The other day, I was playing Diablo IV (what?! Impossible), and I felt like it centers around one thing that Broken Build Simulator seemed to mostly lack: randomized powers that guide your build in a direction and offer huge power if you build accordingly. Not a revolutionary concept by any means, but one I had really noticed the lack of in my game, because I have weapon ugprades which fill a similar role, but they aren't that powerful or that random, and after a few runs with a certain weapon, you'll have done every 'build' that weapon offers within reason. So I felt a need for spice!
What proceeded from there was about 24 hours of deep contemplation and mental fiddling of ideas, followed by about 12 hours straight of the fastest coke-fueled (Coca-Cola, people, come on) coding rampage I have experienced in years, at the end of which was a fully functional entirely new huge game system that just plain works, and is way awesome:
In addition to all the other upgrade systems in the game, you now also collect Runes. They are rarely offered by Lootboxes (so, you can pick them in place of weapon upgrades). There is not yet any way to remove them, and you only have so many rune slots, so if you pick one, you are going to be enjoying it for your whole run. You can however upgrade it - the higher your level, the more likely you are to find higher level versions of the runes you already have, so you can take the higher copy to replace it. You might also find lower level versions - don't take those.
Runes are very powerful, some are probably
too powerful, but I'll worry about balance once somebody other than me plays the game. What I've been loving is how extremely easy it is to add them thanks to my handy scripting system. This is a wildly complex game on the inside (pretty goofy since it's really simple to play!), but mostly it just sort of works, because of those scripts.
This specific rune is one that is a blatant rip-off from Diablo IV itself, actually, the vampiric curse detonations in that game. Although in this case instead of being whole people that run at your enemies, they are for some reason just my head. And specifically MY head, not the head of whichever character you're playing. You can't have everything.
As you can see, they are very digital. You can also see one of our lovely cosmetic pets in here! And regarding that upcoming alpha test... it seems to keep getting further away, perhaps due to new features appearing all the time. But because I know all the things that are missing or wrong, I keep stopping myself from starting a test because it seems dumb to put it out there with obvious gaps. So I continue to plug away very hard on the first two implemented modes, To Tory L. and 20 Minutes Till Lunch. I'd like to feel solid on those modes before testers make fun of me.
