Chests, cubes and the deep game

An idle game is a promise that tomorrow will be more interesting than today. This stretch was about keeping that promise past the first day — and past zone 100.

Loot that means something

Legendary and mythic drops were made genuinely rare, and the first day's progression was spread out "instead of sprinting into a wall". Then the systems that give loot a second life:

• A hundred and fifty named items.
• The cube — nine items of one rarity make one of the next.
• Rarity rules — for each rarity, the player says keep, salvage, or cube it up, and the party does it.
• Ctrl-click to pick several items and salvage, cube or lock them at once.

The road

A run now starts at a campfire. There is a portal back to any zone cleared in the current run, and bigger bosses. Two regions were added past the void — the drowned city and the machine — with their own bosses and modifiers. And there are chests on the road, most of them locked behind a deed the party has to do. The strip tells you how it went.

That last part took several tries in one day. Furnish nine regions. Vary the ground from one tile. Look at the strip, then fix what looking at it showed. Put the light back on the horizon. Make the trim look grown rather than planted. Take the roadside back out. Sometimes the commit log is the honest version of a design review.

A desk, not a menu

The Headquarters became a desk of windows, dressed the way the panels inside them are dressed, later in wood, stone and parchment instead of three greys. Every class got a skill tree — six tiers of two choices, from level 35 — with an icon for every skill. Bonds pay out when two heroes fight side by side. Five save slots sit side by side, with a new game one press away.

The deep game

Past zone 100 the game was crawling. The fix: pay every zone past 100 in power, and keep percentages worth chasing past the end of the tier ladder. The run can now ascend on its own at a zone the player names.

And one removal I am fond of: cooldown reduction was taken out, because nothing in the game ever read it.