Update 0.1.20: the bosses learn new tricks
A new attack for every boss on Nightmare and Hell, power cuts in the Abyss, a secret on every stage, 32 Empowered skill boons, damage per skill on the results screen, and a Reduce flashing switch.
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Catacrawl is made by one person, and most of what I learn making it is written down the day it happens. These are those notes, rewritten for someone who does not have the repository open: what broke, what the number actually was, and what I changed.
Why the Abyss is full of vacuum cleaners
Every monster in Catacrawl is a thing that actually frightens a cat. That one rule wrote three stages, and it is the only design decision in the game I have never had to revisit.
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A boss shipped on its back for a month, and I looked at it every day
The Scarab Sovereign was drawn from straight above, like a specimen pinned in a case. In a game where everything else faces the camera, that reads as a dead beetle.
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I fitted a bot to my own play, and made it 40% worse
I recorded ten sessions at ten samples a second and fitted every knob of my playtest bot to them. The result was a measurably worse player, and both bad knobs were bad for the same reason.
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My seeded runs replayed perfectly. In one process.
A year of balance numbers were measured against a bot playing a game that was not quite the same game twice. The cause was a `pairs` loop and a security feature in LuaJIT.
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Every Windows install of my game failed, and Steam blamed the player's disk
For three weeks nobody on Windows could install Catacrawl. The client said 'disk write failure'. It was a symlink, in a folder Windows players should never have been sent.
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