Better Treasures
One of the core pillars of Dungeontop’s design is strategic choices. We’ve been trying to push this angle with every content push going forward, and one of the areas we could see this failing was the treasure cards.
Previously, the treasure cards all gave reasonably powerful effects, but were consumed on use. The thinking here was to provide a choice between using these cards and cashing them in at the shops, but this was flawed thinking; With this design, the cards were only considered usable when your back was really against the wall, and even then, they didn’t feel good to use. All they’d end up doing was bricking in your hand when you were stable, getting you into a bad situation later down the line and force you to use them anyway.
The new treasures do not consume on use. They are also powerful, at par or sometimes even better than level 1-2 cards from drops. We hope that this encourages you to think long-term about their use - Maybe you want to keep them now and upgrade later? Or maybe it’s better to reduce deck pollution early even if it drops your overall power level right now?
Only time and testing will prove if this change is truly better, but from early feedback in the Discord, it seems to be a well-received change.
Encounter Complexity
Those of you who have been playing since the beginning of alpha stage may notice a significant decrease in the difficulty of encounters on the first floor.
This is for two reasons, the first being onboarding - If you’ve been playing for a little while and are already comfortable with our mechanics, you may not have noticed, but the game had quite a sharp learning curve. We’re trying to tamp that down as much as possible to make the first-time experience more enjoyable.
The second is reduction in complexity, which does not necessarily equate to making the game easier. During this alpha stage, we’ve made a lot of very complicated mechanics. Some of these have been very fun to engage with, some decidedly were not (Looking at you, Cleave + Guardian). As we remove some of these junk mechanics, we’re also trying to boil down the best mechanics to keywords to prevent the ‘word salad’ problem some of our cards have and reduce the amount of reading you need to do. Ideally, you should be able to understand most encounters within one pass of reading, and even our most complex encounters should not take more than a second scan to parse. If this isn’t the case, we have a problem, and we’d like to hear about it.
Thanks,
Bryn ‘Jammy’ Welch
DungeonTop Designer