Cassidy Hilts

Game Developer

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Secret Areas & Early Game Balance

March 28, 2025

Added a bit more to the blog section on the site! I've created an archive so that its easy to see all the entries I've written sorted by date. Also added a bit to allow me to put images into my entries as well, likely not going to put in anything too big, or too many until I can be sure that my hosting can handle it gracefully, so please bear with the lossy gif on this page ^_~

Today I spent most of the day creating a new type of interactable / NPC, that can take can take a cost to perform an action for the player, in this case opening a more convinient location to farm resources in the early game. Currently I want the early game to really communicate that core ideas of an incremental game (number go up) while not being tedious. The early parts of the game are meant to be relatively linear just to ease players into the loop of completing quests to add more features to the game, and tools to their arsenal to explore. To that end I also found the first few instances of combat to also need some tweaking. The early slime enemies were wandering a bit clustered and needed some tweaks to their AI to explore and spread out a bit more, as well as a reduction in the TTK for players before they've got options to increase their damage.