Farming, Combat, The World, & November Stats - Sidequest Dev Blog

Sidequesters! I've had a bit over a week to take in feedback from everyone and I have some initial ideas to share about the future direction of the game. They might not be everyone's favourite answers, but I do think we can make some great improvements and turn Sidequest into a very enjoyable experience.

The World

Yeah, I'm scrapping the world. This one hurts a bit because of the vision of the Sidequest project but I think overall this is going to be a positive. I wanted Sidequest to be this grand ecosystem and it's clear that having The Site and The World really just creates a clash in how it has to be developed. Not only is it much more difficult to put features into the world aspect of Sidequest, but everything has to be balanced with both of the mechanisms in mind which leads to odd situations.

Energy was supposed to be a way to help balance different interactions between both the Site and World aspects of the game, but I just don't like it in The World at all with Energy as a feature. I also dislike that in order for me to add Dungeons to the game, they need to exist in a location in the world which is cool, but then they just kinda get slapped onto a random page on our site for that part of it. So no more development of The World will take place for now. That doesn't mean there won't be worldbuilding though still =)

We'll keep the current World around for now, maybe even do something smaller scale with it, but really I think what I need to do is take what we have with Sidequest, and if I want to make a "proper" game with it, it needs to be its own product with its own set of goals. It sucks because I love the name Sidequest but also apparently a couple of people already use that on Steam. lol.

This Week: Farming

Planned to drop last week was the addition of Farming into Sidequest. I held off on it though due to all the feedback pouring in and I didn't want to muddy those waters.

• Farming is coming!

• Everyone has their own farming plot to plant a crop of their choice with seeds.

• The community garden also exists and allows everyone to vote on which crop should be planted next.

  • All voters and all people who swing by after the crop is grown get a share of the harvest.

Originally, farming was going to be a community-focused project. I decided to not make this the case and instead we will be receiving additional community garden plots throughout November. The community garden will continue to function a little bit into December but will then turn off as it will be too cold. A smaller community project will become available at this time to build a greenhouse. This isn't going to be as large as the profession houses. The greenhouse will allow year-round easier access to food to cook with.

The community garden has a couple of small little fun things with it that should be quick to discover...

Additional personal plots will become a thing in the future through additional events. I'm intentionally leaving these for future updates just to get a better feel for how the food economy feels with the community plots.

The farm will launch this week. No more spoilers!

Combat & Classes

I've heard a lot of feedback on combat and I understand this is one of the largest pain points right now for folks. The two biggest points of feedback are about the time investment being huge and how combat as a whole just isn't there yet, and I agree. I really needed to build up some data and feedback on this to push forward with some meaningful updates. Here's where my mind is at:

• Allowing basic fights to be automated just like bosses.

  • I am thinking about leaving the energy usage the same but giving people a small energy discount if they participate in the actual non-automated fight.

    • The real penalty to automation is only the first 4 spell slots on your bars get used.

• Classes.

  • I know there have been several points of feedback about things not feeling as good on each class. Archers are OP.

  • Wording of tooltips and mechanics needs large improvements.

  • Respeccing to play around with stuff right now kinda sucks.

• Turn slowdowns definitely have issues.

• Food isn't working at all in regular combat.

• Gear stat formulas are not exposed well right now.

  • Intentional, for the record. Because they are very much in-dev and going to change more rapidly.

And there's just over 80 other pieces of combat-related feedback I have received either in comments here, private messages, direct messages on Discord, or in our Discord Sidequest Feedback channel. It's a lot to work through and I do expect to start pushing out some updates regarding combat towards the end of this week when Farming gets deployed out.

The biggest change to combat will be the automation aspect of fights. I think this is going to improve Sidequest for many of you and will allow less time involvement for a game that is supposed to be something you are doing on the side. I might not hit balance on this perfect out the gate, but we'll try!

Professions

The UI kinda sucks for crafting. Just straight up. I want to get this fixed and I have a very good idea of what to do to fix it, it's just going to take some time because I haven't figured it out for mobile yet.

Fun Stats

• 2,919 fights by 25 adventurers, and 2,852 resulted in a win (97.7%).

• 1,606 Ventures and 1,313 Boss Fights.

• 19,010 abilities cast by players, out of 37,078 moves made in battle by everyone.

• 1,624,326 damage dealt by players. Monsters hit back only for 238,045.

• 313,898 class XP earned, 6,553 Gold looted and 33,960 Energy spent.

• 80 characters created by 63 members.

• 265 talent points spent, and only 9 respecs.

Fights per day

We have seen a rise in the number of fights taking place per day since the launch of turn-based combat.

This is certainly due to boss fights becoming more accessible, as you can see most of the fighting happens with bosses now.

Class Popularity

Archers are currently leading the pack with the highest number of fights however Warrior remains the most popular of the chosen classes. Archers are just doing a ton of damage, which means we need to help the other classes out to make things feel smoother.

Speaking of classes, only four classes have hit the level cap of 20. Congrats to our two Archers, one Warrior, and one Mage who have hit max level. The first Assassin to reach max level should be soon, the highest is level 18.

Ability Popularity

WARRIOR GO SMASH!

Top Fighters

Oh and madcat, congratulations on not only being the fightiest of the fighters, but you also are undefeated!

So yeah, lot of stuff to work on. Thank you everyone for the feedback! We'll get some kind of an update out this week and then next week I want to send out a survey to all our Sidequest participants to get some more targeted feedback, so be on the lookout for that - it'll arrive via a direct message whenever I'm able to put that together.

I did want to get Dungeons going for this month too, but I think that's going to become a next month thing instead because I need to have a rethink on how that works with the combat changes. Dungeons might just be an automated feature instead of folks joining up together and going through several rounds of combat and making decisions together because really, doing both is going to be way too difficult to balance the time and reward aspect. Open to opinions on what you think dungeons could be in Sidequest though - leave your thoughts down below.