Hello everyone!
Working through some of my old notes alongside the next update (should be done on Friday), and figured I'd give an updated rough roadmap of the sort of stuff I'd like to work on over the course of Early Access.
New Classes
I would like to add at least 2-3 new classes to the core game with likely candidates being: Earth Mage, Summoner, and Spell Sword (some kind of magic melee). I want to keep the core classes quite tight and without much overlap so each new class really needs to justify its existence. Furthermore since the classes will often be force either in the daily challenge or due to some of the Ranked-Mode modifiers, I don't want to include anything really weird in the core set.
With that being said I'd also like to include properly integrated mod support through steam which should make it easy for others to add new classes and get them out their to the community. I'm even planning on using this feature myself to add any classes that seem neat buy might not quite justify being part of the core class set. I regularly get suggestions for classes that are really interesting but might not quite mesh with the whole game. Given that I can often knock these things out in an afternoon I figure I can just upload them as 'mods'.
New Races
Possibly as many as double the current races (so maybe 8 more). Unlike classes, whose talents are then available to everyone else during a dungeon run, races are much more self-contained and are really supposed to be sort of weird. Of course I still want to be conscious of daily challenge and ranked-mode (so don't include anything too crazy), but I think its much more likely that I'll end up adding quite a few more races to the game.
New Zones
At the very least I'd like to add at least these 3 new zones. With sub-zoning (see below) the question will arise of what should be a zone and what should be a sub-zone. Depending on how work goes in the future its possible that certain sub-zones may grow to the point that they get converted to a proper zone.
- Wilderness: I'd like to split The Under Grove into a purely traditional fantasy forest zone and a proper jungle zone since currently it includes elements from both. This would give us 4 zones in The Wilderness.
- Branch-1: The Undersea - a zone themed around sea life, pirates and storm enemies. We need a storm focused zone to complete Branch-1 and pirates are cool... arrrr.
- Branch-2: I have a few different ideas bouncing around for this one but I definitely want to get 4 zones here as well.
Sub-Zones
This is going to be the primary way in which new content is introduced to the game. Basically every zone will eventually have something like 10 or more sub-zones created each based on some highly specific sub-theme, special mechanic or challenge related to the overall zone. When the dungeon is generated some levels in each zone will be generic but others will be generated based on one of many randomly selected sub-zones. So each trip through a zone will have you potentially facing quite drastically distinct levels. Some simple examples could be:
- The Crypt: A graveyard level, a level haunted by slow moving, unkillable ghosts that chase you around and phase through walls. Some sort of 'toxic crypt' full of toxic themed undead.
- The Sunless Desert: inside a pyramid level, wasteland level (like the boneyard thing in Lion King)
- The Iron Forge: lots of possibilities here based around different 'machine' mechanics. Each sub-zone could have some sort of different special environmental mechanic.
- Orc Fortress: barracks, ogre caves, arena challenge level, prison etc.
Each sub-zone will include some specifically chosen subset of content from the main zone and will also include its own totally unique monsters, items, environment objects, and in some cases special level wide mechanics. As development progresses and we build up more content, many of these sub-zones will also begin to appear as branches within the zone so the overall dungeon structure will become a bit less linear. This is important as many of these sub-zones will have very specific challenges that certain builds will want to avoid and possibly even skip over in certain runs.
New Bosses
I'd like to bring the numbers up to about 4 major bosses per zone and rework many of the existing boss fights to be more elaborate, challenging, memorable etc. I'm definitely excited to implement multi-tile bosses, for example: just a big dude (say dragon), a long snake like boss, segmented boss like a main body w/ 2 sperate hands, some sort of central core with rotating parts etc. Lots of possibilities here to really make these boss fights shine.
I'd also like to add a lot more mini-bosses. Some zones currently have none, but I'd like to get this up to about 8-10 per zone since they tend to break up the dungeon with nice spikes of challenge and excitement. Many sub-zones may in fact be based around some sort of specific mini-boss so when you see that sub-zone you'll know there's a boss lurking around somewhere. I'd also like to add a bunch more phases to Yendor while reworking the existing ones.
Ranked Mode
Planning on beginning work on this next week. Players can choose to play the game in Ranked-Mode in which case starting in Bronze the player will work their way up to whatever rank they can manage. Win's will progress your rank, losses will reduce it (might be mitigated by how far you got). Will need to tune the numbers somewhat and add some stuff so that a player on a win streak will gain rank faster but basically the players going to have to maintain at least a 50%+ win average to progress.
A whole bunch of game wide modifiers will be added with some of them starting right in bronze and others restricted to only the higher ranks. When the player starts a Ranked-Game a number of modifiers (based on rank) are randomly selected and displayed to the player before he makes his character selection. These modifiers will make some specific aspect of the game significantly harder ex. all archers have max range, all healers have no heal cooldown. High rank modifiers will be more elaborate. Basically each run is going to become more challenging, but in some unique and different way each time. At the highest ranks the ways in which multiple (think 5-6) modifiers all stack up should create some pretty crazy runs.
The player will be able to play a game at any rank lower than his current one though only playing at the current rank will actually progress. You will almost certainly not be able to lose a rank once you've achieved it. Finally, this mode will be completely optional, the base game will remain as the default easy/normal difficulty.
Hero Academy
This is how I'd like to add a bit of a tutorial to the game while also being so much more. The Hero Academy will consist of a whole bunch of little self contained 'challenges' possibly broken into different tracks (the tutorial being just one of the tracks). These challenges will spawn the player in a precisely predefined scenario i.e. a specific room, with specific enemies, with a specific character with set items, talents etc. The player may even start at half HP, or already poisoned etc.
From the tutorial perspective, I can create a whole bunch of these that basically force the player to understand a particular core tactic in the game. Consider a room with a table in the middle and a slow moving ogre you need to kite around it to kill it or a swarm of enemies that will easily kill you but there's a nearby choke point.
What I think is neat is this can be expanded to include all sorts of really tricky problem scenarios for more experienced players. This would be the sort of place that I'd love to get some contributions from the community from people who like to come up with insane and intricate challenges. This is a way of distilling those critical 'oh shit' moments that occur during a regular run in which the next 5 turns or so completely determine success or death.
Talent Trees
I'd like to overhaul the talent system so that each talent has 2 or more possible upgrades to allow for increases customization and build diversity. My current thinking is that the player can only choose 1 of these upgrades so you can't just sink all your points into a single talent. While the current system often has 2 or more stats improving on upgrade, this system would be more specific but with much larger bonuses.
Misc Stuff:
- Full keyboard controls that are just as efficient to play with as mouse + keyboard.
- Full options menu. Really anything that anyone could conceivably want to adjust, I'd like to include as an option.
- A whole bunch more little lore tidbits and in game environmental story telling. Really build up Yendor as a character and make the dungeon feel like a coherent believable place.
- Much better mod support that is integrated into Steam.
- Steam Achievements.
- A 'training room' where players can test stuff out.
- New music, sound effects and animations.
- Some kind of in game manual/wiki that gives some details on all the core mechanics, stats and controls that are not currently explained.
I'm sure there's more that I'm missing but this should give a decent overview of roughly what I'm planning for the next 3 years.