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itslate wrote: Tue Jan 05, 2021 2:26 pm- Player-created Vixens: You could input the variables for an enemy Vixen and then fight it. However, the input would be tediously long and the enemy Vixen could not be saved in your save file, due to size restrictions.
- User-created Vixens: If there were enough interested players, I would make a new forum thread, detailing the programming behind Vixens. It's basically a couple of variables and an attack pattern in form of a list. People could come up with their own Vixens, post the code and I would implement them as optional enemies.

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301stLegion wrote: Sun Jan 17, 2021 8:00 pmHad a pretty odd bug today. I had just bought the curse of death and was on my first run to fight the witch. Got to the top, beat the witch handily and then it just went to back to the ascent screen and battle and I had to fight the witch again.

First off: You beat her handily? Than I really need to make her harder. Did she start the fight by dooming you? Just to rule out that the wrong Vixen got loaded.

RemiHiyama wrote: Sun Jan 17, 2021 9:10 pm You could always use something like this to allow loading custom data wholesale

itslate wrote: Mon Jan 18, 2021 11:23 amI will look into it later, but I don't want to rewrite the whole savegame stuff if I don't have to.

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So I got curse of death and beat the witch. After beating her it took me back to the screen before her except instead of being Realm 5: The End, it was Realm 6: The End. I beat her again, and i was again brought back to the screen before her reading realm 7 this time. I let her kill me this time because I was tired of fighting her, and I was brought to the failure screen. She said something about the price of my insolence or something and brought me back down to Realm 1 with my inventory from the past run and negative 2 hp. As soon as the fight against the vampire started, I died and I went to the normal loss screen and did not get any keys I earned that run. Is the game supposed to work that way, or is this a bug?

Edit: I see now someone else already reported it, mb
Absolutely love the game by the way and respect all the effort you're putting into it post-launch.

I am pretty shocked though that some people found the late-game Vixens too easy. So I would love some feedback

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I did feel like I started to move through them more easily after R2, speeding up by the end of R3. I think it came down to a few things. I had Attack II and Block II (and I think I had trained those a little as well?) so I could pretty easily just beat the later vixens by attrition if I didn't feel like dealing with their specific games. It was usually just a pattern of block and attack, spaced out correctly to avoid their damage as much as possible. I also got heal somewhere in there so I would throw that into the mix and heal myself every few turns rather than try to fully block or cleanse everything.

I was kind of expecting some vixens to notice my stronger attacks and blocks and level up themselves to deal more damage or block harder mid-battle. OR like, get mad when I use a stronger attack, and unleash a bunch of horrible stuff on me. Not sure if this would be easy to implement. You could also start much more frequent and intense force stroke, and force edge to wear the player down.

The vixens ARE very good about destroying my limit, which is how I think they're supposed to be more challenging, but I just stopped using limit boost and fell back to a steady repeated Attack II.

I think if you can make them react to stronger attacks the same way they are prepared for limit boosts, it would make a big difference.

I guess it felt like I leveled up more than the vixens did.

RemiHiyama wrote: Mon Jan 18, 2021 3:59 pmYou wouldn't have to. (Though it may require some rewriting of that code to not have to, I haven't looked closely.) It's presented as being for savegames, but there's no reason you couldn't leave saves the way they are and just use that for loading custom Vixen data at runtime.

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lor205y wrote: Tue Jan 19, 2021 4:01 pmI did feel like I started to move through them more easily after R2, speeding up by the end of R3. I think it came down to a few things. I had Attack II and Block II (and I think I had trained those a little as well?) so I could pretty easily just beat the later vixens by attrition if I didn't feel like dealing with their specific games. It was usually just a pattern of block and attack, spaced out correctly to avoid their damage as much as possible. I also got heal somewhere in there so I would throw that into the mix and heal myself every few turns rather than try to fully block or cleanse everything.

I was kind of expecting some vixens to notice my stronger attacks and blocks and level up themselves to deal more damage or block harder mid-battle. OR like, get mad when I use a stronger attack, and unleash a bunch of horrible stuff on me. Not sure if this would be easy to implement. You could also start much more frequent and intense force stroke, and force edge to wear the player down.

The vixens ARE very good about destroying my limit, which is how I think they're supposed to be more challenging, but I just stopped using limit boost and fell back to a steady repeated Attack II.

I think if you can make them react to stronger attacks the same way they are prepared for limit boosts, it would make a big difference.

I guess it felt like I leveled up more than the vixens did.

That's awesome feedback. Especially if you know the game well, you can buy the right skills to choose and can kill the Vixens quite effectively. It's interesting you beat a lot of them without using limit. That's not what I had in mind. Some Vixens should pretty much force you to use limit. This can be done with more blocking and healing, though. Maybe I add another status that gives blocking automatically each round.
The idea of reacting to big attacks is cool, but nearly impossible to implement. Any kind of "if" calls for a second list or part of the list of actions. There is exactly one condition like that in the game, Full Health: Evolve. I think it would be better for me to just rebalance some vixens in Realm 3 or 4 and assume that the player leveled up his stats effectively. That's how rogue-likes operate either way.
It would be great if a few people could post their opinions on balance as well. Do you agree with lor205y?

RemiHiyama wrote: Tue Jan 19, 2021 5:22 pmActually, would you be bothered if I just -wrote- the thing and then handed the code off to you? I'm pretty sure I know how to do this in a fairly straightforward way.

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I bought the Curse of Space but it is not in the curse menu and is no longer available to purchase in the keys screen.

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Also is it supposed to be possible to buy more than one key from the Smith in a run? I paid 300 gold worth to her but still only received 3 keys total upon successful completion of the run. I did turn down the orgasm though, just to see what would happen. Maybe that's something to do with it?

LittleElfBoy wrote: Thu Jan 21, 2021 12:23 am Re: Balance, one of the issues I think is that Attack (and secondarily, Limit) is the only thing that does damage. Since damage can end the encounter (and the other actions don't), its inherently more useful to just keep attacking. There should be more variety in the other actions to also deal damage in some way to make them more appealing to use.

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That's true, and there are lots of other ways to deal damage. But maybe they are not as potent as upgraded attack actions. Maybe I will add a status that only affects the attack actions, specifically. Weaken or Blind also hinder quadslash.

intermolecularpyro wrote: Thu Jan 21, 2021 2:15 am

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I bought the Curse of Space but it is not in the curse menu and is no longer available to purchase in the keys screen.

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intermolecularpyro wrote: Thu Jan 21, 2021 2:15 am Also is it supposed to be possible to buy more than one key from the Smith in a run? I paid 300 gold worth to her but still only received 3 keys total upon successful completion of the run. I did turn down the orgasm though, just to see what would happen. Maybe that's something to do with it?

You can but you can only get the key in the next realm, when you visit the Smith again. That's when you get the message that you obtained a key. The keys you forge are not affected by the keys you get for completing an ascent.

Vicissitudo wrote: Thu Jan 21, 2021 6:40 pm I noticed you've constantly implementing/fixing it and that's great.
But I now see you've somehow increased the difficulty by a lot (or perhaps I'm just extremely unlucky).
Apparently I can't find Heal in the Dojo anymore and I end up relying on the Witch's potions/tinders which are very limited.
Perhaps add an easy/normal/hard selection at the beginning of the game? Just saying...
Could also be cool to have a list of the encountered Vixens and those unknown who still have to be discovered and/or new ones.

Thank you anyway for all the effort, the game is great!

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your already bought actions and by luck.

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implementing 3 new statuses which would be introduced in Realms 3 and 4:

Exhausted/Debuff/Taking an attack action applies Weakened X/permanent/Player Only
Shielded/Buff/Apply X Blocking at the end of your turn/permanent/Enemy Only
Guarding/Buff/Can't take more than (10-X) damage from a single attack/reduced by 1/Enemy Only

So Guarding7 means the Vixen can only take 3 damage max per attack from the rogue.

All these would be aimed at making attack actions weaker forcing players to use Limit and other means of damage more. The overall difficulty would increase as well.

itslate wrote: Thu Jan 21, 2021 7:06 am

intermolecularpyro wrote: Thu Jan 21, 2021 2:15 am

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I bought the Curse of Space but it is not in the curse menu and is no longer available to purchase in the keys screen.

I fixed it, thank you!

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Hmm, it's still not there, but now the Turn Keys menu is missing too. Other things I've bought (disembodiment, knowledge of the smith) are still usable.

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intermolecularpyro wrote: Fri Jan 22, 2021 11:31 am Hmm, it's still not there, but now the Turn Keys menu is missing too. Other things I've bought (disembodiment, knowledge of the smith) are still usable.

There was indeed a second bug. Please try again, it should be fixed now.