Devlog #4

Hi everyone,

In this fourth edition of the devlog we’ll talk about one of the big upcoming changes: The reworked upgrade system. Apologies for this delayed devlog. I personally moved to a new home during these past weeks and I completely misjudged the amount of time and effort that would cost! But enough about that. Let's talk about upgrades.

The current upgrade system

Currently you are presented with 3 upgrade options after defeating a boss. These options are chosen at random from the pool of available upgrades and can be paid for with gears earned from your completed missions.

This system was inspired by the game Slay the Spire which also allows you to choose 1 upgrade (called a relic) after defeating a boss.

This game allows you to choose 1 of these upgrades without paying any cost. This requires the upgrades to have about the same overall strength in order for your choice to be meaningful. This is hard to achieve in Command Line Pilot as there are many fun upgrades that are smaller in strength than some other ‘bigger’ upgrades. This inspired us to associate upgrades with a cost, allowing us to offer a larger variety of upgrades while at the same time allowing you to spend gears earned from mission in a meaningful way.

This worked out well for us during early development as we didn’t have many different upgrades implemented yet. We were easily able to test what upgrades were fun and balance their costs. Our playtesters really enjoyed being able to buy upgrades and upgrades were quickly validated as an essential & fun part of Command Line Pilot. We used this system for a long time, but as the game grew, so did the feedback on this system. Players eventually started collectively providing the follow feedback: You have to wait until you’ve beaten a boss to be able to buy upgrades. I want to be able to spend my gears on upgrades sooner.

This pushed us to revise the upgrade system. At this point in time the game contained a much larger pool of possible upgrades than when we first decided on how to offer upgrades to players. This meant that we now have options for the upgrade system that weren’t possible before.

The new upgrade system

After realizing that we needed to revisit the upgrade system, we used feedback from players and an analysis of upgrade systems used in other games to choose the new system: An upgrade tree. This system is inspired by the skill tree system used in many games like the original World of Warcraft, Diablo 2, Witcher 3, God of War and also more recent games like Last Epoch.

We combined the concept of skill trees with our cost based upgrades to create the first version of the upgrade tree.

The upgrade tree can be accessed at any time between missions to purchase upgrades. The first layer of upgrades is accessible by default, the other upgrades can be accessed once you have purchased a connected upgrade from the previous layer. The upgrades in the tree are different on each playthrough to make each playthrough feel more distinct.

The upgrade tree is now live on the beta-branch. You can check devlog #2 for info in how to access the beta-branch. The first reactions have been very positive, although the system may still undergo several iterations based on the feedback we receive. We are looking forward to pushing the new upgrade system live once