Hello and welcome Alpha Testers!
After several false starts, I've spent the last 4-5 months just experimenting with the game. Trying out a lot of new ideas, tweaking and changing things to see what happens. Adding things that seem interesting in the moment to see how they work out. I wasn't following any concrete plan and I tried not to overthink things to much. I was really just 'thinking out loud' but in code and content, trying to zero in on a few key areas or changes that I'd like to focus on for Rogue Fable IV.
In the past few weeks these areas of focus have started to crystalize in my mind and I think I have a pretty good idea of both the final vision for the project and also the rough road map leading there. Since I've been working these ideas out in the game rather then on paper I've actually got a working prototype now that at least partially demonstrates some of these major ideas. Of course there's a whole bunch of other stuff in there that's either the beginnings of something genius or else is completely stupid, nonsensical and was added on some semi-coherent whim. Overall its safe to say that its about as rough as Rogue Fable III was in early alpha for those who remember that mess.
Rough as it may be, I'm excited to start getting some feedback and suggestions especially at this early stage before I really commit to anything drastic. I think the main challenge is distinguishing what changes and additions are actually important to the new vision for the project and what's just noise and loose ends. The overall vision for the project is quite large and ambitious and I'll be documenting it on the various pages of this site but right now the goal for Alpha is to get to a Web Release sometime in November of 2023. The Web Release will be a much smaller and more limited project that is intended to attract new players to the project and also act a a solid foundation for the bulk of the work that will occur during Steam Early Access. So the following is what I'll be focusing on during Alpha and should be completed and polished for the Web Release.
From a balance perspective this is probably the largest change and the one that will require the most refinement to get working. There are many benefits to this system.
Every single fight becomes important, since health is ultimately finite. Every bit of player skill and optimization is rewarded by conserving resources.
Managing these resources becomes a meta game in itself. Timing level ups, food consumption, player and item abilities will be important to conserving the shrooms and fountains found in the levels.
The player will very often be entering fights without full HP and so a lot of challenge will arise from learning how to take calculated risks, knowing when to push and when to back up to recover.
Movement in combat becomes much more important in order to heal with shrooms and fountains. Smaller, denser levels will make it so that these important resources are never far away.
I want to get this balanced so that if a player is playing efficiently and is not trying to bash their way through a zone or level that completely counters their build, there should be enough resources on each level that back tracking is not normally neccessary. I DO NOT want the player spending a ton of time returning to previous levels just to heal. Ideally, clearing a level should also use up most of the healing resources so there shouldn't be much to return to and even if there is, then food should prohibit a ton of repetitive traveling.
The system of healing shrooms works best with the new level generation, best shown in The-Upper-Dungeon. The smaller levels make it easier to actually use the shrooms during combat. A lot of the later levels that are still using the old generation do not work nearly as well since often these resources are very far away. A big chunk of the development towards the Web Release will be reworking all existing level generation to make this work.
There are a number of ways I want to push the combat without necessarily changing any of the fundamentals.
I want the player to generally just be using more abilities. Abilities should be used more frequently and the player should use a larger set of different abilities rather than just spamming 1 or 2.
To do this, abilities should generally be a bit weaker but have shorter cooldowns or reduced mana usage. I also want to work on adding a lot of abilities that are very powerful and impactful but that do not necessarily just deal damage. I think having most characters have 2-3 offensive abilities and 2-3 defensive or utility abilities that are all used frequently would be a good goal to shoot for.
A ton of equipment, particularly in the later game, should have abilities connected to them. These Item-Abilities would have a number of different resource mechanics. Some might just be cooldowns but others could charge up when the player attacks, gets hit, casts spells, uses speed points etc. The simplest case is that I'm thinking of converting most of the weapons that have 25% proc chance to instead charge up a more impactful ability after say 10 attacks. This takes something uncontrollable and gives it to the player to use tactically. There is more of an incentive for players to look for opportunities to use their secondary weapon just to keep it charged, for example a mage getting some melee hits in occasionally to keep a Life-Tap daggers healing ability charged. Once an ability is charged, the player is then always looking for a way to use it somewhat quickly since every additional charging action after that point is wasted.
Most of the abilities that previously had long cooldowns (think anything more than 10) are going to be converted to have a single 'charge' that recharges each time the player levels up or is otherwise fully restored (fountains and potions). These can then be made much more impactful since the player has a limited number of uses. At the same time, the player is encouraged to look for uses since leveling up with abilities charged is a waste.
Enemies should generally be more individually powerful, come in mixed groups and be designed to work together, support and compliment each other.
All of this additional complexity for both the player and NPCs will be offset by a smaller average encounter size and less enemies per level. The typical encounter should have 3-4 enemies with 5-6 being very hard and anything above that being reserved for boss fights or very challenging vaults. So combat should still be pretty frantic and fast pace and levels should still be cleared quite rapidly.
This is likely the largest chunk of work I need to get done before Web-Release. The goal will be to convert all the existing generators to be inline with the new design ideas.
Levels should generally be smaller with a lot less empty space. The entire level should remain 'in play' during all encounters and the player should never be far from a patch of shrooms, choke point or bit of advantageous terrain. Of course the player is always never far from agroing another group of enemies so careful play will be encouraged.
Levels should be a lot denser with a lot more meaningful 'stuff' littering the floors and effecting combat. A lot of this 'stuff' should be new terrain or objects with special properties or effects. Vaults and levels should be non-symmetric so that there is some tactical difference between each corner or side of a space.
Basically the levels need to be designed from the ground up to support interesting combat taking place repeatedly over the same space rather then just being a collection of rooms and halls with some set dressing.
The plan is to have each generator be simpler, capable of producing a more unique and tightly designed level, but ultimately limited in the variety of its output. Achieving variety will then come from just having A LOT of these generators with wildly different designs.