Dungeon Explorer
Diablo-style game with procedural items, progressive difficulty, leveling and map variety. (Still in early development)
On game start, a dungeon, race, and story is randomly chosen. Enemies spawn in the dungeon with a coherent random pattern. The player then selects a hero and wages battle against these enemies with his/her allies. Killing enemies provides experience and loot, which are used to progress the hero with abilities and crucial stat increases.
This game has constant expansion and ambitions. Here are some more details about the basic game design above:
- The possible enemy races are Bandit Terran, Rogue Protoss, and Feral Zerg.
- In each race is a unique combination of available trash mobs, elite mobs, and bosses.
- The dungeon is populated with five elite packs (4 in an elite pack), five trash packs (6 in a trash pack), fifty random trash mobs, and one boss.
- A storyline is chosen randomly among a list of eight, and fitted with the race.
- Items that drop have stats generated at runtime. There are ten different slots for an item. and each item can be one of 6 tiers. Each tier offers a different range of bonuses. The drop rate and other item stat parameters are tied uniquely to each mob. Intuitively, elites drop better loot than trash, and bosses have the best loot. There is immense variability in this though.
Tuning the monsters and implementing a way to adjust difficulty are some of my current top priorities.
I can be reached on skype [invalidskypenam3]. I am active from about 3 PM-2 AM CDT.
I am changing the status to inactive, because I am starting school next week. I have a lot on my hands with that and my job so there is just no time to be continuing development on this. I may do some work on the weekends but much fewer updates should be expected. I hope you guys had a good summer!
Edit: Inactive looks a lot worse than I was expecting, I will just leave it as Alpha.
Okay, the new one is up (sorry for the wait). I will work on returning monster generation, and I think I'll handle elite packs similar to Diablo, where they roll affixes. The main features to notice for this release are the planned spells for the ninja/wizard, the map generation, and the nice clean item interfaces (swapping items with the stash is bugged I think).
As an update, I haven't posted the newest version because the random maps still have some issues and I have to recode the monster spawning trigger. When those are where they need to be, I will tie up a stable version and release it. It could be another week or two, or more, so just hang in there.
Yeah, that's the idea, make what is fun for you. Best of luck!
@DuckyTheDuck: Go
For generating stats, one stat is chosen to roll the highest values, a second to roll less, etc. The objective of this was to make players decide about their pieces of gear about which stat would be the best in the circumstance of the two items. I have noticed that the differences in the main stat and other stats are too randomized. I want the players to really think about two pieces of gear, which one to use. Not necessarily wear A armor in X situation but switch to B armor in Y situation. I was planning on adding extra stats that only roll on rare, epic, and legendary items though.
You mentioned you've been pulling some example from a game you've played before. Admittedly, I am also doing something similar. Diablo III for me was a fun and engaging game that gave me many hours of entertainment. I wanted to make a game that gave entertainment in a similar way.
Don't cling to feedback, I've only said that random dungeons are nice because they are nice and because I thought you've already had them (when you wrote "dungeon is randomly chosen" I interpreted it as that). If you decide to implement procedurally generated map now out of the blue it may completely dry you out :/
On the aesthetics side, it's somewhat forgivable when you name your archons and zealots as wizards & knights. Models are secondary to gameplay and design, though if you mix up sc and wow models it may feel like a really big mess due to a bit different styles.
On items: if you don't like useless stats - don't add them (I don't), but the thing is, affixes/suffixes are in a games to encourage diversity and variety, it's like a minigame where you take a break from constant action to figure out how to best arrange certain elements in your character puzzle. They are like a puzzle in themselves that help you solve particular parts of game.
For example a stat "prevent monster heal" can seem useless with regular sc2 enemies, until you add enemy that has insane health regeneration, or packed enemies with some sort of shaman that has annoying healing abilities. Think of unique monster mechanics and of ways to counter those with random item stats. Enemies have huge armor - add "crushing blow" that temporarily destroys armor, Enemies annoy you with missiles, have a stat that can redirect % of missiles away. Enemies knock you back and stun you - add hit recovery.. Stuff like this is cool (though none of my examples were original, all came from a certain game =D)
Also, the less item slots you have - the more awesome stuff you can do with them. Item slots are coolest when you can feel that they are different (for example most armor stats focus on defense, rings on on general buffs, helmet on defense + support, boots on speed and maybe resistance and so on..). Otherwise they become bland and boring where each slot just adds a random amount of same old goddamn attribute (str,dex,int,vit). Too much of same thing is not very fun.
But again, take what I say with the grain of salt, your own critical thinking should arrange your priorities and designs. Even if you fail, it'll be a precious experience, so nothing is ever in vain.
@DuckyTheDuck: Go
Thank you for the feedback. A random dungeon is appealing and it would tie in well with this game, so I think I'll spend some time designing a way to make a random map.
As for the aesthetics, even more so than the monsters are the heroes! A wizard looking like a wizard, etc., would be really nice. However I am no expert at modeling/animations and I think these will have to do.
As for the item system, I'm also not quite satisfied with it yet. I am considering adding level requirements and an according stat generation adjustment. Item suffixes is a good idea, I think I'll do that. As for the miscellanous stats, shining, damage versus undead, better prices, etc., I've always found those distracting, and I want to keep it simple so for now I am hesitant about adding more attributes. Edit: As it pertains to the preview icon, yeah, the feet tooltip might not be the best idea.
A randomly generated coherent dungeon! This certainly tingles me in a good way.
About aesthetics, games with loot such as boots and swords that sticks to default sc2 atmosphere (such as admitting that protoss/zerg/terran units are infact protoss/zerg/terrans) feel off.
Also, in preview icon that "feet" is uninspired. Wouldn't it be more interesting if it was something like "Sword of Heroic Hero: +10 to shining; +44 to NPC admiration; -52 enemy enthusiasm per attack; 14% of heart attack."
I'll probably wait till beta is ready to check it out.
@EDHRIANO: Go
Each map currently has a boss spawn area which spawns one of three possible bosses for that race. When I go through and edit each monster I'll try to make the bosses interesting.
Boss battle of course.
I posted the map here on SC2Mapster to see if the community had suggestions while I am developing it. I'm sure many of you have played some kind of game in this genre. What is a feature you think the game should have to stand out?