Hey everyone!
Today is the 1st post in a new weekly series that will be our Developers Blog.
In this series I want to give a bit more of insight into changes that are coming and our thought process behind them.
Today I am going to touch on Gameplay / Arena Rewards / Combat
GAMEPLAY
Currently Holybread is an idle based game with only 2 things players can actively do. Quest & Arena Fights. Players have created a 3rd task which digging through the item store for items to help in climbing the Arena.
One of the 1st things we identified is we want to add more features that players can do on a daily basis. I know these are not available right now and some of the comments on HIVE are "they need to make it more fun"
These can be a little frustrating as we have had the game for barely a month, but we understand they come from the frustration around playing since the initial launch of 1/31/2000.
We also understand some players don't like idle gameplay and some do. So our balance goal is keeping idle play but adding more active gameplay.
Dungeons will be our 1st attempt at this. When you enter a dungeon, you will be in ROOM/FLOOR 1 and will have an encounter. After the encounter you will get rewards, you will then decide if you want to continue and go deeper & deeper.
At anytime after an encounter you can choose to leave the dungeon with all of your gains. The next time you enter the dungeon you will start at Room/Floor 1 again. At anytime you are defeated you will leave the dungeon with nothing.
There will also be ways to play a couple of rooms/floors of a dungeon and come back later, and completing a dungeon will have its own rewards.
This post is not to give specifics but give you an idea of how gameplay will work.
ARENA REWARDS
I know a lot of players are not happy about Breadcrumbs going away. It is never fun when something is "taken" from you. IRL or in-game.
Our intention was never to take things away from players. We have been focused soley on what we can provide for players in gameplay and rewards.
We just finished building out an API that pulls stats from the Arena Rankings. Using this information we are finishing up building out an upvote bot, that will reward players with HIVE through our upvote power.
We consider these out-of-game rewards.
We will also add in-game rewards.
You will start hearing the term LEADERBOARD soon. Our upvote bot uses the API to pull a leaderboard from the Arena rankings every 12 hours, based on your leaderboard ranking your account is credited with an certain amount of upvote.
The leaderboard is only players that have fought in the Arena in the last 72 hours. The leaderboard is the top 500 players.
So if you are rank #120 and don't play for a week, you will not be on the leaderboard and earning upvotes. If you come back and fight in the Arena you become active for the leadaerboard & upvote rewards again.
I know players want to know "how much voting power do you have?" "how are you going to increase it"
We currently have an upvoting power of around 10,000HP across our accounts. We are looking at what accounts we are going to be using, but have not made a final decision.
To increase the voting power we are using the concept of never powering down any HP earned through posts and curation.
We need to cover our server / development costs every month. So our HBD & Liquid HIVE earned have to be used for that currently. As we grow our revenue streams we will readdress this.
We want to have a large UPVOTE power as much as you want us too. Our goal is to be sustainable and not disappear in 6 months like so many other games.
COMBAT
I am so focused on this from a design standpoint right now.
I am really close to having the design / balance complete where we can move this to coding / testing.
Currently combat is based around crits (damage & chance)
It is currently random based on your luck stat who goes 1st in combat.
In the new combat world. Attackers will always strike 1st. Now before you all go nuts over this. This will allow us to add abilities to combat that do not work in a world where it is random who attacks 1st.
Also there is a damage_type field in the current code base (if it was not there we would have to add it) that we will be expanding heavily on. This will allow us to give items abilites such as a piece of chest_armor that gives 10% damage reduction against Archers (just an example)
Our goal is to gives players more choices and make how you build your team / items more than just trying to stack stats.
It is very exciting.
CONCULSION
I could talk all day about what is coming and why, but i don't want to overwhelm you guys.
If you found this useful let me know!