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[gambrinous]

That's a shame. I don't think this kind of grant is regional in Ireland at least (I could be wrong though..)

[gambrinous]

So I've been thinking about some fundamental game design issues I'm facing with Guild of Dungeoneering. Here are all the problems I see at the moment and my ideas to fix them.

Problem: why play harder monsters?
Right now you are motivated to play the easier monsters to gain some hope to be able to drop down some equipment. But once your hero is equipped what is the point of fighting more monsters? And what is the point of fighting the hardest monsters in the dungeon (bar the boss)? None.
Possible fixes

• I'm going to change the 'treasure' counter to a 'glory' counter. This represents the amount of glory received by your Guild by this venture into the dungeon. When you win or lose you will spend this glory in the Guild management screens to buy permanent upgrades for future dungeon runs. You will gain glory in a few ways: one way will be by killing monsters. The harder monsters will give you exponentially more glory.
• The 'dread' counter will no longer be a direct cost needed before you play monsters. There's no reason why you can't drop a super-difficult monster on the board whenever you want, or drop a whole load of monsters in one turn. Instead I'm going to change dread to be a sort of danger-meter that starts at empty and can tick upward to higher danger levels. If you do not play a monster (of any difficulty) in a turn, the dread meter ticks upwards. If you do play a monster it drains the meter downwards towards safety, with the harder monsters more likely to drag the meter downwards, especially at the highest levels of danger. The danger meter itself will also have an impact on your play: at the higher danger levels Bad Things will start to happen like monsters getting to move, traps being spawned, etc.
• Finally I'm going to allow the harder monsters to combo with HOPE items, so if you place a hope item in the same room as a placed monster you get a discount to the HOPE cost of that item. I may then have some super expensive special items (plus a hope cap) that can only be placed in the same room as the toughest monsters..

Problem: why build a big, interesting-looking dungeon?
Right now it's actually much more manageable to keep your dungeon small and linear, so you can push your dungeoneer to always go exactly where you want them to go. But big, sprawling dungeons are much more fun looking!
Possible fixes

• First up I'm going to use the new glory counter. You will gain a bit of glory every time you place a dungeon tile down, and more glory when your dungeoneer steps onto a tile for the first time.
• I'm going to make it so you cannot put down corridors that don't fit with the existing rooms (carcassonne-style). So no more exits leading into the wall of another room. Every placed tile must fit perfectly. This will make things look a lot nicer.
• I will have event cards that spawn a special room (treasure chamber!) in a random location 3-5 tiles away from where you have built, to encourage you to expand towards it.
• Proper dungeoneer AI will make him move towards areas of the dungeon he hasn't been to before, so no more pointless back-n-forth movement in a corner of the dungeon
• If there's no new dungeon tiles to move to because you have kept the dungeon tiny, he'll move into a blank space and you'll get a random tile + monster combo. Could be dangerous.
• Special events tied to the art of certain rooms. Eg the bridge/chasm could hurt you, or else certain rooms could combo with certain monsters to make fun things happen (eg elite monster if you place him in the throne room..).

Problem: combat & equipment is too straightforward
The equipment (and stats system) is too basic, and everything is a linear upgrade of other equipment. If you have the best helmet, there's no point putting down any of the other helmets. The combat system is too simple too; if you have high armour and fight a monster with high armour nothing happens!
Possible fixes

• This one will need a bit of exploration and testing, but here's some ideas. Firstly I would like to make the equipment fit three bands, say Common/Rare/Unique to use a nice RPG trope. Commons would be cheap and terrible, but a slight upgrade from nothing at all. There would be 1-2 commons for each slot. Rares would be the bulk of items for each slot and they would offer different bonuses to each other. So there will be an actual difference to whether your hero is using one or the other (one won't be better in all situations). Finally Uniques will be hard to get (not needing just enough hope to place) but will be really cool. You will be doing well to get one of these in a playthrough and it should define your choices from there on.
• Tied into the above, I think I'm going to make the stats system a bit more interesting. Strength/speed/armour isn't quite enough design space to make items that compete with each other for a spot on your dungeoneer. Not sure where I'll take this yet, but I might add magic as a secondary offensive stat, and make speed and armour two different ways to dodge/absorb attacks.
• Special abilities. Particularly for monsters I want them to do some special stuff, like poison for spiders, first-strike, armour-piercing.. that kind of thing. Then these can be tied into the equipment system too (like a poison-dagger). Nice.
• Possibly dice-rolling, just because I love it so much. It would add a little variance to combat too, which would improve some things.

Problem: where are my interesting choices?
Right now you can play through the alpha without really making any tough decisions. I want each hand of cards you are dealt make you think about trade offs, possible combos, and essentially have to make some exciting or agonising choices about what to play and what to throw away.
Possible fixes

• More types of card. Right now SEEK gives rooms, HOPE gives equipment or treasure and DREAD gives monsters. I'd like to expand that so all three decks have some special events with unique gameplay effects. Eg SEEK could have events tied to exploration (like finding a secret door) plus events that could be good OR bad (eg meet an NPC, but will they help or harm you?), HOPE could have more beneficial events, possibly at a hope cost (finding a healing pool for example), and DREAD some mostly painful events (like traps and the like). The DREAD events might *have* to be played if your dungeon dread level is too high, which would further encourage you to keep it low and/or keep a bigger dungeon so you have space to hide bad traps..
• Tweak the number of cards you play each turn. Someone suggested playing 2 cards each turn and discarding the rest. This could lead to more interesting decisions and I'd like to try it and see how it plays. I could even tie this to upgrades you unlock in the Guild - eg you start out having to discard your hand after playing 2 cards, but maybe you can build an upgrade in the guild that lets you keep one card each turn (or play a third card every turn)..
• Cards that combo with each other. An easy example would be equipment that is a set, so collecting a few pieces of the set gives you a nice bonus.

Finally there is the issue of more content (ie more of what I have now: more monsters, more items, etc) which I honestly don't see as difficult. I will be doing that later on once I solve some of these more fundamental flaws.

[bigalphillips]

Hi gambrinous,

That whole post you just made made me a lot more excited about this, but this especially:

I will have event cards that spawn a special room (treasure chamber!) in a random location 3-5 tiles away from where you have built, to encourage you to expand towards it.

Combined with carcassonne tile placement, it should make for a much more interesting game, as far as laying out the dungeon goes.  

It would be great if there is more of a correlation between defeating hard monsters and getting awesome gear. Perhaps some sub-bosses could drop the unique items. Agreed that the combat could be more interesting. Another stat or two would give more options and more choices for tradeoffs.  A common RPG trope is different types of damage and different types of armor.  Eg. piercing (dagger) vs. bashing (hammer), and armor can have different block ratings (eg. scale mail blocks more piercing damage, but leather tunic blocks more bashing damage).  Or a ranged weapon which does low damage but can do one additional hit on any monster in line-of-sight each turn (which would make dungeon layout all the more important -- you'd want to make a long straight dungeon if you have a ranged weapon, but a twisty turny dungeon if the monsters have ranged weaons...).  Hm, come to think of it, magic staves which shoot fireballs down the corridors, and magic fire imps monsters that shoot fireballs back...  I should probably stop back-seat-designing now... :)

Best of luck!

[gambrinous]

Nice ideas on ranged weapons! I do want to include ranged weapons in some way, but hadn't yet come up with something interesting, I'll think about what you've suggested.

Someone in my 1GAM group came up with a nice idea related to the treasure chamber which I want to try out. Essentially have markers on the blank part of the map showing bonuses for whatever room you put on that space (like the multipliers in scrabble). So you know if you build over to here you can have a hope discount, or a free chest, but to do so you have to go past this trap spot..

[gambrinous]

Update: v0.6.20 Jun 10th

Changes since the last version
- added a Glory counter. This represents how much glory this dungeon run is going to bring to your Guild. Later on you will use Glory to buy improvements to the guild.
- you now gain glory every time you place a new tile, defeat a monster, step onto a placed tile for the first time, or sell a treasure.
- added a little particle effect when you gain glory.
- room/corridor tiles must now always fit perfectly with what is around them (no more doorways leading into a different room's wall).
- you can now always play monsters, even if you shouldn't have enough dread for them (dread level is moving to a special danger meter rather than a cost for playing monsters).
- sound can now be muted, toggle it with the S key.

Play this version:
Browser (Flash)
Installable (AIR)

[gambrinous]

I wrote up everything I know about going through Greenlight in a nice big blog post. Hope it helps any other devs thinking about going for Steam:
http://blog.gambrinous.com/2014/06/11/getting-your-game-greenlit-in-2014/

A lot of the info is also in the AMA I did (linked at the bottom).

[Bakuda]

Just played through your playable demo on your site...got incinerated 

Awesome game so far!!!  I agree with your video that the AI could use some tweaking...especially the ability to sense treasure from more than a room away.  There's times I felt like a sheepherder trying to get the little guy just to go get the club...IT'S RIGHT THERE...GET THE FREAKING CLUB!!!  But it's still awesome.  Can't wait to see what else you do with this gem of a game!

[gambrinous]

Wahey, just sold our 200th pre-order of the game 

[gambrinous]

Update: v0.6.21 Jun 27th

Changes since the last version
- you can now place a treasure/equipment token in the same room as a monster (and vice versa). This is going to be key when I revamp the costs of all equipment as the harder monsters will give a hope discount for items placed on top of them - in some cases this will be the only way to place some of the best items..

Play this version:
Browser (Flash)
Installable (AIR)

[Slader16]

Looks super fun to play!

[gambrinous]

I've added a debug text overlay for tiles that I'm using to ensure pathfinding is working right. I'm thinking of using a pathfinding-style algorithm to score all the tiles in the dungeon so that the dungeoneer can pick one to head for, and this will really help me tweak how that works:

[gambrinous]

Finally built the most important feature in the game! Your dungeoneer now examines the entire dungeon to pick where to move towards each turn! You could say he finally has a rudimentary AI \o/

Update: v0.6.22 Jul 2nd

Changes since the last version
- your hero now examines the entire dungeon each turn to pick a room to head for. He scores each room based on treasure value in that room, whether he's ever been to the room (bonus for unexplored neighbouring rooms), how far the room is, and how difficult the monsters are from him to that room. He then picks the room he values the most and heads for it! This is just the start for the AI side of the game - I'll be tweaking this later on to include stuff like the dungeoneer's mood/traits & equipment etc, at a bare minimum.
- fixed the heuristic in the pathfinding function to make more sense (you won't notice a difference in effect, but it is more correct now)

Play this version:
Browser (Flash)
Installable (AIR)

And here you can see some of the scoring in action with debug mode on (hit D to toggle this yourself). I've left these screens full-width so the text is readable. In the first screen the hero has just moved upwards and is going for the silver shield. In the second screen I've added arrows to show where the hero and boss just moved from (scores are from just before both moved).

[gambrinous]

I'm looking at a short effect to show the hero examining the dungeon before settling on a tile to head for (to better message why he's doing certain things). Here's two options where I flash the tile size or tile brightness briefly.





Which do you think is better?

[RhysD]

I like the second effect more than the first. It gives the impression that the tile has been selected. Have you tried combining the first and second effect. Say, the jumping around until the tile has been found and then a flash when it's decided?

[Mr.Watson]

I actually like the first effect more, I think it's neat that it looks like the tiles kind of pop up. Works with the papercraft theme.

[gambrinous]

Here's a third option, showing a pathing line to each spot before settling on the chosen tile with a flash.



Still not convinced which one to go for!

[gambrinous]

Update: v0.6.23 July 7th

Changes since the last version
- added animation to show dungeoneer considering all tiles then settling on one to head for at the start of his or her turn. This isn't final - as you can see above I'm still playing around with various options on this.
- added dungeoneer facial expressions. No more doll-like 100% happy dungeoneers!

Play this version:
Browser (Flash)
Installable (AIR)

[Slader16]

Really really fun, I'm buying Guild of Dungeoneering day one. 

[gambrinous]

Thanks for the encouragement Slader16!

[Slader16]

I decided to play some more and found a bug, if you rapid click a card that you don't have enough hope to use, the player gets huge.