Post by Jude on Dec 13, 2017 0:55:08 GMT 1
TLDR Version: I ramble about nothing.
Branching off from the Board Games thread. A while back, I guess about two years ago now, I was asking a similar question about finding a lighter weight dungeon crawling game for my group. The main catalyst was playing a couple of games of Warhammer Quest. The premise and theme of the game seemed really solid, but playing it just felt flat. Especially the campaign mode. The theme is of exploring the dungeon to do some certain quest but mechanically it is just a string of random encounters until you get to the end. Then the last room requires rolling a certain number to complete your task, so you just keep fighting more monsters every turn until someone rolls a 6 or whatever. The campaign mode let's you level up and fight harder monsters but not in a meaningful way. It's the same as adding zeros to everything's stats. "Wow!, my strength is a 100 now instead of just 10 I'm so strong!" But if the monsters defense is 100 instead of 10 as well then the game hasn't fundamentally changed. Also your characters abilities seemed to come more from the random loot you picked up than from the type of character you were playing. So I thought to myself "I know what we want in a game, why don't I just make one?" So here it is.
So setting out I made a couple of simple goals:
1 The core of the gameplay should come from decision making about team dynamics and tactics
2 The game should be streamlined and light weight, not having lots of components to track different things
3 Characters should progress by getting better at their niche, NOT through equipment or just increasing stats
The base idea for the characters I took from an idea I have for a more "Arcade" style RPGish game. (Think like a halfway point between Castle Crashers and Secret of Mana). Hopefully I'll get around to making at least a prototype of it before I die. Anyway, the basic premise is there are three stats: Strength, Agility, Intelligence, each with two aspects. So Strength has hitting things really hard or more tanky-defensive, agility has faster multiple attacks and dashing around or ranged. So you pick what you want your primary stat to be and which aspect you are using but then you also pick a secondary stat; secondary stats don't have aspects. So you could pick straight strength, or you could be a strength guy with a little bit of agility, or maybe an agility guy with a little strength, or an intelligence person with some agility. The idea is this gives you lots of choices about what kind of character you want to play, and a group of 4 tons of possibilities. Leveling up just gives you cooler abilities from your primary and secondary stats.
So that was my starting point.
I went through a couple of iterations of things and ended up a with a 10x10 hex grid (squares caused me too much trouble figuring out if diagonals should count).
I have a deck of different monsters that you draw from, each card is a wave of 3-10 of a certain type. You fight a number of waves equal to the level. So each level would always be an interesting mix.
I had a map to work across different terrains to mix up the fights more. Still not entirely happy with it but it is good enough for now.
The part I'm proud of is the multi-part character sheet that interlocks depending on the stats you choose. Here is a picture:
Primary stat
Plus secondary stat
You probably can't read them but essentially those are all of your cool moves in the middle and you gain a new one each time you level up. So levels 1,3,5 are from your primary stat and 2,4 from the secondary.
There is more details about all of those things. The flavor of the abilities feels great mostly, the enemy AI has good variety. But I felt like I had designed myself into a corner.
A key part of the game was the variety of enemies. You needed to be able to fight fewer strong ones, as well as lots of swarmy ones because characters have some moves that work well on one type and not the other. That's where a lot of the interesting choices happen, especially if your groups leans more in one direction. The way I had it though was 4 levels and then a boss. Which means in the fourth level you fight 4 waves of enemies at once and if you happen to draw cards that have larger numbers, you could end up with 40 figures on the board. That seemed like way too many to track simply and so much down time in between player turns.
It has always been in the back of my head that maybe I should abstract the combat more somehow so it wouldn't require so many minis. But I never really came up with anything I was happy with. However since the last month I have renewed my interest and effort, and feel like I may have come up with some solutions. I will post more about them later, as well as my thoughts on the pros and cons of the current state of the game.
Branching off from the Board Games thread. A while back, I guess about two years ago now, I was asking a similar question about finding a lighter weight dungeon crawling game for my group. The main catalyst was playing a couple of games of Warhammer Quest. The premise and theme of the game seemed really solid, but playing it just felt flat. Especially the campaign mode. The theme is of exploring the dungeon to do some certain quest but mechanically it is just a string of random encounters until you get to the end. Then the last room requires rolling a certain number to complete your task, so you just keep fighting more monsters every turn until someone rolls a 6 or whatever. The campaign mode let's you level up and fight harder monsters but not in a meaningful way. It's the same as adding zeros to everything's stats. "Wow!, my strength is a 100 now instead of just 10 I'm so strong!" But if the monsters defense is 100 instead of 10 as well then the game hasn't fundamentally changed. Also your characters abilities seemed to come more from the random loot you picked up than from the type of character you were playing. So I thought to myself "I know what we want in a game, why don't I just make one?" So here it is.
So setting out I made a couple of simple goals:
1 The core of the gameplay should come from decision making about team dynamics and tactics
2 The game should be streamlined and light weight, not having lots of components to track different things
3 Characters should progress by getting better at their niche, NOT through equipment or just increasing stats
The base idea for the characters I took from an idea I have for a more "Arcade" style RPGish game. (Think like a halfway point between Castle Crashers and Secret of Mana). Hopefully I'll get around to making at least a prototype of it before I die. Anyway, the basic premise is there are three stats: Strength, Agility, Intelligence, each with two aspects. So Strength has hitting things really hard or more tanky-defensive, agility has faster multiple attacks and dashing around or ranged. So you pick what you want your primary stat to be and which aspect you are using but then you also pick a secondary stat; secondary stats don't have aspects. So you could pick straight strength, or you could be a strength guy with a little bit of agility, or maybe an agility guy with a little strength, or an intelligence person with some agility. The idea is this gives you lots of choices about what kind of character you want to play, and a group of 4 tons of possibilities. Leveling up just gives you cooler abilities from your primary and secondary stats.
So that was my starting point.
I went through a couple of iterations of things and ended up a with a 10x10 hex grid (squares caused me too much trouble figuring out if diagonals should count).
I have a deck of different monsters that you draw from, each card is a wave of 3-10 of a certain type. You fight a number of waves equal to the level. So each level would always be an interesting mix.
I had a map to work across different terrains to mix up the fights more. Still not entirely happy with it but it is good enough for now.
The part I'm proud of is the multi-part character sheet that interlocks depending on the stats you choose. Here is a picture:
Primary stat
Plus secondary stat
You probably can't read them but essentially those are all of your cool moves in the middle and you gain a new one each time you level up. So levels 1,3,5 are from your primary stat and 2,4 from the secondary.
There is more details about all of those things. The flavor of the abilities feels great mostly, the enemy AI has good variety. But I felt like I had designed myself into a corner.
A key part of the game was the variety of enemies. You needed to be able to fight fewer strong ones, as well as lots of swarmy ones because characters have some moves that work well on one type and not the other. That's where a lot of the interesting choices happen, especially if your groups leans more in one direction. The way I had it though was 4 levels and then a boss. Which means in the fourth level you fight 4 waves of enemies at once and if you happen to draw cards that have larger numbers, you could end up with 40 figures on the board. That seemed like way too many to track simply and so much down time in between player turns.
It has always been in the back of my head that maybe I should abstract the combat more somehow so it wouldn't require so many minis. But I never really came up with anything I was happy with. However since the last month I have renewed my interest and effort, and feel like I may have come up with some solutions. I will post more about them later, as well as my thoughts on the pros and cons of the current state of the game.