Now that Alpha19 is out, fixing many technical and other issues introduced earlier, a lot of weight is off my chest . Players seem to enjoy the Adventurer campaign greatly. So far 782 Adventurers have been played, compared to 838 Keepers. The total number of turns spent by Adventurers is only 886 thousand compared to 5.4 million in Keeper mode, but that was expected as the games are much shorter. Big thanks to everyone who agreed to sending game statistics, I promise not to target any ads based on your sadistic deeds in the game. 😀
I’m now going to work on gameplay improvements, mostly in the basebuilding department. It has long been known that the game suffers from poor progression mechanics. Currently the player only faces a few major challenges, and the road to victory is either quick or contains long stretches of boredom. My ambition is to change that in Alpha20 and later.
I’ve played a few good basebuilding games recently, and I think the goal of the game should be putting visible and well defined challenges in front of the player, sometimes letting him or her create their own. The tools to beat the challenges should be easily discoverable (big bonus if there are multiple ways to do it). Challenges can be external, like enemy attacks, or internal, like a food shortage or a desired improvement in the base.
My goal is to set up the gameplay of KeeperRL as a long string of challenges of growing difficulty. It’s a ridiculously hard thing to do, of course, and requires a lot of trial and error. Ultimately, however, I think it’s essential for KeeperRL to be a game that people keep playing for many years.
I’ll write about some of my ideas soon, and I hope to hear your comments. With a lot of the technical stuff behind me, I’m hoping for really fast progress.