A Dark Forest - WEEK 16 : Charms

[DEVLOG] Week 16

Patch Notes

Charms

I added charms, permanent unique effects that can be bought with the prestige currency "Singularity" resource.

They are based on Tarot cards.
(Thanks to my Discord community for the suggestions!)

For example, The Empress charm boosts your population working speed.

 For example, can craft a third mode in Population management now.

Shadows

Added Shadows to the game...  👀

Quality Of Life

I've also added a progress bar for the prestige currency (Infinity gets converted to Singularity).

Story

We also have a plan to add story dialogue after each reset 👀

Watermark

Added a watermark URL at the bottom of the settings screen.

This advice was given to me by others, who experienced their game being re-hosted or embedded on various 3rd party sites, without their knowledge, most likely by web scraper bots.

Bugfix & QOL

• Fixed "Absolute Rule" not working properly in certain edge cases
• Typing settings animation now has a 0.5 seconds delay before repeating
• Offset Heart texture 32 pixels upwards to be more in the center
• Remove scientific formatting from Substance number values

Coming Next

The Prestige Feature is a big one, COMING NEXT WEEK! 🚀

TODO

• test and polish charms
• add prestige Lore
• add prestige QOL
• balance prestige scaling
• maybe add more charms

P.S.

Problem of Offline Automation

A problematic charm to figure out was the automation of masons, granted by The Hierophant.

When this charm is active, peasants automatically get assigned to masons and required roles, generating more masons faster and faster.

I was trying to work out a closed form solution for the mathematical formulas to get the numbers after a given elapsed time. In the end, I decided to just simulate the cycles. The number of total iterations never gets too big, so it works fine and it is much cleaner and readable than trying to use a complex formula for direct calculations.