Shuffle Me v0.2.8 - Card Upgrades - Small Update

Hey, it's Sifa :D

I'm worn out after making 53 upgraded cards and rebalancing everything once again... So won't write a long post today xD

(links are at the bottom, as usual)

Card Upgrades

We scrapped the previous upgrade system, because upgrading entire themes was too powerful! And bcz of that balance was broken. Also, upgrades were too rare, that's another reason to change it.

So now, instead of upgrading a whole theme, you upgrade a card of a theme where you got enough experience. Usually you need to play several cards for an upgrade to trigger after a fight. However, the system will pick the theme where you've got the most XP, so be sure to play what you want to upgrade :D

Also, most of the upgrades are balanced in the way where they don't break the game's balance. I wanted to make them more useful rather than powerful. Not sure I balanced them well though, so let's playtest it for a while. Lemme know what you think in the comments here or on Discord!

Plans for the future

With the new system I see a new issue: campaigns are too short. You don't have enough time to upgrade everything, try everything, and etc. So we are going to add ability to continue playing, or maybe a difficulty setting where you can set the length of the campaign somehow.

With that, we're going to implement a new campaign with more generic characters, but with more differences. Everything seems ready for that.

Next, we decided not to use Gender XP for card upgrades, because Gender XP is going to be used for Player upgrades. Increase max arousal/stress, increase max TF (aka HP), or even revert TF changes. Should be cool.

And there is a high chance that we will roll all of these changes into a bigger update, numbered 0.3.0. Not sure we can do it by next Friday, but we'll try our best :D

Shuffle Me v0.2.8 Changelog:

• Added "upgraded" versions of all 53 player cards

  • Card upgrades are unlocked instead of "whole theme" upgrades, using the same experience system as before. Using more cards of a theme will give you upgrades for that theme more often.

  • Added a few variations of existing card effects

  • Rebalanced cards with upgrades in mind

  • Adjusted starting deck

  • Gender XP won't trigger any upgrades, for now

• New set of effects around boosting the first card in hand ("plan" theme)

• New cards' drop rates are now completely random (they were tied to TF points before)

• Removed the ability to "continue" from main menu after completing or losing a campaign. You finished that run; start a new game!

• Fixed animation system causing a crash from trying to interact with an enemy that doesn't exist any more (i.e. ended combat, but had a lot of queued animations from using cards).

  • These crashes happened after combat, often in the "pick a card/item" selections, depending on how quickly you picked stuff there.

• And as always, miscellaneous fixes & balance adjustments.