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[Fuzz Force]

As part of the IWOcon Digital Indie Convention, there is a demo of the game on Steam! Check it out this week.

Fuzz Force: Spook Squad is a roguelite rpg about elite ghost hunters using dice powered weapons. Navigating a board game world you'll upgrade your weapon, overcome story events and capture the PolterPrince.
The game is now on Steam in Early Access after being in development since Dec2019

Taking inspiration from games like Slay the Spire and Dicey Dungeons, I wanted to make a roguelite that didn't require knowledge of all the cards to make builds. Therefore the cards are replaced with dice making it much easier to determine if the new item is right for the player or not getting them back to the game quicker. I also wanted to make a roguelite with an explorable overworld, something most other games in the genre drop for a simple map screen. This takes the form of a board game with tiles that flip over. With rough information on what each tile hides, it's up to the player how they tackle the area.

The dice you find affect your battle actions depending on the slot they're equipped to. Attack Dice translate into damage, Shield dice create a barrier that blocks an amount of damage and Charge which restores your battery, required to use Attacks and Shields. The value rolled from the dice you find fill up your Special skill, unique to each character.

Along with dice there are battlechips which augment dice with status effects such as burn and poison. And also Modules which infer unique abilities to your character such as doubling poison damage or rolling an additional Shield dice. The combination of these three will make unique builds on your quest to the top floor of the Tower.

Today I released on Early Access, so I'm quite late to the devlog but I'm starting one for the road to release at the end of Feb next year. But I will do some posts about the history and how things have changed since the beginning.

[Fuzz Force]

At the beginning the game was about finding dice and rolling them one at a time to deplete a ghost's hp within a time limit. This had many issues to do with input during battles being non-existent so I moved over to a simple turn based system.

An Attack which used battery, a Shield which used battery and Charge which recharged your battery and filled your special skill. These color coded as red, blue and green for easy identification. Thinking ahead,I wanted an element of drafting/deckbuilding but knew a bad diceroll could be frustrating. Therefore you could have 3 Attack dice to rotate through but only 1 Shield and Charge to get consistent results. The inventory was set inside of your gun for a nice 3D Menu.

It took a while but I committed to having 2 of each dice to be used for each action as a matter of consistency. After using the top row of dice, you then alternated it with the second one. This allowed players to have 2 different status effects across one Action. At this point Status Effects were built into the dice like the below blue dice being a Burn dice. However nobody understood when the second dice came out or why they even needed a second dice for each action.

After plotting for a bit I stripped out that second row entirely meaning the player only has 3 dice total. The second row of dice replaced with the Battlechip item. This solved the issues of consistency and comprehension. It solved a third issue of the Status Effects being bound to the dice. Progressing through the game meant early game dice got weaker and the need to replace them became a challenging decision between having stronger dice values or keeping your Status Effects and build synergy. I didn't like this decision and split the Status Effects onto an item which empowers the dice they're linked to.

The final part of the dice comes from the dice with 0 on them. It'd be frustrating to roll a 0 and waste your turn. So in order to get something every turn each character has Stats attributed to the 3 Actions. This grants them a second dice every turn with that stat number on their face, meaning they always get a minimum value. This second dice doesn't use battery either but still count as an extra Attack/Shield/Charge meaning they affect Status effects that play off of those. I didn't like the idea of combining the stat with the dice number (rolling a 5 and it says you did 8 damage) as I want all damage sources to be obvious in their origin.

An additional part of the dice is the Silver Frame. Throughout development it was hard to identify which dice was the one you had put into your inventory, so this frame was put around it. So the Framed Dice use your equipped battlechip, drain battery and charge up your special skill whilst unframed dice do not.

[Fuzz Force]

Taking feedback from people who played the game, the most common one is a way of keeping items you've found but rejected. I was following other roguelites whereby you did lose the item if you didn't take it there and then but I kept hearing it so it was time to get around to adding it in. I am going for a more introductory roguelite so it seemed worth putting it in. It was also frustrating to find Modules which boosted your Poison but you'd already passed on Poison chips or you didn't find any at all.

I came up with a solution of stashing everything you'd found and having it accessible from the inventory screen. Selecting an item instantly brought it up so you could swap it in and the details of each item can be seen from that screen. Whilst this does collect everything you turn down, it empties when you find the stairs, leaving you with only the items you have equipped in your weapon. I'm hoping this change helps players get a synergy going and also flexibility with what they find.
A secondary change is adding a 15% chance of finding a chip related to your equipped Modules. So if you find a poison module, theres a 15% chance you'll be offered a poison chip when you find a chip, really boosting the chance of a build.

I've also made 2 other big changes with this update. The first is to give enemies their own separate Attack and Shield dice. This means I can vary enemies to feel more fair as before enemies could Attack and Shield for the same values. Now I can make enemies more damaging with weak Shields or enemies who don't Attack often and gain big Shields.

The other change was to give enemies with multiple dice an Attack or Shield per dice. Before an enemy rolled all the dice they had, the total was added together and then dealt with as a single large number. The downside of this is enemies couldn't take advantage of Status Effects in the same way you could. Burn, which does 1 damage if it hits HP instead of a Shield, was really weak for enemies as it would only trigger once. Also with their 1 attack, you could avoid all their damage through the Dodge Effect (avoids 1 attack), whereas you could remove their dodge with one dice and do damage beyond that during your turn. It's also made Angry (+3 to dice roll) very scary.
A small benefit of this is enemy skills which use the rolled number to do a secondary effect such as Attacking for the face value and healing for half of that value now activate per dice as opposed to 50% off the added total. So doing such a skill off 3 dice would heal 3hp at the minimum.

Hopefully these changes work well for the game and I'll see how it goes in the following weeks.

[Fuzz Force]

The third character has been added to the game; Lix the Lizard! This guitar obsessed Lizard is more concerned with his melody than Spooky Ghosts, making him the perfect candidate.

Ever since I started concepts for new characters, this idea of having a character with large eyes instead of large ears really stuck with me. As I progressed after Dotty, I wasn't sure of doing a Lizard and thought of other characters like a bat or an Alpaca but the idea of a lizard was just too strong. I looked through a bunch of lizard species to see which would fit best and settled on a day lizard due to those striking red stripes, which fits in with the extra markings I'd added to Finn and Dotty. The blue/green colour really helped separate him from the orange and brown of the other characters.

As for his weapon, he was going to be another ranged weapon user but the name came first and it fell into place. Firstly licks, because lizards have big tongues, and tasty guitar licks. So I gave him a fun electric guitar for shooting music (like Sonic Underground)and worked with this personality that all he cared about was his music.

For Lix's role in the game, he was always destined to be the defensive Shield user and the blue headphones and guitar reference that. Following the advice of Magic the Gatherings Mike Rosewater, "It's better to have a card some people think is a 10/10 and most a 0/10 than a card everyone thinks is a 7/10". He emphasises it's better to have something that's a perfect fit for some and I've leaned into that. Lix isn't good at Attacking the enemies and his Lizard Power is where his damage comes from. If he's attacked with a Shield up, the enemy takes half of his Shield value as damage (eg has 10 shield, enemy takes 5hp damage), so he can win without attacking at all.

Thankfully such a counter already showed its head in the Caterpillar, who only damages through poison damage and then Shields itself. Lix can't reflect poison damage and can struggle taking down Shields, so this has given him something he isn't completely invincible against.

The other enemies in the game need to be reworked to counter both Finn and Dotty's playstyles, as currently one strategy beats every enemy the same.

[Fuzz Force]

The Attic is the third area of the game, where you fight tougher and more reclusive enemies and finally the PolterPrince at the very top of the Tower. After Lix had been tested a little bit, mostly to make sure he didn't have any glaring issues, it was time to make the Attic live. This is the promotional image for that update.

Keeping the area different from the previous two, the Attic is filled with rafters and planks across those foundation beams. I started with the battle arena as that is the most detailed part of the level and it helps me work out whats important for the flippable board tiles. A trusty google search helped me with pictures of abondoned and pre-renovation attics showing the wall insulation, blanks and broken plaster on central pillars.
The entrance was like the attic hatch that you'd have in your house, like you'd just climbed into there from the hotel floor below. The exit is the same metal ladder propped up against a pillar. It's not really an Attic without that metal ladder
The unpathable tiles are holes to the floor below however due to the flat-ish tile style they couldn't be deep holes. Thankfully I could make this 'hole' as a black plane which is below the walkable height and the planks over the top help sell the effect.

The new enemies are the bat, who was the second enemy created, even if it doesn't look like it once did. It's based the Brown long-eared bat who has the ear shape, though mine sticks with the blood sucking trope.
The Jack-in-the-box is an evolution of the Jack-o-Lantern enemy from the first area. When looking for inspiration of the tin boxes, most of them were to do with clowns, so it was hard to find something appropriate!
The Gargoyle is a special enemy in that it has a gimmick to block you getting a second turn during battles. (Choose a number at the start, if you roll it, you get another go). It was based on a cute dragon statue that I'd seen.
The Sword and Shield are a twist on the haunted suit of armour, featuring ghost eyes that watch. The Polterprince is still on vacation so he hasn't turned up for the update, but Ghost George is taking his place with the same fighting techniques.

The events in the Attic are about finding things left for a long time such as an old bed or a mystical summoning circle which will make you refight one of the previous 2 bosses. Unfortunately a lot of it came down to drawing lots of planks of wood but these things have to be done. There are some events about finding the enemies in a new context and one that has you playing Odds or Evens against a Fox Skeleton. It was a challenge to work out what Finn's skeleton would look like due to inaccurate anatomy. But I made sure that it didn't have any arm bones to keep with the style.

Now that the Attic is in place, I can start to get an idea of the game's length across the three acts. It's important to me to keep it under an hour so it's lunchbreak sized.

[Fuzz Force]

With the turn of the new year and all the areas being in the game, it was time to add some fun new gameplay options. Something I'd had in my head for a while is increasing the number of Module slots from 2 to 3 (Modules being your passive abilities like Slay the Spire relics). I knew something like this would break the difficulty of the game but I was hoping it would introduce more fun. Up to this point I felt that adding that third Module to my build would really help to strengthen its effects or cover a new skill entirely. Here's the promo image for this update.

The hesitance was going back to add it in the code and sort out the Drag and Drop inventory system which until now swapped the position of the models between the slots. Thinking about how to do this I realised I didn't have to move the models at all, video games are all visual tricks. All I needed to do was turn off the Module you were moving and turn on the Module in the destination slot. Reworking the inventory like that made it a breeze to get the third Module in. However the Modules did have to be made much smaller than they were originally, very dinky sized now. And I had to squash an extra panel in there, moving the buttons to the side.

Now it was the perfect time to make some new Module abilities. I had to make a bunch for the Status Effects you could get that didn't have any supporting Modules such as Dodge, Crush, Vital&Danger and added some completely new ones. A Red Ribbon, based on Final Fantasy, that makes you immune to Status Effects. A Status Shield which afflicted a random Status Effect on the enemy if they Attacked your Shield and World Traveller which healed you as you explore the overworld. I ended up with 24 new abilities in the game, taking the total up to 67!

This introduced an additional issue of the scarcity of Modules. You found 2/3 in chests for each level, one in the shop, one from the boss floor and 2 more from Events if you were lucky. So less than 15 across the game. On the other hand, Battlechips were gotten from fights, so you could get 6 per floor but there's only 15 of those total. I decided to change the reward from battles to be these Modules with their exciting abilities rather than Battlechips which added effects to your dice rolls. Now the player is pushed to fight enemies to get the Modules and these fun abilities rather than sharking all the chests at the start of the level which I think is a very positive change

Now that this is live, I look forward to seeing how players enjoy having expanded options for their playstyle. Fun takes precedence over balance at this point. Except for the hidden new enemy I haven't told anyone about. Every game with chests has to have a Mimic. Posing as a Chest tile, players will unwittingly click on it hoping for goodies but instead fight an enemy much harder than surrounding enemies. IT's a 6% chance of one spawning but I'm hoping it keeps players on their toes and makes them think twice about grabbing all the chests in a level.

Its three attacks are an Attack that heals it and the Prank Status effect, which was exclusive to the final boss. This reduces all your equipped dice to 1's on all faces along with the burn, static and poison status effects. But it has a final Taunt skill too. This makes the player Angry (a condition which forces only Attacks) but reduces your battery to 1. You require Battery to do damage or make shields, so with only 1 Battery, you can only do 1 damage but Angry is a +3 bonus on top of that. However Angry doesn't +3 to dice rolls that come up as 0, therefore reducing to 1 Battery was chosen to keep it functional, whilst also allowing Angry status builds to be a strong counter to the Mimic.

[Fuzz Force]

This time around it's the Combat Update. For a while I'd been feeling that my enemies weren't particularly interesting or unique. Art wise and Special wise theyre fine but if they never roll that Special that defines them, they lose their niche. And it's important that your enemies are different and that the same strategy doesn't work on each of them the same. There's this microtalk from George Fan about this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8QAVGeEj-U#t=28m.
If every enemy can be beaten the same with a poison build, then it's not very tactical. So the object of this update was to introduce counters to specific builds and even add some new passive skills to the enemies to strengthen their niche.
I came up with some new triggers for enemy passive skills to happen those being Battle Start, Start of Turn, lowered to 50% HP (enrage) and when you roll a Lucky Number. The Lucky Number is a dice number you choose at the start of a fight, if it's rolled, you get a second turn. The only counter to this was the Gargoyle who blocked that turn outright. It's partly this ability that made me want to do more. It was very characterful and countered a Lucky strategy a bit.
And I also came up with a few new status effects that would benefit the enemies. These being a 2 Damage counter attack when you Attack them, it wont trigger through poison or static damage. There's also HP Regen, Status Immunity, Mirror Status for the new MirrorCat enemy and some new Status Effect shields that impart that Status when they're hit.

Starting with Battle Start and Start of Turn abilities I could introduce a constant threat from each enemy. The default Ghost enemy is now immune to all status effects which immediately mixes up how you approach it. The Ghost Hand drains 3 battery every turn increasing the amount of time spent recharging. This counters Finn as his passive ability gives him an extra dice when he has 20 or more Battery.
A new Tenrec enemy gains 1 Shield every turn with a Static Effect, whilst this doesnt increase its survivability much, Attacking it then makes it risky for you to recharge your battery as you'd take 2 damage each time. This again counters Finn as he gets lots of damage from his Charged! buff and also Dotty as she charges her battery each time she attacks twice in a row. However she's best suited to take it out from having the highest damage. So from there it's up to the player whether they attack twice in a row as Dotty and risk that 2 damage.

Lucky abilities trigger when you get your second turn (well, once the dice settles on the lucky number) which can turn the tide from something you aim for all the time, to maybe not as often. The Bat gains Dodge, so it'll avoid the first instance of damage on your next turn (or whenever, it stays until its used).
The new Tenrec drains 2 battery when you get Lucky which activates the Static the player has from hitting it. This can be countered by having a shield up to block that 2 damage.

Enrage is a common thing in RPGs but I wanted to use it to force an effect just incase the enemy doesn't roll it on their dice. I know there's a change the Bear can be beaten with it never going Angry (which is like a beserk state), so if I used the enrage I can guarantee it'll be Angry at some point.
The Caterpillar and the Jackobox both use a new Scared! status effect as their enrage. It clears all of their status effects but it forces a Shield next turn. This cements my vision for these two being defensive enemies. This new Scared! is a counter to status builds also, mostly to poison as it's duration equals its damage but having your piled on statuses removed can hamper your flow quite a bit.
I've also paired the new Counter status to this enrage too on both Jack Pumpkin and the Sword and Shield. Whilst the Sword and Shield will do straight damage, Jack burns at the same time adding an extra 1 damage. This counter will happen as soon as they land below 50% HP, so if your first dice takes them below that, your next one triggers the counter.

I added 3 new regular enemies with this update too, though they have placeholder art, they help round out these new abilities that I'd made without overloading the 4 existing ghosts. I've spoken about the Tenrec at length but we have the Skeleton who gains Counter each turn. This makes the skeleton strong against physical attack builds, however like most Turn Start abilities, it's also countered by Lucky Turns since you can clear the counter on turn 1, then attack freely on turn 2. However the Skeleton gains Status Immunity when it enrages. Now Status Immunity doesn't clear away existing Status Effects, so its important to build them up before it hits 50% HP.
Lastly is the MirrorCat who gets a unique effect to Mirror Status Effects. If you try to poison it, it poisons you instead. If you try to become Angry!, it becomes Angry! instead which is a very strong counter to status builds. Since you don't know which enemy you're fighting beforehand, you could end up mirroring a bunch of status effects back to yourself. This is also strong against Dotty and Lix's Special moves but not Finn's as it doesn't take Charged! from you. However it's quite frail, so standard Attacks will make short work of it.

Lastly in this bumper update are Comboonation Battles, a type of miniboss. Instead of making brand new enemies, I slapped 2 existing ones together. Work smarter not harder. Whilst still placeholder art, I will combine the 2 enemies properly onto a single base. This singular unity combines the Specials and the new effects from above of each enemy to create a tougher ghost. The pairings are done through what I consider the offensive pair and the defensive pair of enemies to create a dangerous battle or an attrition fight. Jack Hornet gains 1 Dodge every turn like the Hornet, and gains Enrage: Counter like Jack. Unlike the Hornet, Jack Hornet can go up to 2 dodge, so if not attacked, it'll dodge 2 dice on your turn. The regular Hornet used to be like this but it was very unfun for potentially the first enemy you fight.
There's 6 of these enemies and theyre denoted on the board by a double ghost, so players will know which are the harder fights. But these are required for the All Battles Cleared checkmark at the end of the game. As an incentive there's now a Boss Module drop pool. Defeating a boss or Miniboss offers a more powerful Ability Module than you'd get from other fights. So it's definitely worth taking one on.

That's all for the Combat Update whose goal was to make enemy fights more varied and strategic than 'mash attack it works 100% of the time'. I also hope this has increased the difficulty of the game through the skills alone as I didn't really change any enemy's HP total or the numbers on their dice.

[Fuzz Force]

The forth character, Mecha Peppa, is now playable! Unlike the other 3 characters, Peppa is an adaptable and all-around character. This is demonstrated through her Mecha Peppa which changes her mode every turn. Each mode gives her an all 2 dice matching the colour she is for free. On her creation I was hard pressed between her current implementation or whether it should match the Action you used last turn, as a sort of lingering bonus.

It came down to if I wanted the bonus dice to be controllable or not and I settled on it being uncontrollable and thus making the player play around it. I hope it leads to some interesting decisions on if the player Attacks in Attack mode for a big attack or Shields in Attack mode in order to gain an Attack alongside being defensive.
This also creates some strategies against enemies who will counter her if that Attack die is rolled or Charging whilst affected by Static which'll damage her.

Since the beginning I wanted to make a Red Panda character because they're super adorable. They have those wonderful face markings which aligned perfectly with mech panelling and it's another character with huge ears. Lets not forget those cute white tufts at the bottoms. That gives me another character with the big ears that looks lovely next to Finn and his big ears. The stripey tail lent itself to being illuminated by her mode lights (on her tail it travels from her bum to the tip) but using this self illumination is a different shader to the character shader so the outline doesn't line up. Something I need to fix.  I also learned that red pandas have 5 toes, instead of 4 like Dogs and Foxes but the extra toe is squashed on the inside, rather than the outside.

Peppa's animations are all very robotic too, lots of them having a linear animation curve to give that mechanical impression. They set her apart from the other three organic characters. She 'drives' from tile to tile like she's on wheels, her intro is a powerful Superhero landing and other animations have her hands and head spin around. When these bits move around they have an overshoot and snap back like a vvvvvt-kachunk kinda thing!

A big problem I had with Peppa is how i fit the dice inventory into her gauntlets. Every other characters weapon is big enough to fit in both the Dice and Modules but anything I tried made her gauntlets really long which threw off the illusion of where her elbows could be. Somehow I had the idea to make it a part of her, a Dice powered robot! So I created an extra 'core' based on the green glowing bit on her chest which slides out of her body and she puts her dice that, then back into her body. It helps explain the reason as to why she can punch ghosts, the power of dice is coursing through her.

Another big thing, whilst largely cosmetic, is something I've wanted to create for a while. Up until the game was set on a high fantasy wooden table inside a blue void but I wanted to ground the play area into reality as a board game that's being played. This immediately spruced up the boss intro where the camera swings down to character level and zooms in on them. The other part of this was to expand the immediate outside of the board with game components. These reflect your current stats (health, battery and the stat cubes) along with your loadout where the dice are those you have equipped. Module and battlechip counters show up when you equip them and there's a character card there too. Outside of that is a glass of soda, the dice bag to explain where your dice come from and the big chunky rules and events book that pops out during gameplay with game tips and events!

This update also implements the music I contracted Haakon Davidsen to make and he really did a bang up job of trying to make a spooky battle music like that of Dicey Dungeons. It's the first time I'd contracted someone to work for me and it was a pretty straight forward experience. I'd never have been able to make the music myself and it was important to have some original battle tunes instead of the royalty free music I was using before.

[Fuzz Force]

I played the game and discovered an awful problem. There was no reason to take dice in the Attic (last area).
Why not? You had kept low numbered dice to roll for Lucky Turns off of 1s,2s,3s and 4s. Therefore all the dice from the Forest fed into that, maybe some from the Halls but from there if the dice didn't have 3 of the number you were Lucky Numbering then there was no point in taking it. It didn't help that there wasn't much of a requirement either since the game was easy enough. Lucky Turns also meant you could apply all your buffs again, passive skills would activate a second time and since your dice weren't that strong, most damage came from the passive skills.
Following on from that, since battlechips existed you were aiming for stronger battlechips and not stronger dice. I'd made a dice game where the dice were useless! 

I thought about it and the best way to solve the problem was the removal of battlechips. It meant going back to the original system from before battlechips of finding dice with status effects baked in. From a code perspective, the dice now come with a battlechip built into them so they live on, in a way. This also meant going back to the 6 dice system of the old days too, 3 is just too simple to think about. The reason I got rid of the 6 dice system before is that no one understood it. You rolled one dice on attack, then the other one the next time you attacked but it was too complex. I had to think of a new way to use it.

After a bit of pondering, the solution was to be able to use the status effects on your stat dice. The stat dice occupies the bottom row of dice in the inventory and is always used with the main dice, so it should make perfect sense. This means you can apply 2 different status effects each turn which adds some more combinations for deckbuilding. The Action dice (top row) uses the numbers and 3 status effect symbols (50% chance) and the Stat dice have the stat number on every face and only 2 symbols(33%). I also changed stronger status effects from putting additional chances of triggering it onto the dice to making it more effective or lasting longer.
These are shown through the symbols shown at all times. Grey symbols are common effects and what they were before. White are uncommon effects and a step up. Rare effects are yellow.
By always showing the symbols, I can make dice with multiple status effects on them and have it be obvious. And with the dice always having 2 or 3 status symbols on them, its easy to say it's always on the 1,3 and 6 of a d6.

There are two further changes to the dice themselves. Firstly was going through all the dice and rebalancing the numbers on them to remove all triple and quadruple digits to severely lessen the chances of Lucky Turns. With only single or double digits on dice, getting Lucky Turns is limited to mostly 33% chance which will up the difficulty and make Lucky Turns feel special rather than the main goal.
The second change was to go for a Common, Uncommon and Rare dice system. Uncommon and Rare dice have the stronger status effects and higher numbers so the goal is now to find the best and rarest effects as opposed to the most 3s and stopping midgame.
Currently rarer dice are found through chests through a chance that increases the longer you go without getting one (pity timer). However it's already made a huge change and it's been well received. It makes the deckbuilding decision far more worthwhile and it's certainly easier to be flexible through getting a rare dice with status effect not currently in your build.

In my case, it's reverting a change I thought was for the best a year ago but it's put me back in a great place. If I hadn't gone with battlechips in the first place, I doubt I'd have ended up in the same place