Lsm's Dev Blog

Recently I've starting undertaking the task of macro-balancing: Balancing things on the larger scale of the game, not just for instance balancing different attacks to ensure that different strategies are viable, but balancing the two races. I've started these efforts with the new daily boss system that rewards race points for each race based on how much damage they did, and a training boost for the winning race. The race that's currently behind in things like generating race points and having active high-level members initially received the boss spawn notification 5 minutes before the other race, and the boss was 10% weaker against them. This has caused a lot of upset in users of the race that is ahead, who feel that they worked hard for their advantages and the opposing race shouldn't get anything for free. In this post I want to discuss some of the reasons this balancing is necessary, and why I'm doing some of the things I'm doing. Why balance/give handicap

Tl;DR about the balance changes is battles are going to be lasting longer than they are right now. Health is going up, and chakra/stamina are going up compared to move usage costs so that you won't run out of energy after using 3 moves. Damage scaling and jutsu strength are being adjusted so that also, the difference in power of jutsu from one rank to the next should be slightly less pronounced (yay Genin jutsu aren't completely useless as soon as you hit Chuunin maybe? :D) Once the damage/health values for all the various ranks have been worked out and the jutsu adjusted, AI will be planned out a bit in terms of their length/cost for healing/money gain from AI and the reduction in gains for fighting lower leveled AI. The idea behind this is to make it most rewarding to fight AI close to your level, and make spamming weaker AI only useful for perhaps getting jutsu exp without losing much HP. It's more rewarding and less grindy to do fewer AI battles but have them be harde

(Fair warning: This post has quite a bit of math numbers and whatnot in the first half or so, if that's not your thing, skip down and find where the features coming soon starts) Balancing has proved an arduous task, particularly with trying to figure out how to properly have things like stat nerfs in the game. I'm trying to move away from static % numbers as these make it incredibly hard to make high-effect jutsu at lower ranks without rendering higher ranks useless. For instance, if you have a Genin speed nerf of 33% for 3 turns, which equals out to ~100% total effect, then what are you supposed to do at Jonin? 40% speed nerf for 3 turns? It becomes a game of either making higher ranked jutsu stupidly OP, or making lower ranked jutsu so low they're useless. 10% speed nerf for 3 turns, anyone? Kappa The key to making jutsu balanced at all ranks is to copy what is probably the most balanced effect in the game: Residual damage. Residual damage is perfect, because it's b

Chuunin has been released on Shinobi Chronicles, and the release went fairly smoothly, with only a few bugs that had to be fixed. The big thing the game needs now is a complete balance review now that things are out and have been tried by the userbase, so pretty soon I'll be making a simulator to run damage curves, looking into damage, jutsu strengths, AI strengths, bloodline boosts, even money gains vs health costs at different strengths, trying to get everything sorted out to being fair. Up to this point I haven't been personally looking at too much of the content, I've been mostly leaving that up to my content admins, but now that Chuunin is in and it'll be a while before anyone is hitting the stat caps, I have time to look over everything myself. It's interesting being a game owner and having to oversee everything. To some extent my content admins I hired for a reason and they're good at their jobs, but it's my job to make sure their work meets my standa

So it's now been about three weeks since the May 4th release of Shinobi Chronicles, and I want to give everyone an idea of the current state of the game and where we're going with it. The design of the game The game is designed to put the player into the world of Naruto. It's a unique aspect that console games like the Naruto Ultimate Ninja series can't really replicate: They let you control characters from the series, but the character is never really you, you're never really a ninja in the world, you're more like a puppet master seeing things from the third person. To that extent in Shinobi Chronicles you get to choose your own village and train starting from a lowly Academy Student into a legendary Sennin. (I opted to use Akademi-sei for the first rank because all the other ranks are listed in Japanese, and the series never really described Academy Students as having a rank title, so that seemed the closest to what should be used). One difference howeve

Hey there, my name is Levi, but most of you probably know me as Lsmjudoka or Lsm for short. Since I just released my second game and I'm about to start active development on my third, I decided to make a blog so that there's a central place I can talk about stuff that happens on all my games and keep everyone informed outside of the limited-scope news posts on the individual games. First things first my next post will be about the state of SC, once Chuunin rank is released on that I'll talk about what's next for WoB, SC, and LoE. Thanks for checking out my blog!