BellHop StudiosReception devlog · Part 3 of 6
Design first
When work restarted after a two-week break, it restarted on paper.
Research before code
On 18 September we wrote up a retention study drawing on 35 sources. It was blunt: treasure had no use, wipes were too harsh, and the gacha needed a hard pity, with 40 pulls recommended. From then on every big system began as a written memo and a design doc, and on 20 September the first batch was built in one pass.
The systems
- The gear economy. Gear became the core loop: combine, salvage, a merchant, and a player market for later. The Bat Dungeon was designed too, with bats that promote into ghouls and a 500 party GS cap.
- Fatigue. A meter per hero, set by rarity (30, 25, 20 and 15), with a Rat run costing 2 and a Bat run 3, a full recovery each day, and a daily tonic.
- Sena Haulbright. A fourth desk character who runs the shop, and also a pullable SSR warrior.
- Combine and currencies. Items combine up to +20. Copper, iron, gold and mithril, Sena's stall, Ethereal as the premium currency, and the Armory.
- Hire a Hero, live. Writs of Hire with rates of 55/30/12/3, ten free pulls, hard pity at 40, and duplicates turned into shards.
- Menus rebuilt. An Armory grid with a detail panel, a Party screen that saves as you go with a Quick fill, and a ladder list of dungeons. Every desk on the hub got a status line.
- Seeing the run. Watching a run now showed the party walking in formation. Sight ranges became per hero, with three map marks per run and a scouted ring in the fog.
- Our own art. The hanging-sign title, the desk logo, 21 framed hero icons and walk cycles.
- Monsters that move differently. Three movement models, one per dungeon: classic, Mystery Dungeon style, and scent trails. A lethality harness measured wipe rates, and ghouls were made genuinely dangerous.
- Monster abilities. Rat poison and Over Bite, bat bleed, and the ghoul's Red Drinker and Blood Rage. Ring Celler joined: a Rare hunter-alchemist with acid, potions and Emergency Brew.
- The Training Hall. Drift's ten fixed rooms for testing a party for free, with batch win rates. An Options menu arrived with five tabs.
Why paper first
Writing the systems down first meant they fit together on day one. Fatigue, the gear economy and Hire a Hero all lean on each other, and designing them separately would have meant rebuilding each one when the next arrived. A spec also gave us something to test against: when the code and the doc disagree, one of them is wrong.