FANGS DEV BLOG 3/08/2021
Hello and welcome to Dev Blog #2!
I’m Max, a member of the design team here at Hidden Leaf Games. I’ve taken ownership of Astrada and Rayo, and will be the lead designer on those two for the foreseeable future. I’ve also brought along Sam, our Narrative Lead, who’s going to talk about some of the thematic changes to our beloved fire mage.
For this Dev blog, we’ll be taking a closer look at some of the work we’ve done on Astrada since our first Dev Stream a few weeks ago. As always, the goal of these blogs is to provide transparency and honour our commitment to the community we’re building this game with. I’ll also throw in the usual disclaimer that things you see here aren’t final and still subject to change.
Let’s get into it!
Thematic Changes
"Hi everyone!
At the core of any character is their theme. This contains their backstory, their personality, what motivates them and what their life goals are. It's vital that a character's personality and other thematic elements synergise with their design fantasy. Otherwise, you're left with a hero that may be really fun to play but is a little hard to connect with on an emotional level in a way that feels genuine.
Previously, we had Astrada down as this pious princess, who travelled the land meting out judgement on non-believers while she pursued her righteous destiny. We leaned into a puritanical witch hunter archetype with a princess twist. Astrada was all about torching heretics, while dropping the odd meteor here and there for good measure.
However, we felt that while Astrada may work as this "Purifying Flame Princess," there was still a much more compelling and entertaining character we could build out of her current thematic. And now with the changes to her kit, she's still the holy princess we know and love, but we've introduced a slight maniacal element to her character that pairs well with her newfound appetite for explosions.
We've now rebranded her as more of a hothead, who has no restraint when it comes to destruction; the "Demolition Princess." While we currently can't reveal too much about her new themes and what it means for the lore of the world we've built, we're definitely excited with this refined direction and we look forward to sharing more about Astrada’s story in the future!" - Sam
“No nonsense here!”
“Explosions are pretty!”
Playtest Feedback Identifications and Kit Changes
In our first Dev Stream, you saw an Astrada who had flashy highpoints, but struggled to shine while not casting her Ult. After gathering your feedback, we identified a few key points that we received in large volume. This feedback was incredibly helpful and influenced the changes we’ve made with both her kit and theme. Here are a few of the stand out points:
Too much of Astrada’s kit was centered around generating and casting her ultimate ability (R). Successful Astradas hit their R in a fight and quickly spammed their spells to generate enough mana to cast again. While we definitely want to reward skilled players for consistently landing and generating their ults, we also want Astrada’s playstyle to not totally rely on one ability.
Overall, Astrada felt very spammy. Players spammed out their RMB, Shift, and R as soon as they could. Players felt like the largest purpose of her basic abilities was to generate mana for her ult. This resulted in Astrada casting her basic abilities on cooldown in order to maximize mana gain, without focus on maximizing the potential of each ability individually.
For being a Mage, a lot of her damage was coming from her basic attack (LMB). Thematically, a mage’s strength comes from their immense arcane power and ability to weave their spells in a unique combination to control the pace of fights and deal punishing area of effect damage. This should be true for Astrada, which is why it doesn’t make sense for her to almost match Rayo, our traditional basic-attacker-DPS character in an LMB for LMB duel.
Kit Changes
Without further ado, let's reveal the new Passive and RMB that we’re experimenting with!
Passive: Dealing Damage with LMB marks enemies for 3 seconds. Damaging enemies with Astrada's other abilities consumes the mark, instantly dealing damage in a circle.
RMB: Astrada shoots a shockwave cone of fire forward, which knocks enemies back, dealing damage.
These changes have two goals:
Increase Astrada’s combo and damage options across the board, making her playstyle revolve less around ONLY her R. We've given Astrada an all-new Passive and RMB which should kick up the damage potential of her individual spells. Her R is still her pièce de résistance, but now the rest of her kit has room to shine.
Make Astrada less spammy by raising the bar on her base abilities “best usage case” scenarios, incentivising her to hold off on casting immediately and instead to look for better opportunities to use the ability. Before, Astrada's had large, easy to land abilities that dealt instant chunks of damage and were hard for enemies to dodge. With these changes, Astrada has higher highs available to her, but also lower lows. Balancing the defensive knockback safety with the aggressive R > RMB combo to knock her opponent into a giant meteor is one example of the trade-offs that Astrada players now have to balance.
Take power out of her LMB and add it into other parts of her kit, solidifying her role as an AOE caster/controller as opposed to single target DPS. With these changes, we've been able to take power out of Astrada's LMB, and add it to her Passive, RMB, and New Ability! (👀)
Since prototyping and implementing these abilities in our internal playtests, we're very enthusiastic about how the new Astrada looks and feels to play as, play with, and play against. We're still tweaking specifics like damage and range, but we're already super psyched about the pyromaniac Astrada is turning out to be!
That's a wrap for Dev Blog #2! There's still lots of work to be done in the coming weeks, but we're confident that we're moving in the right direction each day. We really enjoy reading your feedback and interacting with everyone in our Discord.
Thanks for reading and be sure to suggest topics for our next Dev Blog!
