Maze Retease

[Inside7shadows]

Alright, I put together a Maze Retease generator and finally have an answer about demons. The tend to appear 15% of the time. I think this averaged to 1 demon every 30 hours of tease time. I would say either give them more support while making them more dangerous, or cut them out entirely.

Having Shelters reset danger is a good move. If you're unlucky and in a long tease, you're screwed once the portals are gone. Plus this makes starting up the next day easier. Speaking of which, why are the portals single use? They level out the game and make interesting things happen (Demons).

The biggest thing I would work towards is finding a way to shorten the teases while making them more consistent.

Modifications: Assumed Shelters reset danger and awareness like a portal. I made Sword cure Paranoia. This was a minor change. 3.8 hour average.

Modification: Had Tranquility remove paranoia. Average of 3.6 hours, out of 20 trials, the average number of demons was 0.2

Modification: Permanent Portals. Maximum time drops from 7 hours to 5.2 hours. Average time hits 2.3 hours.

Modification: Defeat the boss.
For some reason I only have 119 instruction cards in the initial tease. Added a boss for 120. Must defeat the boss before exiting. No more instant teases. Ha! This bought the longest of 20 teases to 35 hours! Poor guy found the exit 50 times before he found the boss. Kept stepping into reappearing portals. Not good for boss mode. Danger actually helps you get out. Averaged 8.1 hours each tease.

Modification: Boss with single use portals. Range 24.9 hours - 2.2 Hours.

Modification: "Been here before" removes itself if all "It goes on" and "Dead ends" have been removed. Also Exit gives +1 Awareness.
Range 9.2 hours to 1.4 hours with an average of 5.3. This came out looking very regular. This could be a good direction to move in.

I think Secret Passages need to be something else. It's pretty much just drawing a new main deck card, and that doesn't help any. Maybe its a free win/save on the next danger card? But wouldn't you know it... If you don't draw the extra Main Deck card, Ghosts can't generate enough Danger overcome Tranquility and it gets stuck in an infinite loop. For the interest in time, I think I would rather just draw 2 than skip through stuff I already generated.

I feel like there's an excess of traps, and maybe only 3 would make them more "Surprisey".

Sorry this was super rambley. I think I found a good balance. I'll work on making the Excel file more user friendly and put it up if anyone is interested. I will also take simple requests for data.

[Rothaon]

I'm interested in it, I wanted to do a little sim of this in Excel last week but I ended up simulating another game in VB

[Inside7shadows]

I'll put mine up then. It's simplistic: it doesn't shuffle the reteases, and allows for modifiers to go negative when adding. Also danger gets capped at 32 for reasons. It's been useful to see why teases go haywire.

I could not get Sword to balance. Getting an early Sword will disrupt the balance between Monsters and Paranoia and you will get into a positive danger feedback cycle that can't be broken until you find the map or a portal (or you give up and die). There may also be hope if you get your Main deck card at the very end of the Generation, and don't allow Awareness to go negative.
Edit: Map, Thread, and Sword should say to remove them on the Card.

Current configuration incurs excessive loops if "Been Here Before" are self removing. They also give -1 Awareness to balance like monsters do. Doubled the size of the Awareness Deck.

I made a few other small tweaks, but I'll reveal those with everything else. Or in the Excel Utility... I'll try to clean it up a bit and post the link here when I finish.

I also wanted to incorporate time changes as well. I figured the easiest way to balance this is to have Paranoia reduce it by 1, and losing to a Monster Increases it by 4 (and a Minotaur by 2). That way it's self regulating. Would anyone be offended by this? An interesting property of this tease is that losing doesn't actually interfere with finding the exit. Unless you have to fight a Boss first.

On a related topic, do you have any idea how to reduce aliasing in images displayed in a Userform?

[Qrr]

Sorry for no card updates. Had a bad week. Will try to get them up in a day or so.

I also been thinking about changing the slide duration. What if we give a choice for player to increase or decrease it by 1 second each slide (or to set is at a slide duration he wants on each card) and make each "fight" have a "stroke per second" (str/sec) ratio, but make it different for different slide duration. Also min duration is 5 and max is 20.

For example: lets say we have a minotaur. If you are at 7 to 15 seconds the ratio is 3.5 str/sec, if you are at less than 7 seconds it's 4 str/sec and if more than 15 - 3 str/sec. It's like you can try to be fast, but it will take more of your strength, or you can take it easy and not go as far.

Also what if we just remove the sword and replace it with "Boots" that will give you another main deck card without more images?

I like the boss idea, but what if the boss is not a card that exists separately from exit card, but IS the exit card?

Caught myself on a thought that I really want the CTI2 to come soon, because then I can do a card like this:
"After a random amount of time you'll get a jump scare"

One last thing. The awareness and danger shouldn't go down bellow 0. I'll clarify that in the rules.

[Rothaon]

Thanks for sharing Inside I¡ll look at it a bit later.

I don't have a clue about anything related to serious coding I just play around with code to make it do what I need to

[Inside7shadows]

Sorry for no card updates. Had a bad week. Will try to get them up in a day or so.

No worries. I have not made progress either.

Also what if we just remove the sword and replace it with "Boots" that will give you another main deck card without more images?

I hate it, because it requires changes to my lazy coding. Other than that, the next effect is you would get something like an 3 Cards and 10 images in each generation. Could add up when looking for the exit.

I like the boss idea, but what if the boss is not a card that exists separately from exit card, but IS the exit card?

You could make a boss that becomes easier with each Artifact you find? Otherwise you still risk drawing it right off the bat. You need some sort of minimum for proof of work.

One last thing. The awareness and danger shouldn't go down bellow 0. I'll clarify that in the rules.

So anyone using the worksheet I provided, it does everything in order and doesn't shuffle reteases. It works for averages, but this could also help exit paranoia loops.

[vanadium]

Modifications: [...] I made Sword cure Paranoia. This was a minor change. 3.8 hour average.

Just to clarify, does the sword only remove paranoia, or does it remove paranoia and monsters (and minotaurs)?

It might be an idea to change the map to allow you to remove "Dead End" and/or "Continue (it goes on)" cards. Leave the thread to handle the minotaurs as a reference to the myth perhaps? Finally let the sword remove paranoia only. It's a rusty sword; it only makes you 'feel' more safe.

[Inside7shadows]

Just to clarify, does the sword only remove paranoia, or does it remove paranoia and monsters (and minotaurs)?

I was spasticaly trying different combinations and making minimum notes on the effect. The problem is if there is more paranoia than monsters, the game breaks. So under my sword function* I changed it to 'Removes Paranoia' so I didn't have to retype anything else. Now I have it as a new item called Drops. I think it'll be good for the game to have a selection of artifacts, and to pick 3 before you start.

*Actually a switch statement

[Inside7shadows]

Good heavens, Maze Retease has almost fallen off the front page!

We mustn't have that.

Not yet...

Introducing the first Retease Stand Alone expansion: Shadow Maze - featuring new cards and new art (PLUS bonus gallery, sounds, and worksheet!!!). Play it by itself or combine it with the original!

I just got finished polishing it up for publication. I teased through once about 2 weeks ago. By now I don't recall much detail. I would advice when using duplicates of cards to ensure that the card you remove (Drops, Map) is the same copy currently on the screen, otherwise you might remove a card you were about to encounter. Not sure how other tease programs deal with that.

Other than that, the thing I remember about this tease is that it was fucking WORK! Normally I prefer to just lean back, relax, enjoy my porn, and endure a bit of pain to keep it interesting. I don't know if squatting for 5 reteases is an average ability, but I sure as hell can't. Especially after doing a set of squats. I shortened most durations to 2 reteases, perhaps this is too uniform? Fortunately, you can easily rebalance cards in the Editor. Which, by the way, made the whole exercise of editing the original and creating this set super easy. It's amazing witnessing a new tool making life easier.

As a super whammy extra bonus, I'm also including an updated version of ShadowView - Updated for Windows 10 color scheme with performance enhancements and features for Reteasing! WOW AMAZE SUCH PERV MUCH NEW

[Qrr]

FINALLY AN UPDATE!!!

Implemented most of the changes we were talking about.
Main points:
1. Portals and ghost are moved to the danger deck.
2. Items are moved to the awareness deck.
3. Big changes to the cards "Secret passage", “Shelter”, "Sword" and "Good ghost".
4. Some minor tweaks to most of the other cards (shorter punishments for failing in a fight, removed the need for punishment set, typo fixes)