Retention
One
of the main things our game lacks so far is the draw for the player to return
to play and the aspiration goal – the thing the player would like to achieve
overall etc. We have discussed having loot in the game, like a lot of dungeon/rogue-types.
Loot and collectibles are an excellent incentive, but I have been pondering
over what the loot would be used for. There must be another way to keep the
player coming back to play/spend loot etc though. On a high level it should be
loot-survive-escape-spend loot-adventure further-repeat
One
idea I had was that loot could be spent to accumulate multiple characters with
different traits you could 'buy' or upgrade and use, and perhaps take a little
team back into the labyrinth eventually. Though that makes the scope much
bigger than I had intended,
A simpler method for now would be character-development. the player can take the loot they have earned in the dungeon and use it in the main menu to spend on developing their character stats before returning into the dungeon to travel and fight further than before in a newly created menu.
Editor Tools
Editor Tools
Chris has been working on the visuals of a piece collision
editor. Once he has done that, he plans to work on the actual maze/dungeon
generator and then navgrid generation and pathfinding.
Creating a path through the maze
It's a modular piece editor which allows you to decide which
directions you can enter and exit each tile from. We were going to have a few
set paths and rooms and then they could be programmatically rotated to suit the
map. Chris had just figured out the rotation for the navgrid, when we
discovered that this maze creation method was not going to work visually using
the rotation.
1. We discussed at this point if the view would be fully
top-down similar to the example on the left...
with this we would be able to rotate each room/path and most of the objects in the environment would be seen top-down
2. ...or tilted up slighting, similar to the example on the right...
this view gives a better perspective of the environment and allows for interesting visual barriers/blockages that the player will need to overcome and it is also a more attractive angle to look at the assets and animations...
a downside to this is that we will need bespoke wall tiles for the top and lower wall sections as well as the side walls.
Even though Chris has finished the navgrid at this point, we both decided to go for the second POV option. It does mean that we will need to make bespoke prefab sections for each path rotation, but I think it will pay off. We want to avoid rotating the pixel art since it will look odd.
Tile division
Looking ahead
Chris and I spoke at length over F2P/P2P prospects. We both
prefer P2P, but agreed that F2P is the way to go for our mobile title. We would
like to aim for P2P for a potential steam release much later on though.
Chris and I spoke at length over F2P/P2P prospects. We both
prefer P2P, but agreed that F2P is the way to go for our mobile title. We would
like to aim for P2P for a potential steam release much later on though.
