Next game idea: Dungeonmancer

The other day at work, I was messing with drag and drop in Flex for the first time and was surprised at how easy it is. As always, my mind starting thinking "how can I make a game out of this?" And the answer was obvious: Make a dungeon!! I played Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground for PSP a LOT. Way too long, far past when the game is interesting and fun and deep into the terrain of "this game sucks, but how does it end?"

In Dungeon Maker, you run around in your quasi-3d dungeon, building it block by block with pieces you buy from the builder in town. Then the next day you go back and the dungeon is full of monsters. You kill the monsters, get gold, buy more materials, build more dungeon, which attracts more and bigger monsters. Kill more monsters, get more gold... etc for 100 hours or until your throw your PSP at the wall. The dungeon building is simple and fun, the combat system sucks. And the game wears out eventually; the builder doesn't make enough blocks per day, which slows down your building and makes it a very annoying game.

Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2, for PC, were fun games. You built the dungeon, summoning imps to do the grunt work. The rooms you have in your dungeon dictate what monsters will be attracted. Then you send your monsters at the enemy dungeon keeper or at invading heroes and progress to domination of the underworld.

So I'm thinking of how to combine these into a fun game built in Flex. Building the dungeon would be an exercise in drag and drop. You could only place certain types of tiles next to other tiles. Like if you have a tile that's a hallway going north-south, you can't put an east-west hallway next to it. And you can only place a tile next to an existing tile and not have a hallway going to the edge of the map.

Then my mind wandered to "what's the point of building a dungeon?" and the obvious answer "why, for other players to pillage!" This brings up the ideas of using LiveCycle services to track multiple players in the same dungeon at once, maybe traversing it together in a party. Haven't gone into that realm before and don't even know where there's a hosting company that offers it, and how much that would cost.

And what about a combat system? Dungeon Maker's combat suuuucks. It's hack and slash, but you end up caring more about a weapon's speed and attack shape more than how much damage it does. So I used a mace I got on level 4 of my dungeon all the way to level 15. In Dungeon Keeper, you personally have spells, but it's your monsters that do all the real combat. I keep a notebook of my game ideas and flipping through, found I wrote up some ideas about a combat system that's almost completely magic based. You get a book that'll cast Fireball or Chain Lightning or Heal. Then you collect pages to modify the spell. Add a page to increase the damage, make it cast faster, give it some added burning damage over time or status effects, restore health to the user, etc. Once you've filled the book with pages, you can seal it and inscribe it to a weapon or armor, so the spell can be cast from that or will automatically go off when the weapon is used or the armor is hit.

But any game that runs in a browser has one major vulnerability... Clickers. If a game doesn't limit how much a person can do in a day and if the game design itself doesn't limit it, you could get people that create a macro to play the game for them, ruining the balance of the game. But if you do limit how much a person can do in a day, they may forget to return tomorrow and will quit your game in a few days. RaceWarKindgoms(.com) was a fun one for this. Stupid game only works in IE... But you click to summon a monster, click to attack until it's dead, then click to summon the next. With no limits. Eventually you'll level up and will have to select what stat to increase. Very macro-able. I think the very design of exploring other players' dungeons and killing monsters you encounter will keep this from happening. It would take a tiny bit of intelligence to be able to navigate a dungeon I should think. And if someone goes through the trouble of making a macro to work on my little game, I'll hire them.

Death... The last several online games I've quit, it's been for speed of game play. Specifically the speed lost when your hit points reach 0. In The Realm, you lost experience, up to a full level. They put that cap in later, used to be a fraction of your total XP. Plus you could randomly drop anything in your inventory, including your weapons and armor, for anyone to pick up. In Asheron's Call 2, if you died, you had to run back to your corpse. If you died, you were likely confronting something more powerful than yourself. Now you have to run back to your body, naked, to recover your gear, equip it, and get out before you're killed again. City of Heroes, if you die, you get experience debt, which slows your level gain rate. Die a few more times before that's repaid and soon all your XP gained is going towards the debt. World of Warcraft (which has the best death system), you lose durability on items you were wearing and have to run back to your corpse, but at least you can resurrect yourself 30-40 yards from where you died, far enough to avoid what killed you. With any game, death recovery must be quick and not make you lose so much that it's not worth continuing.

Well here I've spent an hour writing a very long post that no one will read instead of actually making this game :) But if you do get this far and have an idea, post away!