[Mod] Arint's Last Day (Preview)

[Newbiespud]

Now public on the Steam Workshop!

Fellemo's right-hand shroke, Spark Baron Lieutenant Arint, becomes a playable character!

Arint's battle deck revolves around her chest beam cannon: charging it up, coating her enemies in volatile chemicals, and then firing on everyone for massive damage. Her negotiation style is all about staying cool under pressure, creating bounties on herself while incepting vulnerability in others and leveraging the official authority of the Barons.

This is a preview version of a short campaign mod still in development. This version will remain separate and won't be updated save to fix any severe bugs.

It also represents more or less everything I've learned so far in the past three and a half weeks of learning to mod, and is available as a resource free to use for other modders who'd like more examples to study.

WHAT THIS MOD HAS:
- Playable Arint
- Unique and upgradable Basic cards for Arint's deck
- A short Mini-Brawl for Arint
- An experimental encounter with a boosted NPC Rook with negotiation behavior, boosted combat abilities, and weaknesses for both Arint and Rook

WHAT THIS MOD DOES NOT HAVE:
- Draftable card pools of Commons, Uncommons, and Rares for Arint
- Story content
- Custom quips

KNOWN ISSUES:
- Grafts that let you Improvise commons, uncommons, or rares simply don't do anything
- Selecting the graft that makes 2 random people hate you at the start of the Arint VS Rook Experiment causes a crash

If you download and try out this mod, consider giving feedback on the Steam Workshop or here in this thread!

[u lil nerd]

Looks good!  Can't wait to try this later tonight.

[RageLeague]

I'm not sure whether it's your job to make the portrait face the right way or the devs.

[Newbiespud]

I don't think there's a script method to horizontally flip the preview anims, and it makes sense why there wouldn't be. The hero and boss anims are pre-baked and clearly labeled, and the one and only reason you'd need to flip them around (including the direction of the slide) is if... you're a modder turning a boss into a PC and a PC into a boss. That exact situation. So I'm the one person on planet Earth who might want that functionality.

[Wumpus the 19th]

It is cool although limited. The simple fact it can contend with day 4 difficulty is astonishing since all it has is the "basic desk". I could even beat the challenge fight 4 clobbers with good enough RNG and some item usage. If other parts of the project have priority/have a clear idea to be implemented, this can hit the back burner. However, arint is currently a bit rng based due to beam charge and chest strike and it would do good to nerf the basic deck and adding new cards to vary playstyle

[Newbiespud]

Yeah, the original scope of this was to keep it short, with a basic deck that can handle one day of story campaign at a high difficulty. I want to prioritize getting it done and out the door before burning out, and limiting the scope is key to that.

That, and with only four combat animations to work with - attack1, taunt, chest_beam, and surge - I want to avoid having a lot of cards that look pretty much the same artistically.

But the more I look at the strength of Arint's decks and how to balance them... it really looks more and more like the correct decision is to dial them back a bit and create a draft pool that a player can enhance (or ruin) their decks with. Not a huge pool (it's still gonna be a short campaign, and even without unlockable card packs, that'd be 100 cards to invent and balance for a full-sized pool across both decks), but enough to create variety. So that'll probably end up being one of the tasks for the full version.

For the moment, though, my immediate task is making Arint's story campaign and quests, and I've still got plenty of learning to do there.

[RageLeague]

Oh by the way, I tried to implement arint into the cross character campaign, because someone on steam is asking for it. It crashes whenever a random card reward is given because there are no cards that can be rewarded. That is something you should probably keep in mind.

[Newbiespud]

Yeah, Arint will also probably crash if you try to buy any battle or negotiation cards from merchants. I figured it wouldn't be compatible with the cross-character mod, but I think having card pools in the full version might fix all that?

[RageLeague]

Yeah.

Or just allow sal's card pool to be rewarded or something.

It's mainly because when a card is rewarded, the game tries to rig the reward process by searching for an uncommon card and asserts that uncommon card exists. But since it doesn't, the assertion fails and the game crashes.

[Newbiespud]

If I add Sal to Arint's card_series, though, I think that also means that she drafts some of Sal's cards after every battle and negotiation, and that's not really what I want this mod to do.

[Wumpus the 19th]

maybe throw in some cards such as:

"Spend beam charge: gain defense"

"ability: gain 1 beam charge at the start of your turn."

"incept 2 strange chemical on all enemies"

"Hits once per stack of scruple"

"Gain dominance per intent (You found the way to gauge the amount, just translate to dominance)"

Nothing crazy, just a few ideas for cards to justify a basic deck nerf.

[u lil nerd]

1 hour ago, Newbiespud said:

If I add Sal to Arint's card_series, though, I think that also means that she drafts some of Sal's cards after every battle and negotiation, and that's not really what I want this mod to do.

I want to do something similar to my mod as well since I don't have a single custom Negotiation card for the character I'm creating yet.  Somehow add ONLY negotiation cards from Sal/Rook/Smith to my characters card series but I don't think there is a way to do one or the other, just both which is tragic since the battle deck is more or less done.  

As for your mod, I've played the demo Rook boss once and the brawl a few times on the first day and I would agree that adding a small pool of cards would help balance out the deck and make it feel less static.  Playing as this character felt accurate and I felt very powerful as the Liutenant of the Spark Barons should be.

For the actual cards I liked what I was working with there, building up strange chemical on to an enemy, charging up, and eventually slamming them with the chest beam is not only satisfying to execute but also very intuitive to do with the cards you're given. 

Now take this as a grain of salt as a fellow modder since I know how it feels to get card concepts or ideas from others, but a few things that I can think you can build on for cards are definitely Strange Chemical (Being that if an enemy has Strange Chemical for example, a card or cards could do bonus damage or hit twice, costs 0, or even have those effects but you will need a certain Strange Chemical stack requirement on an enemy to have the additional effect) and Charge Up (Having 3 Charges charged up could give you Overdrive, increasing damage of attack cards, giving an extra action while in Overdrive or extra card draw every turn?). 

I just thought since these are conditions/abilities that you've made up and are interesting, why not build on these and have other cards that do additional effects depending on the stacks of these conditions?  Anyways those are my thoughts on the Arint's Last Day character mod, I think what you have is pretty cool and I hope that someday you will be able to finish it and let myself and others enjoy your creation!

[Newbiespud]

Thanks for the feedback, everyone! New patch just went up.

v1.0.1

- Attempted fix for All Business adding Composure that is immediately cleared at the start of the player's turn

 

This was a bit of a journey. It seems sometimes a rare combination of what I assume are animation delays cause the enemy's intents to be generated a split second before the player's turn officially begins, rather than after. Since All Business adds Composure one instance at a time per EVENT.INTENT_ADDED, on those occasions it looks like it adds all that Composure at the start of the player's turn and it just disappears as soon as it's done, because Composure is cleared when a negotiator's turn begins but the animations are delayed to be readable.

So how do you fix that? The idea I came up with was that if an intent is added before a player's turn, it just banks it and then adds it once the player's turn begins. Problem is, the negotiation engine doesn't seem to have a method to detect whose turn it is. It's not something anything else really needs. So eventually I realize I can have the modifier track whose turn it is itself!

composure_amount = 1,

is_my_turn = true,
composure_bank = 0,

event_handlers =
{
	[ EVENT.BEGIN_TURN ] = function( self, minigame, negotiator )
		if negotiator == self.negotiator then
			self.is_my_turn = true
			if self.composure_bank > 0 then
				self.negotiator:DeltaComposure(self.composure_bank * self.stacks, self)
				self.composure_bank = 0
			end
		elseif negotiator == self.anti_negotiator then
			self.is_my_turn = false
		end
	end,
	
	[ EVENT.INTENT_ADDED ] = function( self, card )
		if self.is_my_turn then
			self.negotiator:DeltaComposure(self.composure_amount * self.stacks, self)
		else
			self.composure_bank = self.composure_bank + self.composure_amount
		end
	end,
},

It's a bit hacky, but hopefully it fixes the issue. It seemed to work in my testing.

And I just realized that if I want to make sure it still looks consistent, I can keep track of how many intents occurred before the start of the player's turn and just DeltaComposure per instance. But my priority for this patch is making sure that the Composure disappearing problem is fixed.

[Newbiespud]

Widgets, man. Widgets. Started out as wanting to consolidate all these conditions that were piling up, which turned into a realization that Arint functions rather similarly to Rook, which led down a rabbit hole of copy and paste and edit...

Anyway, thanks @u lil nerd for the Overdrive idea, though I went a different direction with it for now.

Spoiler

 

 

 

[Newbiespud]

Figure I need to be ready for when the Flourishes become part of the main branch, so I've whipped up some ideas for Arint. Some of these repurpose ideas in Arint's Improvise cards, which I plan on changing down the line. (As part of the overall basic-deck nerf, I'm gonna move away from Item-based Improvise cards and towards a more "standard" suite of Uniques.)

(Quick Charge (0) Gain 1 Beam Charge. Replenish | Snap Fire (0) Spend 1 Beam Charge. Attack a random enemy. Deals bonus damage to targets with Strange Chemical. Sticky)

As far as the story campaign progress goes, I'm about... 40% done? It's playable through the beginning of the night phase of the one-day campaign, so about halfway-ish. Plenty of work left.

[Newbiespud]

v1.1.0 - The Flourish and Mettle Update

GAMEPLAY

- Added battle and negotiation flourishes
- Added unique cards granted by the flourish Tactical Battery
- Appropriator can no longer target support arguments (heckler, FIGHT_ALLY_SCARE, etc.)
- Changed the card pools for Spark Arsenal and Spark Authority (to avoid overlaps with flourishes)

ANIMATION

- Implemented low-health idle animation
- Changed Deflect anim from taunt to stunned_pst

UI

- Composure generated by All Business is applied more consistently if intents were added before your turn
- Appropriated's description now lists what argument it contains that will be returned when destroyed
- The effect "Deals bonus damage to targets with Strange Chemical" has been consolidated into the feature "Detonator"
- Added per-stack highlights to conditions and arguments

MINI-BRAWL

- Unlocking flourishes is now an option at the start of the run
- The mettle merchant is now in the rotation of possible merchants spawned (you do not generate mettle organically at this time, but you can purchase mettle once per run)
- Increased number of merchants spawned at intervals from 1 to 2
- Updated boss lists

ROOK BOSS DEMO

- Removed Rook's pet
- Increased Rook's health (from 83 to 140)
- Changed Pistol Charges so they no longer boost damage
- Rook now has Empty Cells that generate Defense every turn
- The Arint VS Rook experiment now loops instead of completing (so you can't use it to cheese the "under 30 minutes" achievement)

[Newbiespud]

v1.1.1

- Removed the superfluous settings_patch.lua

v1.1.2

- Inherited some of Sal's combat animations onto Arint (for instance, Arint can now use most item cards with their proper animations)

[Newbiespud]

v1.1.3

- Arint now has Mettle enabled by default and will be able to earn it through Mini-Brawl missions

 

In terms of a status update: The story campaign is now playable up to its win states, but there's still plenty of work to be done. 11 out of 12 major sidequests are complete, though a rewards balancing pass is pending. There are not currently any travel events or opportunities. Game modes like Brawl that are unlocked after story completion still need to be implemented and tested. Arint's decks still need to be nerfed, her draft pools need to be built and tested, plus grafts need to be made. I will likely need some custom art for the story campaign's opening and ending slides.

There's still a lot of work to do, is what I'm saying. This is going to end up the size of a small DLC.

I'm considering, at some point in the future, uploading a private invite-only preview build for testing before release, but that will likely be for when I've got cards to test, which I'm saving for near-last.

[Newbiespud]

v1.1.4

- Appropriated's description no longer brings up the tooltip for the argument it has stolen, now instead highlights it in bold (This is a change for safety - some enemy argument descriptions don't have a safe "generic" version when they're ownerless and cause crashes, like the Rise's Brainwash)

 

Status update: All 7 side jobs and all 5 contracts now have main functionality and dialogue. The full-length Brawl has been implemented. The story campaign still needs travel events and opportunities. The second post-campaign game mode, The Bog Expedition, hasn't been started yet. The rework of Arint's cards and grafts has not started yet.

I did, however, make some terrible MSPaint storyboards for Arint's opening and ending slides. Consider them a preview of Arint's story.

Spoiler

 

[Newbiespud]

v1.1.5

- Added more nil-checks to Appropriated's description to avoid crashes when, for whatever reason, it tries to describe a stolen argument name that doesn't exist. Also nil-checks the stolen argument when destroyed and incept's Doubt instead if somehow the table is occupied by a nil argument.

 

We're getting into "I don't even know how this is possible, but here's a fix anyway" territory.

In terms of a status update for the full mod: The main story campaign is now first-draft content-complete and fully functional! Without card drafts and with light reading, one run from beginning to end lasts about 80 minutes. Next on the roadmap is implementing the Bog Expedition mode, then nerfing Arint's basic deck and creating draft pools, plus a whole host of miscellaneous stuff. When cards are ready, I'm definitely going to be uploading a private beta mod page to get feedback.