Hey Everyone!
This post was planned to tell about the changes to the shrine system, but the latest changes didn’t feel right so new ideas are being worked on and tested.
The idea was to make shrines buildable (making them the 5th buildable building type), but, among other issues, this just took all the already lost charm of them being rare and special.
An other issue with this was the spark system that made shrines pour like rain; sparks will be taken out due to the incompatibility with the new enraging socket and because sparks didn’t really spice up the gameplay as the should have.
(The old original idea for shrines was to make them epic and mysterious, but they just didn’t give an epic reward for sacrificing a gem, and didn’t turn out to be a useful battle asset in general. They should have been life saving and battle changing, just like how the Xel’Naga artifact works in StarCraft II Wings of Liberty’s final mission, “All in”. Instead, they mostly seem to just take up precious building area and sitting there waiting to turn a grade 1 gem into some light effects, even gem wasps being more fun. I’d really like to change that fundamentally.)
So shrines will appear rarely and will be tuned to give more return for the sacrificed gem in a more epic and powerful way (probably make monsters drop shrine-only loots as well).
Shrine types were and are still planned to be removed and instead the sacrificed gem would dictate the effect dealt to the targets of the shrine strike.
As you could see in previous posts, there is space for 6 building spell buttons. You already know walls, towers, amplifiers and traps. The sixth building will be revealed later, as well as the new candidate with great potential swapping in to the place of the dropped out shrine button to the 5th button slot.
Also, maybe I should have started with this or not even mention it anymore as it seems to be the norm here for many years now, but sorry for always being late even with blogposts. Being unable to learn from my past mistakes, I heatedly promised monthly posts, with hopes to make me work harder with a close deadline always hovering over me. This, however, made me tailor my steps of development around posts instead of how it should be the best for the entire course of making the game. So, in the next few posts, whenever they will arrive, I plan to tell you more about the 5th and 6th buildable structures and hopefully bring some action packed battle screenshots.
