The rooms are getting smaller, the fatigue is getting worse, but we are seeing old friends more often. Every update has a silver lining!

This update was mainly brought on by an issue in the game that had been niggling at me for a few days. We recently added the “flirt” persona, which significantly increases the good vibes you can pull in a run. The flip side of this is that if the flirt didn’t show up, the whole run would feel like a bust. We’d run into the coupon collector’s problem, the number of guests you see in a run wasn’t really enough to guarantee that you’d see every persona. You could either address a problem like this by balancing the persona abilities, or by balancing the likelihood of each persona. I opted for the second option, which immediately opened another can of worms - how do you weight the spawn probabilities without the player making inferences based on how many times they’ve seen a persona? We don’t really want the player thinking things like “the boor has shown up 3 times so far so it’s less likely they’ll be in this room”. The solution was something of a compromise. Each persona has a spawn weight that increases for each round that the persona is skipped. The trick is that this spawn weight is only used when choosing the possible personas for each room. The persona of each guest is then randomly selected from within the possible pool. While the system still doesn’t make any guarantees, it does make it much less likely that you can go a full run without seeing a particular persona (for better or worse).

There was also a small change to the fatigue system, the system that reduces your social battery further and further with each room. Previously this was a value that started at 1 and increased by 1 each day. This was unnecessary in the early rooms and too slow in the late rooms, so its been changed to a penalty that starts at 0 and increases by 5 points for every room after the fourth room (this is where you’re able to start cashing in your score). This is one of those things that’ll need to be tuned slowly over time, so its very likely to change again.

In the wheelhouse of tuning, there was another pretty radical change. The grid has gone from 5x5 to 4x4! Since the jam I’ve been trying to improve the game’s immediacy. The smaller grid seems to be a step in that direction. By cramming the same content into a smaller space, the game becomes more dense and entangled. Because the game was designed at 5x5, I’m anticipating that this change will have many, many knock-on effects so I wanted to include it in an update so that it can be playtested over a few days to feel out if its the right call.

Thanks for sticking around. We’re getting into pretty fine-tuned territory now, where every bit of feedback helps. If you play Loose Ties and have some thoughts on how its feeling at the moment, I would love to hear them!