Month: June 2018

Today, Siralim 3 received a major patch that overhauls the way breeding – or, more specifically, heredity – works. This post will explain why these changes were made and should help players to quickly understand how the new system works.

Problems With the Old System

In its previous form, heredity had three major issues:

1. It blocked players’ progress at inopportune times, forcing them to forgo their current goals and focus on breeding instead. This was especially obvious during the main story quests – many players would quickly plow through the story bosses, but hit a roadblock when their creatures reached the soft level cap.
2. Many players felt like they weren’t gaining anything from breeding. That would be fine, except thanks to problem #1, they were forced to partake in this system.
3. Later on, it was too easy to gain heredity, and the system became almost pointless. After a while, it was easy to gain hundreds of heredity per breeding session. The solution to that would be for me to cut down on the amount of heredity gained from breeding. Unfortunately, that’s a great way to convince players to track me down and kill me in real life.

I played around with a few ideas to remedy these problems, but in the end, it became clear that the entire system needed to be overhauled entirely.

Goals of the New System

I wanted to provide an incentive for players to breed their creatures aside from the possibility of merely unlocking new ones. Without some additional goal, the entire system feels very empty.

I also wanted to provide another, interesting way to customize your creatures at the same time. After hours of brainstorming, I finally came up with a new system that I think you’ll either like, or simply not care about at all – and that’s great either way because now, you’re no longer forced to breed at all if you don’t want to.

How the New System Works

I want to start this off by saying that the new system is a lot simpler than I’m about to make it sound. If you don’t understand it, don’t worry about it – you’ll pick it up immediately after you breed your creatures a few times.

I’m going to break it down step-by-step for easier reading:

• Heredity as you know it is gone. No more soft level caps. The term “Heredity”, however, will continue to be used with the new system.
• Each creature now has a “Heredity” value for each of its five stats: Health, Attack, Intelligence, Defense, and Speed. These heredities affect the amount of each stat a creature gains when it levels up.
• When a creature levels up, it gains 30% of its base stats. That’s how the game has always worked – nothing new here.
• Heredities now modify that 30% value. If a creature has 2 Attack heredity, it will gain 32% Attack each time it levels up, rather than 30%.
• Heredities can be negative, too. If a creature has -2 Defense heredity, it will gain 28% Defense each time it levels up, rather than 30%.
• Each heredity has a maximum of 15, and a minimum of -15. In other words, a creature gain gain a maximum of 45% of a certain base stat per level, and a minimum of 15% of a certain base stat per level.
• The total of all five of a creature’s heredities is always 0. If a creature has -5 Attack heredity, it also has positive heredities that balance it out. This means that you’ll never be able to make an overpowered creature using this system – it is merely meant to allow you to indirectly allocate stat points.

Simple enough, right? So, how do creatures pass on their Heredities to their offspring, and how do creatures gain new heredities?

• When you breed two creatures, they pass on all their heredities to the offspring.
• After a creature participates in enough battles, it will eventually become “Primed”.
• When breeding, each “Primed” parent will give the offspring 1 positive and 1 negative heredity, based on that creature’s highest and lowest stats.
• This means that if both parents are primed, the offspring will gain 2 positive and 2 negative heredities.
• Parents always pass on their own heredities, even if they’re not primed. Priming is only necessary if you want to adjust the offspring’s heredity even more.

Wow! It’s been almost three weeks since Siralim 3 hit Early Access on Steam. The time has flown by for me… probably because I’ve spent just about every minute of my days reading and implementing feedback, adding new content, and fixing bugs. So far, I’ve released over 60 patches for the game, and I don’t plan to slow down any time soon.

I want to start by thanking everyone who has submitted bug/crash reports, and for remaining patient while I fix those issues. Luckily, there are hardly any crash reports anymore, and the bugs are now really minor and generally unnoticeable to most people. That means that I can spend more time adding content and quality-of-life improvements to the game!

Here’s a quick glimpse of what has been added to Siralim 3 in the last few weeks:

• Prophecies: repeatable, end-game quests that you can complete while enjoying other content.
• Nemesis Creatures: mini-bosses that can spawn anywhere in realms, and drop extra loot and exclusive items when defeated. Each Nemesis Creature has a special “affix” that grants it a unique bonus in battle, forcing players to adjust their strategies accordingly in order to win.
• Talisman effects: these items can be upgraded indefinitely in order to confer a bonus to you and your creatures. You can unlock an additional Talisman power after you upgrade them to rank 100 – those powers aren’t implemented yet, but that’s what I’m focusing on right now!
• Adjustments to the death penalty to make it less frustrating while maintaining tension.
• Adjustments to the breeding system to make it feel more rewarding.
• Adjustments to the arena to make it feel less random and more skill-based.
• Countless quality-of-life changes, balance adjustments, bug fixes, and more!

My current priorities are to implement rank 100 powers for all the talismans in the game, as well as to start using a new compiler to build the game so that you’ll never run into any performance issues, even if you collect 5000 creatures and 100,000 items! (Yes, I tested those numbers specifically).

After that, I’ll start to work on additional content including Nether Bosses, God Bosses, Avatars, Tavern Brawls, and much more! In the coming weeks, I’ll also release the game on Steam for Mac and Linux.

I’d also like to return to my old schedule of writing a new blog post each week. I have plenty of good ideas for topics that I’m excited to share with everyone, so stay tuned! Until then, I hope you’ll continue to enjoy Siralim 3.