Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Man, I think that Mass Paralyze spell is imbalanced!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 11, 2014

FK2_Vault1_ss6Amusing bug story of the week. Actually, two bugs:

On Utah Indie Night, one of the group was playing the (updated) Comic Con demo for Frayed Knights 2: The Khan of Wrath. As he gets into combat for the first time, I explain that the spells are randomly generated every time the game resets, and because I still haven’t fixed the detailed spell data pop-up with the new UI, I have to guess what the spell does based on its name.

After about one or two turns, he looks at one suspicious looking spell that’s like ‘Tokem’s Mass Movement Inhibitor” or something like that. I suggest it may be a paralysis spell, but I also warn that outside of the damage, damage over time, and a few other spell types, not all the effect types have been fully tested. He tries it anyway, because it sounds interesting.

BOOM! The entire player party is paralyzed. The player’s party. While it was designated as a combat spell, I’d somehow flagged that condition-infliction effect type as a “beneficial” effect, which means that it hit the friendly characters instead of the enemies, and there was no need to check for defense against the spell. So suddenly the entire party was paralyzed, and the attacking zombies went to town.

I was pleased to see that paralyze was functioning correctly, preventing the party from taking action, thus permitting the aforementioned zombies to continue in the said town-going behavior. But there was a small bug. Condition effects have durations that are supposed to decrement every turn. But for some reason (maybe because nobody was taking a turn in the player’s group?), this wasn’t happening, and the paralysis was not wearing off. Ever.

We made a couple of joke comments about how this mass paralyze spell was imbalanced and needed to be nerfed as the zombies.

At least I discovered that my code to detect that the entire party had been wiped out and end the game was working perfectly. That was nice.


Filed Under: Frayed Knights, Programming - Comments: 5 Comments to Read



  • Cuthalion said,

    Lol. That’s a pretty good bug.

  • Cuthalion said,

    Come to think of it, you should put that spell in the final game as a fixed spell (rather than random) that actually paralyzes your whole party, as a mildly hidden thing, just to see if anyone falls for it.

  • DGM said,

    I remember a similar bug from the first game’s alpha. Nothing says “fun” like getting permanently stun-locked by a murder of @#%$ing storm crows and having to sit there for two dozen turns while they slowly peck you to death.

    Which reminds me… Jay, you might want to allow the player to bring up the options menu outside of his turn. I recall not being able to even load or quit in situations like that, and it was extremely annoying.

  • Kyle Haight said,

    Reminds me of an old joke D&D spell, “Dwamaj’s Instant Death”. When cast it would, wherever he was, instantly kill Dwamaj. According to the joke he was getting pretty tired of it.

  • brent said,

    Sounds like a spell you should leave in the game just for jokes. The description could be something like “Token was a troublemaker indeed.”

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