Slots, Stats, Tiers and Opponent Reworks

QoL

• Placement changed to slot based. Don't worry, the pets still do wander around to give life to the farm but just constrained within their slots.

• Pet Index UI updated to cater to the influx of new pets

• Modified UI of the race scene. I've taken away the timeline viewer and added in a leaderboard with speed stat instead for now. I understand that it's useful to know whenever your pet is trying to proc abilities and how much stamina they currently have. My initial intentions with these values are that they aren't meant to be visible right away but I'll experiment with them first.

• Map selection removed temporarily - Until I've determined how the different maps and styles will slot in with the runs, I'll leave them out for now.

• Re-enabled map introduction - This was meant to be visible in the original release

New Content

• 20+ new animals with unique training types

  • Training can now manipulate energy, cash, shop XP and what other trainers offer

• Shop now has tiers

  • 4 Tiers for now with more tiers that will be introduced with time. Shop upgrades through XP which also can be manipulated by trainers that give shop XP

• Opponents now stay the same throughout the race - This lets you plan around the style of runners and the type of abilities each runner may have.

  • Slacker, Average, Promising - These are the types of opponents you may encounter with Promising opponents growing in stats faster and vice versa for Slackers

Balance Changes

• Fan gain/loss curve tweaked. More gentler in the beginning and more painful towards the end. This will make it easier for those who wish to try to perform a "comeback season" style of play where you intentionally lose in the beginning.

• Bison is now an End Closer

• Snake removed from the cast - He'll be re-added along with the new Rat trainee with the ability update.

• Wisdom now has a slight effect on how frequent you obtain abilities.

Comments

This was a rather big update for me and probably a small update for you. I actually don't know much of Unreal Engine 5 with almost every single decision I've made based on my experience and past habits of Unity. I've now learned about the Gameplay Tag system and how incredibly powerful that is, utilizing macros and function libraries more and just having data extracted and structured into structs better. That's how I got the trainers to start modifying and querying more than just basic stats.

Anyway, that's all of the changes for now. Thanks again for checking out this goofy game I made while I was burnt out. I didn't really expect it to get this far but it's accomplished it's job for me and that was to get me out of burnout. I'll continue to update this game with changes and improvements over the course of time.