Core Design Principals:

These are the previously articulated core design principles that have defined the vision of the game since the beginning.

  • Emergent Complexity: Create emergent depth and complexity from the simple interaction of many simple mechanics. Avoid lots of arcane, obscure, numbers and formulas.
  • Tight Focus: Limit scope to tactical combat, character development, and strategy. Don't get bogged down building an everything simulator.
  • Inter-Run Variety: Each run should feel unique, even with the same starting race and class. Don't build a massive game that feels the same every time.
  • Intra-Run Variety: Each location or stage of the game should feel location. Partition content to create meaningfully themed zones rather than just throwing everything together in a single generic dungeon. Introduce new mechanics gradually over the course of a game so that each 'phase' feels more complex and distinct.
  • Aesthetics: The quality of the art, the strong, cohesive theme of zones, the meaningful layout of levels and content are as important as the raw mechanics.
  • Quality of Life: Controls and interface should emphasis fast, streamlined play with all repetitive or tedious tasks either removed or automated.
  • Design for Experts: Design and balance for the expert player while providing support for new players to progress to experts.

These principles will remain completely unchanged in the new, expanded scope of the project. In fact, the primary motivation of the expanded vision is really just to further emphasize all of these points. The biggest new features and changes really all relate to a single word in the above list:

Limit scope to tactical combat, character development, and STRATEGY. Don't get bogged down building an everything simulator.

Until this point, with a short game length and a linear dungeon we haven't really been able to touch on strategy at all. The remainder of this document should give a rough overview of the major new additions and changes I'm planning that will allow us to finally realize this core principle.

Non-Linear Dungeon:

The game will be set in a single, massive, procedurally generated, non-linear underground environment; divided into themed wilderness biomes, with dungeons, forts, camps, powerful bosses, towns, and friendly NPCs scattered across it. Note that: when I use the word 'world' elsewhere in this document I'm referring to this massive underground environment (cavern system), rather than an outdoor over world. The word 'dungeon' is referring to a smaller, sub-region of the cavern system with tighter architecture and a high concentration of themed content ex. The Crypt. The word 'wilderness' will be referring to a larger sub-region of the caverns with more open terrain and sparser concentration of content ex. The Under Grove.

  • Seamless: The world will be seamless, with no hard zone-lines or artificial transitions between areas.
  • Chunks: From a technical perspective the world is simply a giant 2D grid of 'chunks' where each chunk is a 40x40 tile map that may or may not connect to its neighbors.
  • 1:1 Scale: The entire world will have a single, consistent scale i.e. there is no a separate, large scale 'world map'. Furthermore, all areas must actually 'fit' i.e. you won't approach a small building, pass through some sort of zone line and find yourself in a larger interior. Instead, there is no transition and the interior tiles of the building physically 'fit' within outer walls.
  • Z-Levels: Most of the game world will exist on a single, flat map with dungeons extending horizontally into the walls of caverns. We will however have z-levels for the cases in which we want a dungeon to extend down beneath the main level (useful for getting everything to 'fit' together).
  • The Under Dark: Thematically, the game is set in a vast underground cavern system, similar to The Under Dark from The Forgotten Realms. So all of the wilderness environments actually exist within this giant network of interconnected caverns with dungeons simply cutting into the cavern walls or extending downward into the floor. The game is set entirely in this cavern so it should be thought of, essentially, as one massive dungeon, albeit, a dungeon that contains a huge variety of environments and many areas of large open space.

Meta Strategy:

Zone Specific Risks and Challenges:

  • Each zone (wilderness biome or dungeon) will feature somewhat predictable risk and challenges i.e. there is some consistent theme, damage type, resistance etc.
  • The game mechanics will heavily emphasize character strengths, weaknesses, counters and interactions over raw level power.
  • Since the dungeon is non-linear, players will need to strategically plan a unique path through the world based on their starting class/race and current build.
  • They will need to consider how to acquire certain tools, abilities, equipment etc. before tackling certain areas.
  • They will need to determine when its best to retreat from an area full of hard counters or even preemptively avoid the area completely.
  • Of course, due to proc-gen, though the general risks/challenges of a zone can be known before hand, the specifics will vary from run to run, and so require constant reassessment and adjustments to general strategy.

Zone Specific Rewards:

  • Each zone will feature its own unique item drop table that is biased towards a certain class, arch-type, element, etc.
  • This means that the rewards from each zone are also somewhat predictable.
  • Players can then strategically plan a unique path through the world in order to gather the specific items they need for their desired build.
  • Relating to risks/challenges: a player that knows he is not equipped to handle The Core, will have some idea of where to go to acquire, say, fire resistance or cold based weapons and spells.
  • Of course, due to proc-gen, though general rewards per zone can be known beforehand, the specifics will vary from run to run and require constant reassessment and adjustment to strategy.

Time (Turn) Pressure:

  • There is a sort of 'dungeon master' entity, that pressures the player by causing special events to occur at predetermined times (turns) to gradually make the world more dangerous.
  • Examples:
    • As the abysmal gate gradually opens, first minor, and then greater demons will begin to emerge and take up residence in the final fortress.
    • A dark ritual will be completed in The Dark Temple which increases the strength of all enemies.
    • The denizens of The Crypt will be awakened and pour out into the surrounding dungeon.
    • Given enough time, as the opening of abysmal gate nears completion, minor gates will begin to occasionally open near the player, unleashing groups of increasingly powerful demons.
  • Due to proc-gen, the exact events will differ from run to run but, in general, the game world will become increasingly deadly the longer the player takes to win.
  • The rate of this 'danger increase' will be fast enough to force the player to take risks, make hard choices and prevent him from simply grinding indefinitely in safety. A successful run will only ever utilize about 50% of the content in the world, so the player must make hard choices in the face of time pressure.

The above 3 factors combine to create the meta strategy of the game i.e. the unique, purposeful path that the player takes through the world. The player is ultimately trying to create a character build capable of making an assault on the final dungeon. To do this, he will need to acquire a unique set of equipment and talents that is broad enough to handle a variety of challenges but specific enough to actually have some key strengths. To develop this 'build' he will need to travel to a variety of areas where the desired equipment or talents are known to drop. Due to the highly specific risks/challenges of most zones, he may need to acquire other things first. When considered together, this means the player must plan out a fairly complex path through the dungeon, often temporarily avoiding areas or retreating to return later. The time pressure will prevent the player from simply grinding in safety for massive amounts of time and force him to have a highly optimal plan. Proc-gen will guarantee that plans must be constantly reassessed and altered based on the specifics of the run. All of these factors contributed to what I'm ultimately calling the 'Meta Strategy' of the game.

Multiple Victory Conditions:

Beyond the standard game objective, which will be more sophisticated than simply retrieving the goblet and will take roughly 4-6 hours, the game will include a number of different victory conditions:

Quick Games:

  • When starting a new game, the player will be given the option to select quick game rather than standard game.
  • A quick game uses the exact same large world as a standard game but the player will be given one of a variety of objectives that will be winnable in roughly 1-2 hours (same length as current game). These could be things like killing a sub-boss, retrieving a minor artifact, rescuing a prisoner etc.
  • Quick games would be used for the daily challenge and would otherwise allow us to maintain the option for players to just to a quick run without committing to the much larger standard game.

Multiple Victory+ Conditions:

  • Based on the lore of the game, there will be hidden ways of achieving victories beyond the standard conditions.
  • Figuring out how to do this will be a challenge in itself and will require piecing together clues throughout the dungeon, across many runs.
  • Due to the way that time pressure works, Victory+ conditions will require expert players to play the game in a much more optimal way right from turn 1.
    • First, the player will simply need more time (turns) to complete these extended objectives so they will have to have highly optimal play, take many risks, rest infrequently etc.
    • There may also be time sensitive sub-objectives that either must be completed within a certain time or else become increasingly difficult to complete as time passes.
    • The idea here is that Victory+ conditions will not be hard because the game becomes significantly longer but rather because they demand a much higher level of player right from the beginning.

Races as an Organic Difficulty Setting:

  • Races will be balanced so as to act as an organic difficulty setting with humans being the default 'easy' race and other races divided into 'medium' and 'hard' categories.
  • In this way we not only increase replayability (win with increasingly difficult races) but also provide a way for players to choose their own level of challenge.

Smoothing the Path from Beginner to Expert:

  • The above factors combine to create a smoother path from beginner to expert. Beginners will have a lower barrier to entry while experts will have multiple ways to continue to challenge themselves.
  • A beginner player can start with a race that is significantly easier and work on completing all of the quick game mode objectives, these acting as nice rewarding milestones.
  • The player can then progress to harder races or work on completing the much more difficult standard game objective.
  • Because Victory+ conditions demand near perfect player from turn 0, the upper skill cap of the game becomes enormous as an expert player must optimize play at all stages of the game.
  • In all cases, we are not using artificial difficulty settings (adjusting enemy stats for example), so every game, at every skill level is constantly reinforcing and building the skills required to obtain mastery.

Frequently Asked Questions:

When putting forward drafts of this document in the Discord these are some questions that arose:

Game Length:

Question: Quick game is described as taking 1-2 hours (same length as current game), but I can beat the game in 30 mins?

Answer: Times listed for each game mode are based on a theoretical average. Despite the game becoming significantly more complex, I will be working hard to maintain the fast pace of play we've always enjoyed so you can just adjust the listed times based on your own play speed i.e. someone currently completing the game in 30 mins will still be able to complete quick play objectives in 30 minutes and the standard full game should only take them 2-3 hours.

Preparing for The Core:

Question: If The Core has fire-related drops, where would you go to acquire say fire resistance? Would there be a 'mini-core'? Would all fire enemies have a chance of dropping fire related stuff regardless of their biome? To prepare for the Core i mean, you need fire resist. Where would you find that fire resist. Same question applies generally to all themes.

Answer: There would be a combination of ways the player could prepare for, in this example The Core:

  • First, there will still be general loot tables that will be used in all zones. So there is still a random chance to find any stuff anywhere. This helps to keep runs varied. In each run, you may just randomly, due to general loot tables, be better or worse equipped to take on The Core. Of course there are many items on the general loot table currently that may be moved to zone, or even enemy specific tables.
  • Based on the way that zones connect to each other, more specific zones will branch off of less specific zones. So there are zones that the player can use as a preparation for later zones (the 'mini-core' described in the question). In the case of The Core we could imagine a connection as follows:
    • The Sunless Desert: minor fire theme with some fire based enemies and drops.
    • The Core: major fire theme with many fire based enemies and drops.
    • Fire Dungeon: extreme fire theme with all fire based enemies, a fire based boss, and fire drops.
  • There would be sub-areas of other zones that would be fire themed as well. These mini-zones could be another way of thinking of 'mini-cores'. An important side note is that the game will have many methods of 'looking ahead' on the world map through finding map shards, using magic, paying npc scryers etc. so the player would be able to locate these sub-areas ahead of time and specifically go to them. These sub-areas would be have a theme unifying their enemies and drops but due to their small size, and the fact that they will include say 50% standard enemies from the surrounding zone they are not quite as intense and could be tackled before attempting something like The Core. Some examples:
    • A sub area of The Iron Fortress: The Iron Forge
    • A volcano rising in the middle of The Under Grove
    • A whole section of The Arcane Tower with predominantly fire based magic casters
  • This idea can be extended all the way down to something as small as the unique rooms + unique npcs that have been introduced in the game lately. Again these would be locatable beforehand on the world map so the player may enter a zone specifically to find the room containing a specific mini-boss type npc that is known to drop a fire resistance item.

Game Difficulty:

Question : will the game become harder or will it stay approximately the same? (Can also be read as : will fail rates increase in the long run, decrease, or stay the same?).

Answer: This is actually a neat area where we can have much more variability.

  • Easier for new players doing quick objectives with an easy race.
  • Harder for expert players doing harder objectives with harder races.

Expanding on the idea of Victory+ conditions: A big part of the Victory+ conditions is not going to be making the game just drag out like 14 rune runs in crawl. Rather, using the same idea as the 'Pressure Clock' described above, in order to achieve a Victory+ win, a player may need to reach certain points, prevent certain events, do other events etc. within certain very tight time constraints. In this way, an expert player attempting a 'hard' victory must play faster, riskier, more optimally and just generally 'better' literally from the first turn of the game. Ideally a Victory+ win will not require substantially more time than a standard victory but rather will simply demand a much higher level of play over the course of the entire game.

A word on future race balance: races will eventually be balanced (or unbalanced depending on your perspective), to have very clear easy, medium and hard races. In this way they can act as an organic difficulty setting for players. Generally speaking we will attempt to get the easier races somewhat easier than the current difficulty to help smooth new players learning curve and hard races will be substantially harder than the current game to continue to challenge even the most advanced players.