Starting to work on what will be the main focus for the first month of development: expanding the scope and complexity of the dungeon itself. This will be a rough process that is going to make the balance go a little wild for awhile so bear with me and please report any issues or concerns.
Dungeon Expansion Overview/Goal:
I view the game as broken into 3 phases: early, middle and late game.
Early game is floors 1-8. These levels need to be balanced in such a way that they are challenging to all builds without any extreme counters as the player has no chance at this point to acquire special defense or offense. This phase of the game should be linear for simplicity sake
Mid game is everything between floors 9-12 including the branches. This is where the bulk of the expansion will be taking place. Branch zones are important because they can be tackled in any order or skipped entirely. This means that they can be much more specifically challenging and have hard counters to certain builds. I'd like to build up the mid game to be more freeform, where the player has choice/strategy decisions to make regarding the order in which he tackles the various levels.
Late Game is the dive into Yendor for the goblet. The Yendor levels should be very challenging with individual monsters or level features hard countering many abilities. A character should need to have at least some breadth in their build and the player should know how to use it to survive here.
Dungeon Expansion Implementation:
So obviously we are currently far away from this goal. The way I will be working on moving the game in this direction is pretty much by doing two things:
1) Adding more content into the mid game. New zones, new branches, new special levels. The overall size (as in number of dungeon levels) of the mid game will be increasing. I will be working at the same time continuously refine the existing zones with the goal of making them distinct from each other and with unique challenges and game play.
2) Because this will be adding more loot and experience into the game, I will be continuously working to make the Yendor levels harder. Extremely good players will always be able to dive Yendor with less preperation, but the goal is to make them hard enough that completing at least some of the mid game is the recommended path.
Todays Updates:
The Lich Kings Lair:
- A mini branch that spawns on Crypt:4
- Eventually all Tier 3 zones will have multiple mini branches like this that will be randomly selected.
- Has its own unique dungeon generation.
- Has an altar at the far side of the level that, until destroyed, will cause the skeletons on the level to continuously resurrect.
- Theres also the lich king himself and a 3-choice crystal chest at the end.
- The crystal chests will eventually contain a set of items unique to this area.
Yendor Changes:
- Rebalanced the spawn tables a bit to make the actual monsters unique to Yendor a bit more common.
- Added the tentacle terror which was implemented but apparently I forgot to add as a spawn.
- Added lava eels since lava can now spawn here.
UI and Quality of Life:
- Numpad 5 will now wait/rest/'accept' a spell or attack as would be expected.
- Moving with the num pad will now instantly snap the character as occurs in most classic roguelikes (this will eventually be togglable for players who prefer slower keyboard movement).
Items:
- Charm of Swiftness: granting the sprint ability since blink charms were removed.
Balance Changes:
- Drachnids will now be immune to unstable in the same way as generic spiders.
- Reduced the max number of spawns from spawners from 5 to 3. Generally they never get a chance to spawn all their mobs and since you get the total exp when killing them they result in massive exp boosts. In the cases where they do get a chance to spawn all 5 waves it tends to just be tedious.
I'm also going to start setting up a section in the forums to post all of my design plans, goals and overall vision for early access so that you can get an idea of where I'd like to take the project.