KatFS Alpha Devlog #2 (August 2024)

Hello everyone! This is the second of the now-monthly general devlogs for the KatFS alpha development. So, what did the month of August bring us?

THE HARVEST IS BOUNTIFUL THIS YEAR

Last month I shared a couple new nature assets for the game's forest settings, including some fruit-bearing trees. Well, I am glad to say that you can now harvest these! If you spot a tree filled with fruit, just give it a gentle whack with your staff and all the ripe produce should come crashing down, ready for the picking!

Fruit trees and other "harvestable" entities like them add more interactivity to the world of KatFS beyond just burning down everything, which is always nice to have. It also ties in nicely with Kalia's earthy nature - literally gathering food from the wilderness to survive. In last month's devlog, I also brought up how the game will be getting mechanics that incentivize protecting nature elements and punishes burning down forests, and these trees provide another way to enforce it. Trees will only drop their fruit if struck with a melee attack, using fire magic only risks burning them. And if they do catch on fire, expect the fruit to burn up immediately and become unobtainable even if you somehow manage to extinguish the tree!

But that's not all. The new harvestable entity system could potentially allow for some other, zanier interactions in the future...

NATURE GIVETH, AND NATURE TAKETH AWAY

Speaking of nature, let's check on the changes to the "Nature Energy" system. Namely, the negative nature levels that the player may accrue. But first, a reminder of what "Nature Energy" is:

Whenever the player is in proximity to natural elements and NPCs, such as bushes, trees, vines and animals, they will contribute to their nature energy. Each entity has a different "nature value", with larger and more complex ones having higher values. Small trees will provide more energy than ferns, large trees will provide significantly more, and animals will greatly boost it due to how skittish and rare they will be. Having enough nature energy will provide Kalia with passive health regeneration, boost her magic regeneration, reduce incoming damage and speed up the cooldown timers on her special abilities, a mix of benefits that all and all make fighting in the forest a breeze for her.

In the demo, once an entity is destroyed, it will no longer contribute to the player's nature energy counter, but otherwise there's no penalty for destroying nature elements - at most the player loses some benefits. In trying to enforce an "environmentally-friendly" playstyle and keep to Kalia's theme of being a protector of nature, being overly destructive will now have more severe effects.

First, plants that are burning will stop providing nature energy right away, even if they're not destroyed yet. Second and most important, plants that get burned up or destroyed entirely will instead deduct their nature value from the player's energy, counteracting the benefits that other plants that haven't been destroyed yet provide. And finally, this score can now go into the negatives, providing the player with maluses instead of benefits - their magic regeneration will slow down and eventually stop entirely, they will take increased damage, and cooldown timers will run slower.

If the player decides to continue destroying nature beyond that point... Well, let's just say a future implementation will ensure they stop doing that ;]

PUT THAT FIRE BACK WHERE IT CAME FROM OR SO HELP ME

With consequences for careless use of fire, the player needed a way to control them before they would grow out of control. I decided to, as we say in Brazil, "combine the useful and the pleasant" by implementing the ability of Kalia to drain fires for a magic refund. This not only provides the player with a way to put out undesired fires, but also gives them an incentive to "clean up" after a fight to save on resources, and enables new ways of interacting with the fire system.

DON'T FIGHT RAW

As part of a new balance philosophy around the entire game's fire system, Kalia's melee is undergoing some changes. In the pre-alpha, melee attacks had a small but relevant fire damage portion, which enabled them to charge up flammable targets for no magic cost. The new balance philosophy seeks to tie fire output with magic expenditure more closely, thus this fire component had to go. 

However, it didn't feel appropriate to completely take away the melee fire damage, after all Kalia is swinging her Fire Staff at foes! Thus, a new special mechanic was implemented for it - if a melee attack strikes a target that has been already "heated up", either directly by Kalia's attacks, or indirectly by fire spread, it will deal double damage against that target, with the doubled portion being fire damage.

What does this mean in gameplay terms? It means the player is now encouraged to "pre-cook" their targets with fire even if they intend on engaging them primarily in melee. A single firebolt is enough to double your melee damage on a single target (so long as you keep hitting it and not let it cool down). And lighting up a single object on fire can heat up an entire group of enemies at once!

EVERY JOURNEY BEGINS WITH A SINGLE STEP... IN THE PROLOGUE

Finally, let's end this devlog with a zoom-out screenshot of the blockout for the game's prologue chapter! I've been iterating on some layouts for it, and have finally settled on a design I feel happy with. The prologue will feature Kalia encountering zombies during a foraging walk out in the woods, which she tracks down to a cave.

In the prologue, Kalia is equipped with a simple quarterstaff and thus only has access to non-magical melee attacks and the dodge roll. The prologue will introduce the player to the base premise of the game's melee combat, requiring the player to learn the melee-combo-dodge flow against a simple enemy. While the intended path should be straightforward, the player will be able to take some detours for optional collectibles or alternate routes to the end.

Since it is meant to be a tone-setter and impromptu tutorial on the game's base mechanics, the prologue is significantly shorter than any of the demo chapters, but that shouldn't be taken as a reference for the rest of the full game. It just has no need to be any longer, otherwise it might get dull to fight zombies in the woods without any magic for a while. Expect the mid to late game chapters to be significantly longer than any of the demo ones and likely span several instances!