Player GoalsDesign-wise, one of the most important thing in the genre is to set Goals for players and clearly communicate with them about their short & long term goals. Without a goal, there will be no sense of accomplishment and players would feel they are advancing for nothing. After a short while, it doesn't matter how high your numbers are if there is no whys.
That's why we are in a mindset of creating tools to be able to set meaningful goals for players. It's a long topic that covers almost all the game when talked in depth, but it's an important one so I want to start talking about it. Bare in mind that when these things are talked in a short blog post like this, they may sound very complicated. But in the end, all these goals will be introduced to the players in a well balanced pace (hopefully). We are also not just thinking about the release of the game but the future updates of it. I can talk hours about making a design with a huge play space and why it's important for f2p mobile, but instead I'll put this link here and recommend you to watch:
To understand the different layers of goals, I have to talk about Game Modes first.
AdventurePlayers start the game with
Adventure mode. In this mode, the main objective is to reach the max stage you can. There is no lose condition in this mode. When your characters die, they will revive after some minutes. Eventually, your progress will slow down though and you'll require more artifacts to progress faster. You can prestige whenever you want to earn artifact currency (which is very similar to other incremental games). Other than that, there are couple of adventure mode specific unlocks that you can get at predefined stages.
-
Reach stage 10 to unlock a new hero.
- 20 to unlock merchant.
- 30 to unlock a new element.
- 50 to unlock a new
game mode.
To get the next unlock in a mode is a medium level goal for the player. Those unlocks are cool because they create new ways to play the game. For example, when you unlock a new character, you will feel the need to fine tune your strategies. The list of mode specific unlocks has a place in the UI. But this is such an important information that has to be reminded to players from time to time. This is why, after player makes a prestige and wants to start the Adventure again, we remind the next unlock he can get.
A w.i.p. screen for starting a new game mode.
Of course, these mode unlocks are permanent, meaning that when you prestige, you keep your unlocks.
In Adventure mode, you can get a maximum of 5 heroes (wannabes) to play at the same time. So, what will happen to all those other heroes that I unlock? If you can only play with 5 heroes, what is the point of having 15-20 different ones? Luckily, we have other game modes to use others.
Solo QuestSolo Quest is the second mode that players unlock. In this mode, players can only use a single hero.
Main purpose of this mode is to teach heroes skill tree better. The single hero chosen in this mode earns more skill points in time, so players can explore more options in character building.
Every hero normally has 1 ultimate, 2 active, and 8 passive skills in their skill tree. In Adventure mode, only ultimate skills can be manually activated by players. Active skills in Adventure mode are automatically activated by heroes when they are ready. But in Solo Mode, both ultimate and active skills of a single hero can be manually activated by players.
Both Adventure & Solo Quest has offline progress, meaning that when you switch from one mode to another OR completely close the game, your heroes will keep progressing / beating stages and earning you precious coins. These modes don't share their currency between each other though. Their progress are separated from each other.
The objective of the Solo mode is not to reach max stage, but train the hero as much as possible. You earn prestige rewards & get new unlocks based on how many levels your hero has.
Starting a Solo Quest w.i.p screen. In this setup, player has to choose the hero in the beginning to start this mode.
Time ChallengeAs you can see, new game modes come with their own set of rules / challenges / unlocks.
Time Challenge mode is the 3rd mode player will unlock and it's very different than the first two. In Time Challenge mode, there is a lose condition.
If you can not complete the challenge within a given time, you will fail it. Failing a challenge means you have to wait some time to try again.
Failing a challenge by a small margin indicates that it's possible to beat it with different strategies. (It's all about creating synergies between heroes.)
Fail greatly and you will know you need more player progression (more items, more artifacts, different heroes) that you can get from other modes.
An example of a challenge.
Completing these challenges is kind of a big deal. The rewards will be huge and players will want to strike for them.
So, in the player's mind, these challenges will stay as a major goal to complete.
"Farm items & artifacts in other modes so you can beat the next time challenge."
These 3 modes are the ones we would like to release the game with. We have a lot of cool game mode ideas for the future updates. And they will all serve breaking the linearity in the game by providing different mechanics and giving the player a feeling of accomplishment. It will be possible to complete everything a game mode has to offer (which will be really difficult) which also moves the story forward. Our plan is to release more meaningful content when this happens. (Instead of letting players farm the same content for a long time.)
These are not the only goals we want players to set for themselves. There are lots of other minor goals players will have. For example, for each Adventure Run, you will have a set of Upgrades you can purchase upon reaching a stage. These upgrades are huge boosts that will boost your progress. But you will lose them after each prestige. Still, trying to find out what the next Upgrade is a minor discovery / goal players will have.
In this example, when the player reaches Stage 50, he will discover what this special upgrade provides. It could be things like:
- +1 skill points for all heroes.
- +50% damage for all heroes.
- Double health for all heroes.
That's all for now about the Player Goals. There are even more goals

but I want to talk about them later.
In general, we have a very good pace in the development. It was a little bit painful to change our structure to support different game modes but right now it became very flexible.
In the next post, I'd like to talk about Artifacts. How players will be able to craft them procedurally and why that matters a lot.
Thanks for reading, all feedback is appreciated!