The Goblin Cave v0.8.2.1 - Units, Units, Units

The Biggest Content Update in Goblin Cave History

Hello! I've still been working towards a demo for a while, this is a good start towards getting there!

Firstly I want to talk about the current state of the game. The game has all the features I want for a demo, artifacts, items, units, events, and bosses. I just need to create content for each of these that flow into each other well. I decided to start with characters as I think they're the most fundamental part of the gameplay and not having them caused me to struggle with balancing the economy...

THE ECONOMY

The economy was SO ANNOYING to balance without a large chunk of characters. This was because 3 stars were so easy to get due to the small selection of units. This made items less useful as they cost so much more than a unit and 3 starts were overpowered, even after tuning their power levels down, it was still more useful to buy a unit over save for a item. (The cost of a item was 10 where a unit was around 5 for the unit and 2 for a potential reroll). After units went from 6->20, hitting the units you wanted on a rolldown became much harder, thus increasing the cost of a unit. Items also scale better with units and are super necessary to win! 

THE UNITS

Units have become really easy to make at least from a programming standpoint, the general structure of how it works is I have a Scriptable Object that holds all data related to the units base stats (ATTACK DAMAGE ABILITY POWER, ARMOR, LIFESTEAL, ATTACK SPEED, MOVE SPEED, etc.) as well as a Ability Script which details all information about the units ability and the functions of it. From a art side I struggled a lot more, art has always held me back in projects especially because I want it to look especially good, because of that I start having art paralysis where I feel I should be making better art when its simply not in my capabilities and I just stop working on things. However I've heard recently that you should not try to exceed your capabilities and instead work around them. Following this approach I have started to adapt to a new method of character creation using KENNEY CREATURE MIXER to at the very least prototype the units art. I do really like how they look in the game so I might just keep them but we shall see. The pixel art works really well scaled down so I will use pixel art more in the future. I've added 20 units in total which should allow for some more flexibility in your builds and have a large amount of content to dig into.

Here are some examples of units...

  Mip: A Support Unit, Shoot healing orbs at allies and damage orbs at enemies

Cacipher: A Tank Unit, Knock back all enemies stunning them briefly and Cacipher heals themself

Jacky: A Ranger Unit, Shoot enemies with shurikens inflicting anti-heal and dealing damage

Those are 3 of the 20 new units added! All unique and interesting!

THE NEXT STEPS

I am looking forward to doing another beautifying update, I think the game is at a point where the game lacks the UI that makes you feel comfy playing it but is really fun to play so I want to focus on making the UI pretty and then I'll get back to content and polishing the content!

THANK YOU! ANHEIY!