next »

[Droqen]

That'd be pretty cool, too!

[TobiasW]

A bit of a nuisance maybe though? It sounds worse than grinding. You know, when games start to feel like work...

[Droqen]

Yeah.

It'd be my hope that it would be an enjoyable process, allowing you to check out the fates of various adventurers who failed at the hands of your dungeon.

[Chromanoid]

well you don't have to clean your dungeon, but then heros may get some hints from the skeletons. I think such grindy mechanics make fun too. harvesting, cleaning and collecting via simple mouse clicks can be very relaxing and satisfying.

when collecting the skeleton a ghost replay could start or a link to such a replay could be logged into an attack log.

[TobiasW]

How big should are you planning this to be anyway? How many players? The cleaning thing is yet another idea where I'm not sure how good it would scale.

[Chromanoid]

random thoughts on scalability: should scale like farmville & co. zynga would probably use smartfox for dungeon instances, maybe php+memcached+mysql for general server stuff and flash for client. see Rightscale "Social Gaming in the Cloud - a technical whitepaper" (for serverstuff).

[TobiasW]

Oh, I mean the scalability of the game design, not the technical design - I should've probably highlighted that.

For example:
It it's 10 players, well, at least they can concentrate on cool dungeon building.
If it's just 100 players, everything should be fiiiiine.
But if you have, say, 10000 players, each dungeon would fall pretty fast. And if it doesn't, accumulate very very much skeletons that have to be cleaned away...

[Chromanoid]

ic
some thoughts for gameplay scaling:

heros and dungeons are randomly distributed over a world map -> traveling to a specific dungeon needs (real) time.

there is a maximum visiting rate for dungeons (the village next to the dungeon can host only a certain amount of heros).

to offer enough action for the heros there are npc caves/dragon lairs (w/o dungeon hearts).

when dungeon keepers aren't in a storage quest and only store the dungeon heart in the dungeon, they can close the dungeon for some time.

[Droqen]

I like the concept of actual 'space' between the dungeons.
Anyway, if each player has a dungeon -- lots of people mean the biggest and most well-known will probably fall faster, but people will still (hopefully) be spread out!

Once you get tons of skeletons, you can always... remove skeletons selectively :D

That's probably the coolest part of manual skeleremoval.


npc caves = why?

note :: I would very much like to avoid a static level system getting in the way of fun.

[Chromanoid]

npc caves = why?

Imagine that you have an initial constant playerbase that enjoys the game for a while. Now the game goes viral and there are no dungeons for new low level players who only want to raid dungeons for whatever reasons. Or there are too few dungeons/heros at the beginning of the game etc. Alternatively if dungeon building is more like "build and forget" a lack of dungeons probably will never happen. For gameplay scalability purposes there should be NPC heroes attackers (e.g. upset villagers) too...

[TobiasW]

Once you get tons of skeletons, you can always... remove skeletons selectively :D

Haha wow, awesome, I didn't think of that :D

[Chromanoid]

resurrecting them with a necromancer and using them as undead hordes would be an option too
this can autobalance things a bit (especially when the undead last only for a limited amount of time).

[Droqen]

That'd be a neat trick to pull:

If you leave your dungeon full of built-up skeletons long enough, you can cast a spell that makes your dungeon an undead hotspot for the day (or something), and without warning any adventurer who visits that day will suddenly find themselves beset on all sides by terrifying skeletons

(of course it'd only be worth it if you had a lot of skeletons)



Chromanoid I think rather than NPC dungeons and NPC attackers, I'd rather have a system that generally regulates how many dungeons are pumped out. If there are too many dungeons, they become more expensive to create/maintain. If there aren't enough, it spits out dungeon coupons to a bunch of players, or something.

That is, instead of relying on NPCs to do what players are meant to do because they have fun and do it best (building and exploring creatively) -- let NPCs take on the boring roles like Dungeon Supplies Inc. who fluctuate their prices to meet supply and demand.

[Geeze]

Could players attempt to steal from those "Dungeon supplies inc"-shops, roguelike-style? Except that noone won't even try because all shopkeepers are so badass killing machines.

[Droqen]

Nah... but maybe unused supplies can be stolen from your storeroom? :D

(I'd like to keep most (all) aggressive interaction player ingenuity vs player ingenuity)