Week 5

Hello everyone! In the past week Dungeon Master has gone through some serious design overhauls to give the overall experience more depth for the player. Most areas of the main gameplay loop have been touched in some way.

Status

The first thing that was added this week are long-term status effects. These work the same way you’d expect in any other RPG, with effects ranging from poison to swarming, but crucially these persist between encounters.

This adds another layer of variables for the player to consider when determining their state at the beginning and end of combat. It also gives more area to create synergy among effects, like how spiders gain buffs for how many stacks of swarming are on the field.

Currency

The second overhaul comes in the way items are handed out for the Hero. Previously, the player had a chance to drop an item after every encounter, with the chance growing for how many monsters the player invested into that encounter. What made this problematic was the fact that players could invest heavy resources to improve these odds, and end up with no returns, or vice-versa.

Instead, monsters will drop currency for the Hero to pick up, and the player is given the chance to present shop encounters where they sell items to the Hero. This gives a consistent reward for investing resources, grants the player more agency over getting items when they need it, and allows more powerful items to be awarded for something other than random chance. With the addition of status effects, there’s even potential to have items which bestow the Hero temporary status buffs on top of the existing items system.

Skills

Lastly, there’s an overhaul to how the flow of combat works. This has been an ongoing issue to tackle, from random misses, to a selection of actions, to the previous update of potion actions. This overhaul intends to put more strategy into each action, and create more interesting synergy with the monsters a player summons, all while maintaining the core idea that the player is never in direct control of the Hero.

This solution introduces a coloured mana system (red, blue, and yellow), and assigns one of those colours to every unit in the game. When a unit gets hit, they gain one mana of the attacker’s colour. On a unit’s turn, they’ll perform a basic attack by default, or use a more powerful skill, if they have the mana for it. The colour of mana correlates thematically to a branch of decision making, with red for offense, blue for defense, and yellow for strategy. In this case, a debuffing move might cost one red and one yellow.

With this system comes the possibility for much more dynamic combat, and a more involved role for the player to strategize, as while they remain outside of direct control, they’re influencing which actions the Hero takes by which colours they put on the board. Putting a resource behind actions also gives the opportunity to create more interesting effects without affecting the balance of the moment to moment actions.

Conclusion

Unfortunately the downside of these revisions means more development time before a demo is ready, but I’m much more confident now that when the demo is ready, it will be rich and engaging experience for players! In the meantime, it’s back to the code trenches for me. Until next week!