DevLog #13 – Spending crystals to get more powerful
Hello everyone!
Last week, we talked about the fast-paced fighting in Project “Stasis”. As your progress through the different archipelagos, you will encounter deadlier traps and stronger enemies. If you are very good at fighting and dodging, you can very much reach the end with your starting gear. However, getting better equipment will make your journey a lot easier. Let’s see how!
The power of Monoliths
In each archipelago, you will find a few monoliths. Once the room they belong to is cleared, you can interact with the structure and see a prompt as illustrated below.
You have two possible choices, and can only pick one:
- Crystal generator: this will increase your base production, allowing to earn more crystals at each fight. You can upgrade the generator to increase even more this value, but this costs… crystals! If you fight well and often get a 4x production multiplier, you will get profit quite soon. Otherwise, it won’t be worth it before a bunch of rooms, and you may regret your decision… Also, generators from previous archipelagos still produce crystals, but you don’t have access to them anymore, so you can’t upgrade them. If you have extra crystals and want to upgrade a generator, you should do it before leaving the floor.
- Forge and store: you get access to a shop with three different tabs. First, you can unlock new bullet types, or buy equipment items. The pool is random (however weighted by the rarity of the items). You will notice some items have a level indicator: I, II, III, IV, V. Items usually start at I when you get them, but you can improve them in the forge tab of the shop by paying crystals. Improved items have more powerful effects. The third tab allows you to sell owned equipment you don’t wish to use. You also have a panel on the side to heal or buy ammo.
Each time you pick a generator, you increase your production, but you also don’t spend crystals to level up your gear and may remain dangerously vulnerable. Each time you chose a shop to get better equipment, you don’t increase your production and may find yourself critically short on crystals later in the run. So choose wisely…
Equipment and system upgrades
In your status menu, you can equip items you own in available slots. However, this action is permanent: you can’t remove equipped items. You’ better think carefully before doing so. Maybe you will find better items later and should wait to not waste slots, but you also may die before that…
You start with 3 slots available, but can unlock more up to a total of 10. You can achieve this through the systems upgrade. These can be performed at any time, when outside combat, by spending crystals. You have five systems you can upgrade:
- Shield: unlocks additional shield barrier points
- Health: increases your base max health
- Armor: increases your base armor points
- Gun: increases your base gun damage
- Equipment: unlocks additional slots
This is how you level up in Project “Stasis”. We intentionally keep our mechanics simple but hopefully strategically interesting. For instance, we removed the consumable system implemented in our last demo, we felt it wasn’t a good fit. Also, until now, you could unequip items, but it seems more relevant to forbid this because of the slots mechanics. We may tweak the existing and introduce new ideas depending on the feedback we receive, but this is how it works in the current state of the game.
Thank you for reading this devlog! Next time, we will talk about another mechanic we added to spice up the fighting. Stay tuned!