start!
Changelog
In any case, let's get back to this new version. Here's an excerpt of the changelog:
[Quote]
Enemies
• Enemy levels on map 1 changed to 1-2 (was 1-3)
• Enemy levels on last map changed to 7-10 (was 7-9)
• Enemy levels on crypt map changed to 10-12 (was 9-10)
• Enemy decks adjusted to be easier on lower levels
• Scion Bloodhand deck adjusted: Fewer charge followers in early maps
• Scion High Priest deck adjusted: Only one Bodhisattva, no more danger of cycling them constantly
Cards
• Unconquered Ascetic: Lost Shielded keyword
• The Tireless changed to 4/3 (was 3/6)
• Mounting Pressure cost increased to 6 (was 5)
• Frazzle cost increased to 4 (was 3)
• Bold Strike cost increased to 4 (was 2)
• Shade cost increased to 3 (was 1)
Miscellaneous
• Reduced number of nodes in later maps slightly
• Battery rewards reduced slightly across the board
And that's it for today. I hope you'll enjoy this new iteration of the game! And if everything works out it might go live for everyone in the next few days!
Thanks for playing,
- Martin
Day 5: Balancing thoughts and the coming week
So I hope that by now a few of you found some time to play the PREVIEW build with the improved AI. As you may have noticed, this makes the game a bunch tougher.
The new normal
So I'm currently looking at the overall balancing to bring it back in line. CHOSEN still seems to be mostly fine, though could be a tad easier, while the change to the AI is felt more strongly in BURDENED and DOOMED, which makes me think that both of these need to be brought down a bit as well.
I'd love to hear some feedback about your experience on whether you agree or disagree with me. That would help me a lot to zone in on an ideal curve.
Knobs to tweak
In the meantime, I am thinking about which levers to use to change things:
Player Health (At start, increase per level)
Enemy Health
Enemy Decks
Enemy Status effects (which, at what level, how strong)
AI cleverness
Fight Rewards (Resources, Followers & Items)
Event Rewards (Resources, Followers & Items)
Length of maps
All of these dials affect the game in different ways. The changed AI basically dialled up the difficulty of fights with the enemies playing more effectively. Tweaking health would be the easiest change but it would also make the game even more sensitive to alpha strikes as it already is in the non-elite non-boss fights.
Enemy decks are probably a better are to address but they are a bit finicky and hard to balance because there's so many things coming together, sometimes in unexpected ways.
Enemy status effects are simpler (fewer moving parts) but the changes are less gradual. One fewer trigger can sometimes make a challenging fight trivial.
My plan for balance
So that said, my current thoughts are to make the enemy decks a bit less mean in Chosen and Burdened so that the decks start to synergize at higher levels. This would also help with making map 1 a bit less of a make or break moment. Also some tweaks to the status effects and then pulling down HP for the elites and bosses just a tad (on Burdened and Doomed). And lastly to make the AI in the early maps a little stupider again - not as much as it was but just a tad less optimized.
I am also considering changing the length of the maps and how the enemy levels are spread out across them a bit. Currently the game ramps up quickly in Map 1, so maybe that should be a bit more gradual.
In any case, expect an updated PREVIEW build Monday or Tuesday next week.
With all that said, please keep the feedback coming! Specifically:
How does the current PREVIEW difficulty feel to you?
What do you think about my plan for rebalancing?
- Martin
Day 4: More AI Improvements
Another day, another update.
Sharpening the AI
I've spent today tweaking the AI some more to make sure it makes better decision and plays more effectively again. The bug I fixed yesterday did a lot to un-stupid the AI and this one should help it find good plays more reliably and a tad quicker even.
I might push up the number of iterations up a bit to make it slower again but give it more time to think in turn.
So far I'm pretty happy with the improvements as the AI seems to make a lot, lot, LOT fewer ridiculous mistakes. However unfortunately that also makes the game a bunch harder which in turn invalidates a bunch of the balancing tweaks I did before the launch.
So my next steps, before this update can roll out to all players, are to push the difficulty down a bit again. I'll have to think about how to best do that.
New version
In the meantime, here's the changes compared to yesterday's PREVIEW version:
Balancing
• AI decision system improved and more responsive to prioritization and unit positioning
• Scion Bloodhand deck adjusted: Fewer charge followers in early maps
• Scion High Priest deck adjusted: Only one Bodhisattva, no more danger of cycling them constantly
Bugfixes
• Restarting game after loading a game no longer throws save game error
• Crypt Knowledge follow up events can no show up in the Crypt (no stars crashed into the Crypt)
If you do play on PREVIEW, please provide feedback on the AI and difficulty in general. I'd love to hear about your experience!
< How to change to the Steam PREVIEW branch to play the new v1.00.008.
A tiny fix
Also, in regards to the AI bug from yesterday, here's the lines of code I had to change to fix it. Such a tiny change leading to a cascading issue in the evaluation and a clearly stupider AI.
I hope you're still enjoying the game. I'm looking forward to rolling out these changes to the wider player base! Thank you for reading and playing!
See you all tomorrow,
- Martin
Day 3: Starting on AI improvements
Alright, let's start with the most important note: There's an updated build in the PREVIEW branch on Steam. It features some minor bugfixes and improvements to the AI.
If you want to give that a try simply right click on the game in your library, select properties, then Betas and then use the dropdown to select the Preview beta.
Here's how this looks:
With that out of the way, let's talk a little bit about today and this preview build...
How the enemies think
The AI in Nowhere Prophet works by simulating all manner of moves from its current point of view and then picking the best one (MCTS for the more technically inclined among you).
This has a few ramifications:
Since this takes time and each player in Nowhere Prophet has a lot of moves (move unit to tile a, b, c..., attack with unit to target a, b c... play card on target a, b, c... you get the drift) this means that I can't simulate all the moves but need to do some clever prioritization to determine which move has potential, before simulating a fixed number. Theoretically, if I players were willing to wait a few minutes for each of the AI's moves, then it could always play near optimally, but there's a compromise to be made between the depth of the simulation and the wait time.
Also the AI needs some way to evaluate the game's current state after each move to understand if its actions made the situation better or worse.
AI Brain Scan
Both these things can be terribly opaque so I spent a lot of time today making the AI's thoughts and state evaluation more transparent. I need to understand what's happening to judge where it's going wrong and how to improve things.
Here's a look at some of that debug information:
And just by doing that I found a little bug in the decision system. What was happening was when the AI was looking for possible moves, the game state was changed by mistake!
When checking for all possible moves with cards it inadvertently put a reference to all the enemy's leader cards in its convoy hand. So for the first move in a simulated chain of moves, it had the right amount of cards. For the second move, the convoy hand was suddenly 7 because the 3 cards from the leader card were added to the convoy hand. Then 10, 13 etc. etc.
This lead to the value of the game state improving continuously (more cards = better game state), which meant the AI evaluated a branch of actions a lot higher than it should have. Even useless actions produced value, simply by virtue of being a step in the chain of actions, they created cards out of thin air.
This bug snuck in 6 weeks ago when I optimized the AI to run faster so I could run more iterations in the simulation. Unfortunately I made it faster, but also dumber.
But that one's now fixed in the PREVIEW build. Let me know if you can feel the change. I believe that the AI should be doing less "obviously stupid blunders" now. This may make the game a bit harder too so let me know how that feels as well!
Here's the changelog:
Changelog
Balancing
• Unconquered Ascetic: Lost Shielded keyword
• Scion Bloodhand deck adjusted: Fewer charge followers in early maps
• Reduced rest at initial crash site to 3 uses (was 5)
• Finally added rest options to the Crypt Gate (3 uses). You can now take a breather before diving in.
Interface
• Improved visual quality of intro logos
Bugfixes
• AI evaluation bug fixed: Later moves in a sequence had inflated scores, making even bad moves look useful
• Soothing Shadows no longer triggers on moved obstacles or constructs
• Defy Death is depleted on trigger, not on turn start
• Hedgehog Drone is depleted on trigger, not on turn start
• Battery mutator no longer has second player start with 10 Energy
• Wounded followers on the enemy side now start with 1 damage
• Rest button no longer vanishes on 4K displays
But that's not all. Beyond that I'm planning to make some more tweaks to the AI, specifically when it comes to pre-selecting and prioritizing AI moves since that allows me to get the best out of the simulation iterations I have available in the time given. But this is something for tomorrow and later in the week.
Best,
Martin
Day 2: Boss Balancing
Alrighty! Day 2 is over and I spent some time collecting your feedback, both the aggregated data from the online form and from the various other places. Thanks again everyone who joined in!
Here's an overview over the results on the bosses:
Now I've used that to take a closer look at the boss effects and decks and spent some time today filing off the rough edges. You'll hopefully find that the difficulty of the bosses will be a lot more even but please let me know if anything still stands out. This is a first pass and it would be incredibly lucky if I hit all the issues with that one.
Also note that for expediency this version is being released pretty untested. Nothing should break (in fact things should run more smoothly) but should is a dangerous word. So if you find anything out of the ordinary, please let me know ASAP so I can fix it - or roll back, if need be.
That said, here's the changelog excerpt for the boss balancing changes in v1.00.005:
Changelog
• Reduced strength of passive enemy effects:
... • Leper Tormented: Now only provides +1/+0 (was +1/+1)
... • King lizard: Now only triggers once each turn
... • Raj Guard Gloryseeker: Now only triggers once each turn
... • Union Bulwark: Now only provides 3 armor per kill (was 4)
• Limited or reduced number of effect triggers:
... • King Lizard
... • Ruster Lifter
... • Feral Javelin
... • Leper Tormented
... • Raj Guard Gloryseeker
... • Union Bulwark
• Reduced deck synergy (on lower levels and difficulties):
... • King Lizard (fewer poison units)
... • Shiram Torchbearer (fewer direct leader damage cards)
... • Ruster Lifter (fewer regen units and self damage cards)
... • Feral Javelin (fewer poison units)
... • Leper Tormented (fewer regen units)
... • Raj Guard Gloryseeker (fewer strong fury units)
... • Union Bulwark (fewer Armor synergy cards)
• Ruster Lifter fight guaranteed to be 5 rows wide, gives you more room to build up for a strong alpha strike
A fun side-effect of the "once each turn" change to the Gloryseeker and the King Lizard is that it not only makes things easier (hopefully not too much), it suddenly makes these into effects you can play around. Which one of your units is expendable and attacks the lizard first? Which one of the enemy units is least powerful if he gets it back to his hand and gets killed first?
Next steps, after this are: More boss balancing based on your feedback and taking a closer look at the AI. So that it no longer shoots its own obstacles or pulls units that are already in the front column. However if the AI starts playing better this will also raise the difficulty again, so it probably will be a bit of a back and forth between the two. But's that's a topic for another day.
Anyway, that's it for today. Keep playing and keep sending me that feedback!
And most importantly:
Stay hydrated,
- Martin
Day 1: Bugfixes and Boss musings
After the madness of the launch weekend it's time for me to get back into a proper rhythm. And to that end I've scoured my emails, the forums and Discord today looking for bug reports. Many thanks to everyone that reported something with special mentions to anyone who provided screenshots or log files. This is the best way to help me quickly find, reproduce and fix a problem.
Patching the bugs
That said, there's already a patch in the works: Version 1.00.004 will address a number of issues I've seen crop up. Here's the changelog:
CHANGELOG
Game fails a bit more gracefully when a save game was corrupted: Now tries to load the backup save if it can.
Stunned followers directly destroyed (cull the strong, neural shiv etc.) no longer trigger an error when trying to un-stun them
Double clicking the "end combat" button in the combat results no longer causes a crash
Pressing ESC while while in the "show battlefield" mode during Mulligan Phase no longer locks you out
Putting units down quickly while a unit is auto-spawned could make one of the units vanish.
"Stubborn" no longer triggers twice on units that are both damaged AND exhausted.
"Bodhisattva" no longer shuffles enemy units into the deck but returns them to the hand, as expected, as well.
"Dynamo" no longer triggers on Convoy cards as well
"Quick Charge" status effect now triggers properly
"Hard Impact" now properly uses Attack 6+ as condition (used to use Cost 6+ by mistake)
Blackout properly resets CanAttack/CanMove states. Followers can attack and move. Obstacles and Constructs can not.
"Stop Levelling" achievement now unlocks properly: Was erroneously limited to the Banshee class
"Fatality" achivement now unlocks properly: Incidentally overkill damage is now also properly displayed on the enemy leader.
Speaker's Circle Hope option now is properly accessible if you have enough hope
Steam Leaderboards now displayed even if you have not submitted a score that day
Steam Leaderboard also displays more scores at once now (top 100 if no score submitted, +/- 50 around your position if score submitted)
Event: Convoy Thief, showing mercy no longer kills the follower
Discord link from the "About the Game" popup works again
Action Log text alignment fixed (vertically centered)
Various typos and text issues addressed (for example the double colon in the boss hint on the map decision screen)
This is a pretty good list for a day, if you ask me. However this version is not yet available because I want it to see some testing before I put it live for everyone. Just to be sure it breaks nothing else. If you want to give it a spin though, you can right click on the game in your library and select the PREVIEW branch to get access. There's no password or anything so go right ahead.
In fact this branch will come handy for the next steps:
Next Steps: Boss Balancing
So, I've mentioned yesterday that I will take a closer look at the bosses. I will start doing so right away tomorrow (unless something strange catches fire).
My current plans are to make sure all the bosses are on a more event footing. A few of them are clear peaks in the difficulty curve, especially at the beginning of the game when you don't yet have a well-tuned deck. To that end I plan to restrict the status effects a bit and also reduce the synergy in the enemy decks, especially on the lower levels.
My plan (as said, if nothing suddenly explodes) is to do the first draft of changes tomorrow and then also make those available into the above-mentioned PREVIEW branch so you folks can give them a spin right away.
Also, if you haven't already, please fill out the online form! It will help me better gauge the difficutly of the bosses and my potential solutions!
Thank you and next steps (Bugs, Bosses & AI)
Wow! What a weekend!
We launched Nowhere Prophet just over 48 hours ago, the game I've been working on for over 5 years! I'm thrilled and excited to see so many of you play and enjoy the game. And I'm deeply thankful for the wave of feedback from every one of you!
I've been reading the forums, comments and scanning the discord to figure out what works for you and what doesn't.
And what I'm hearing from many of you is that the difficulty, especially the AI behavior and the bosses don't feel quite right.
This is clearly the most pressing concern for me and you can expect an update to the game with improvements soon. I may have to do some bugfixes first (anything that prevents people from playing has top priority), but once that is out of the way, balancing the difficulty better will be the first thing on the docket. The Bosses should feel challenging and not unfair and the AI should feel like a worthy foe and not make stupid mistakes.
I'm sorry that some of you had their experience with the game soured by that. I'll do my best to correct this as quickly as possible.
In the meantime I'd love to get more of your feedback on the difficulty, bosses and the AI. I've set up an online form to collect your thoughts and feedback in one place. This will help me better understand what causes problems and will make it easier - and quicker - for me to improve things.
If you have some time, please head over here an let me know what you think:
