Sinathir
Sinathir 0.24 - Wellness and better ghouls
This patch is rather small, but it changes progression in a really big way by adding new wellness system. I also reworked the way ghouls work.
Wellness system
Simply put, this system makes early game harder and progression slower. But once you get your bearings and establish your self a bit, you will be getting stronger much faster than in previous versions.
Here is the new wellness screen added to the status window:
Quite ugly and barebones, but it shows all the important information.
Wellness- This is your raw wellness value. It can be increased by eating food, resting, increasing pantry quality, showering or exercising. Getting hurt or doing drugs / alcohol reduces it.
Level- This is you wellness level. You reach next level once your wellness is above the "Next level" value. You level dictates what bonuses you get. First number is your current level, second number is your maximum level you can reach.
Next level- How much wellness you need to reach next level
Next bonus-This is the bonus you get once you reach next wellness level
All bonuses- These are all the boosts you get from your wellness level.
So, what does the wellness system actualy do?
First, I removed the automatic +1 HP/SP bonus you get for working, training or resting. I also remover the HP/SP and random stat bonus from combat (for new characters. You can get it back later). Stats you get at the end of each week are now determined by your wellness level. Bonuses you get from jobs and training are still the same.
If your wellness level is at zero, you get nothing (You still gain stats and skills from working and training). No new stats, not even the +1HP/SP bonus. Once you reach higher level, your bonuses will increase and you will be getting stronger much faster than before. Getting to that point takes a lot of time and planning though.
Increasing wellness is a slow process. Eating food directly is the easiest way to increase it. Food now doesn't heal any HP, but it still increases your mood. You can still eat only one food item a week.
To sum it up, every week you will need to eat some food and do other activities to raise your wellness slowly over time. This increases your wellness level, which increases the amount of stats you get at the end of the week.
Certain things also decrease your wellness. Using drugs of any kind lowers your wellness a little. Storing low quality food in your pantry lowers it too. Worst way to lose wellness is combat. If your wellness ends below 0, you will lose a lot of mood at the end of the week (equal to your negative wellness value). Doing tons of cocaine and then going through the caves and dungeons will kill you quickly. If your wellness is under 0, it gets increased by your age-9 at the end of the week. If it is above 0, it gets decreased by your age -9. This means that if you do nothing, your wellness will naturaly drift towards zero, so if you ignore it completely, you will not lose any mood, but you will also not get any bonuses.
Getting hurt in combat now lowers your wellness depending on the amount of damage you receive. If you get hit for more than 10% of your maxHP, you loose one wellness. This stacks for every 10% of damage the attack does, so if you get hit once for 50% of your max health, you lose 5 wellness, but if you die from getting hit multiple times for only 9% of your max health each, you lose no wellness points. This makes armor slightly more important as well as having some followers to soak up some damage. It also forces people to avoid combat at the start of the game, since even low damage can take away more than 80% of your HP and thus taking away several weeks worth of wellness.
Combat stat gains (except for weapon XP) were removed for new characters. You can still get these bonuses though. If you join the church, you gain the +1HP/SP bonus after each battle. Bringing one ichor container to Mr. White gives you the +1 random stat for each battle.
The initial maximum wellness level is 5. You can increase it by joining the church (+5), giving Mr. White ichor containers (+1 for each one) and by developing major mutations (+1 for each mutation). Maximum current level you can achieve is 20. At that point, you will gain about 10 HP/SP and +3 in every body stat per week.
This system serves several purposes. It is suposed to make new characters weaker and improving them slower. It makes cooking more important, because high quality food will increase your wellness faster and thus make you stronger faster. It also makes late game characters much stronger if you decide to use this system. And lastly, it serves as a basis for the "humanity" system I have planned.
I'm not going to get into spoilers, but you will be allowed to become much stronger than normal humans. This will have some negative effects, like your character making bad decisions and becoming generaly more evil. Mutating and using ichor will make you much stronger and the game easier, but you will be locked into worse ending and some aspects of the game will get locked or become harder. Staying pure human will make combat and the general game harder, but make other parts of the game easier and unlock new features. All of this is long way off though.
Improved ghouls
I reworked the way ghouls work. Up untill now, they were pretty much broken and they could even softlock some characters.
I added simple heat system. Staying in the caves increases your heat by one every ten seconds. Ghouls will start spawning once the heat reaches certain value. Outer caves have these values higher than deeper caves.
When ghoul spawns, you will hear a warning sound. Ghouls are now slower than player, but they always know your precise location and they walk through walls. If you get too close to them, they start sprinting and attack you. Ghouls respawn every time you re-enter a cave location.
Once you end a week in any way, the heat gets reset and you can explore the caves without any ghouls around. They will start spawning again once you spend some time in those caves. Oh, and I buffed them by about 50%, since they are now easier to avoid.
I will be improving this system even more in the future. I will add more ghoul types and variants if your heat gets too high. If you end up farming them, they will start spawning on the surface and become more aggressive.
Improvements from previous minor patches
I fixed quite a number of minor and major bugs. I rewrote some dialogue and improved the save menu even more. Big thanks to Raisim and everyone else who reported any bugs or suggested any improvements.
Full changelog:
- New wellness system giving player weekly permanent stat bonuses
- Removed physical stat gains from combat. You must now join the church and deliver one ichor container to get them
- Food doesn't heal any more
- Improved ghoul system and made them easier to avoid, but harder to fight.
- Fixed crafting material window not scrolling down far enough
- Added more plants to Billy for trading. Added new seed recipes and fixed some broken cooking recipes
- Added new tutorial step to John to explain the new wellness system
- Fixed some typos
Older minor versions:
- Fixed crash when loading older version saves (saves below 0.20 will still not work)
- Improved save screen. Shows your name, location name and background depending on your location
- Fixed broken imprints from older version
- Crossroads mutant hunter is inactive during cutscenes
- Learning skills now transfers the money you spent into the trainers trade inventory
- Fixed crash when working for Zacharias
- Improved formating in the buy/sell window
- Fixed crash when talking to the kobold trader
- Fixed not being able to dismiss some followers
- Healing items no longer damage you when used
- Fixed minor graphical bugs
- Fixed wrong transitions in the last location of the soviet bunker dungeon
That's pretty much it. If you find any bugs, report them here or on the community page HERE. If you have any ideas or suggestion, don't be afraid to post.
And lastly something unrelated. I started painting miniatures last year. Middle one is the first miniature I painted. Left and right are the latest.
Seeing my skills improve is a good feeling and I feel the same way when I work on Sinathir. It is not a great game, but it is only getting better.
Comments
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It's been really bugging me for a while every time I look at the image cover for this update, is the robot arm, eyes, and that katana already in the game or is it just a planned update later in the future?
Also that skill rank, combat rank, and body rank on the opening menu, will that also be added into the game later on? Because as far as I can see there's nothing like that in my character menu.
Katana is in the game and is sold by Mr. White. Cybernetics are planed, but I will have to make the Ark settlement before that. I'm just working on the graphics in the meantime and thought it would be nice to put them in the cover image as a small sneak-peek.
Those things were in the initial public versions, but I took them out. They took too much space and they became slightly obsolete since now your character can comment on those things at the start of each week.
I got this weird glitch or bug about these two weapon. I can't equip the PPSh-41 weapon for some reason too.
Also I got a problem about the blood staff. Can anyone tell me how to get the Fire one? When I was given the option to pick my staff, he said that I can only use the flesh blood staff but not the fire blood staff. He didn't actually say it like that but I was given an option to pick if I want the flesh power or not, I picked no but then he keeps repeating to ask if I want the flesh power. Do I have to do something specific first?
PPSH-41 and some other weapons like SKS with bayonet are weapons only for NPCs. I just forgot to make them invisible in players inventory. The fact that you can't use them means they work correctly otherwise. Will fix that in next version.
You can only get a blood staff for powers you have, so if you give Zacharias fire stone for the "one of us" quest, you can only pick the fire staff and not the flesh staff. Same works for the flesh stone. If you finish the "one of us" quest, you can still find the other bloodstone and give it to Zacharias later so you can actualy have both the fire and flesh powers. If you finish the bloodstaff quest after that, Zach will ask you if you want flesh staff. If you say no, he will ask if you want fire staff. If you say no again, he will ask about the flesh staff. If you have only one power, he will ask the same question again and again until you say yes.
So if you have only one blood power, then everything works correctly. If you have both flesh and fire and he asks only about the flesh staff, then there is something wrong and I will need to look into it more.
Ah I see, I'm gonna try to look for the other Bloodstone inside the underground cave then. Hopefully there's a fire Blood stone there.
If the PPSh-41 and that other weapon is only for NPCs, why and how did I have it in my inventory and can I like make it gone? Oh I also somehow got SKS with Bayonet before and sold it for a quick money, even if I can't use it I can't say that I hate it. I can't do anything to the PPHs-41 though, lol.
Oh right, I found something called Ichor Container but dunno what to do with it. Tried it with the church people but nothing. Is it an unfinished item?
Those weapons will be gone when I release next small patch. Some can be sold right now because I just copied ordinary weapon you can normaly use, tweaked some stats and gave it the NPC tag so that wepon has a sale price. This wouldn't matter if I didn't forget to make them invisible in your inventory, since you wouldn't be able to sell them anyway but right now, you can just recruit certain NPCs who have those weapons and sell them over and over again to get some quick money. This is a bug ofcourse so it is up to you to decide if it feels like cheating or not.
Ichor can be given to Mr. White. This is a minor spoiler though.
This will be different in the future as I add more quests and locations.
Well that's a useful hint for sure. Gonna do that later.
Oh, I already found the fire stone and my god that's so hard to get. Took 2 retries, mood at -63 with vodka, wellness -12, and 2 ghoul defeated (haven't tried sleeping yet, I hope the mood penalty isn't that high).
Is there a level of ghoul that's gonna be appearing? Those two ghoul only have like 500 hp? Now I'm kinda afraid that the ghoul levelling up is not from killing but from dying.
Also will you add a monster health feature later on? It's kinda hard that every time you deal large damage thinking that this was the last hit but then it's not. Looks funny for trolling maybe? The player expectation got crushed everytime they think the fight was over, lol.
Another bug. Ghouls should have 6000HP. I made it 600 by accident.
Visible health is something I was thinking about. I will deffinitely add it, but you will have to unlock it in some way first.
I thought Mr. White was near the cliffs the whole time. I probably spent a half hour looking for him at where the fight takes place 😭
Bruh that face
Don't worry. He will be in a completely different place once I finish the story dungeon.
Nice patch and nice minis!
I haven't painted in a while, but I still have a few boxes of Warhammer Fantasy sets lying somewhere...
Update looks nice, I'll check it out next week when I can.
Something that's worth looking into is the aged up character sprite proportions and blood-stains. She looks like she's wearing the biggest push-up bra ever made. I'm all for having sex appeal in games, but I think it looks more like two balloons under her dress than anything - doesn't feel natural. I'm not good at anatomy/drawing so I can't really offer any good ideas there.
Another thing is the blood stain position. The one right above her lip looks a bit out of place, as if it's not really connected to her face curvature. Perhaps flip it vertically so it's perpendicular to her mouth?
Really the only reason why I'm noticing these issues is since this used as a promo screenshot in this devlog, which is what grabs a player/reader's attention, and having these issues could be what makes or breaks someone's willingness to try the game out. They don't bother me since I know what the game is like and I don't need to be convinced to play it, but I can imagine someone looking at it and saying "oh, a porn game, no thanks" or something. I think they're probably quick fixes, should you decide to address this.
Keep up the good work!
Thanks. Character sprites are something I'm still fighting with. I'm toying with. Trying to improve both the anatomy, face and materials. I'm not very good at it, but it's getting better.
Wounds are also something that needs more work. I made one set for age 10 and then I just lazily copied them over to other ages without acounting for rotation and proper placement. Definitely something I will work on in the future together with the main character. The game still needs a lot of work in the graphics department in general so I'm just putting what I have out there.