Blood X Thirsty v0.1.2

Hello all! SwAAn here. Today we will be launching the second update to Blood X Thirsty following the end of the game jam, but first...

Announcements

First off, congratulations to all of the winners for PJ15! It was great to see some of the games we played and adored get the accolades they deserved. Although BxT wasn't one of the winners, Thor did briefly play it on stream!! I can't speak for the whole team, but this was a massive surprise to me, and I continue to be blown away by the reception for this project. So, big thanks to Thor for this space and for the positive feedback!

As for the future of BxT, this is sort of up in the air right now. Our team is made up of people who mostly met in LFG channels, so organizing work between us outside of a game jam setting is somewhat of a unique challenge. That being said, if you like BxT and want to see more updates for it, feel free to check out the official Blood X Thirsty Discord Server! Getting feedback and support from the good folks in there is what has motivated this update, and seeing that there are people who want to play a finished version of this game is great motivation for us to keep the project going. Now! Onto the patch notes!

Version 0.1.2

This update can be broken down into 3 changes:

• Small UI Tweaks
• Bug Fix: Anger Bar shows briefly when Customer arrives at Bar Spot where there is a Drink
• Ingredients Rebalance
• Overhaul of Ingredient Modifier System

The UI tweaks are so small that nobody is likely to notice them. So, moving on we have...

Anger Bar Fix

This just irked me to look at. It was trivial to fix, but if you're curious about the system that caused it, here's an explanation:

All customer AI is driven by a single class that is controlled by behavior states. When a customer arrives at a spot at the bar, its state changes from "Finding a Seat" to "Waiting for a Drink". Then in the next physics frame, if a drink is present at that spot, the customer's behavior state changes to "Drinking". The problem was that during that single "Waiting for a Drink" frame, on some systems (mine) you will see the anger bar briefly appear.

This bug also caused customers to take an extra 1/60th of a second to finish their drink, but I don't think anyone is worried about that level of optimized gameplay.

Ingredients Rebalance

This has been a high priority item for me since we hit publish on BxT at the end of the jam. One major point of feedback we've gotten is that the prime strategy for tends to boil down to just getting generic ingredients that affect all monster types. This isn't what I had intended for BxT, so this update aims to remedy this somewhat. This update is made in the spirit that each ingredient should have applications and be able to support different playstyles. My hope is that this update allows you to try some items and combos that you wouldn't have considered before. Further down the line I'd like to add some more ingredients with more interesting effects, but for now I think this will improve the replayability of BxT considerably.

With all that being said, here are the changes:

These might seem like dramatic changes, but since these ingredients only affect a subset of all monsters, I felt it necessary for the effect potency to reflect this. Ultimately, I'm always looking for feedback, so if something is broken (literally or figuratively) let me know!

Modifier System Overhaul

Part of participating in a game jam is writing code you can't be completely confident in, and yet, it gets the job done. Right? Just me? Anyway.

One such system I am responsible for is the ingredients and modifiers system. I've never designed anything like this before, so I just implemented a system that was intuitive to me:

Here, there is a single modifier for both of the brew's effects: tip increase and drinking time reduction.
These modifiers are directly altered additively when a customer is initialized.

This works, but it doesn't really capture the synergistic nature of ingredients that we're aiming for. Instead, let's create a modifier for each ingredient and let them multiplicatively stack on each other:

This method is not only more streamlined; it can also create more dramatic changes in effect potency.

Hopefully none of these changes break the game in a way that makes it unplayable to our die-hard fans.

Well, if you read all of this, thanks for sticking around! I hope to make many more updates to this in the future, so stay tuned for more!

Until next time,

- SwAAn