Actually I think Sproggy will be great.
There was this old Dreamcast game, that was a dungeon crawler / town builder that I loved. I don't remember too much about it, except there was a fat man in a bathtub that you had to get soap for. Anyway, it sounds vaguely similar to that but more strategic?
Maybe a little like Valley Without Wind? Not sure as I failed to pick it up on the last Humble Bundle.
Do I have the general idea there? I think people would consume something like this, a town building strategy sort of thing?
Or is it more of an environmental balancing puzzle game?
It's really targeted at the mobile playstyle, where you sit down at the end of the day, or in line for something, or in transit somewhere. I'm a big fan of the Kairosoft games, but they increasingly feel to me like the choices you make don't matter, They're very fun, but hollow. My goal was to produce a game in that vein, playable in short sessions, but with a real skill-based game underneath.
The basic story is that of a foreign people pulled into a little wilderness, who have to carve out civilization from the wilderness. Early on your actions, which seem innocuous, have some unexpected and profound consequences that ultimately drive the plot.
The basic gameplay is centered around relatively short (3-4 level) roguelike adventures that are tactically dense. It's not quite a puzzle-game, the dungeons are bigger than your screen, and you move around and bump attack minions a lot, but the mechanics very carefully pruned down from a traditional roguelike. Each class has 5 abilities and can choose a weapon, armor and accessory at the start of an adventure. Each class ability uses stamina, and you regenerate stamina by killing monsters. There's no passive health regeneration at all, though you can find environmental effects or consumable items that will restore your health. We really wanted to try to encourage the really fun parts of roguelikes, which are moving forward and exploring, finding stuff (good and bad), and pounding on groups monsters with some tactical decision making; and discourage the less fun parts, like training monsters backwards through dungeons and running 5 floors back to regenerate health in safety before killing one more monster, to rinse-repeat.
Each adventure is self contained. The adventurer you go in with has his abilities and equipment set at the start (unless you find consumables or other boosting status effects in the adventure), but you collect resources that you can use to build your town up, and find items and equipment that you can use on your future adventures. Building your town up unlocks additional classes and abilities for those classes. As you level up associated buildings, at first you unlock your class abilities, and later you choose from a tree of options that let you customize and specialize the play-style of a class. As you advance through the plot, more dungeons become available to you; there's eventually around a dozen or so dungeons, each with a different set of possible monsters and environmental hazards, and each with two difficulty levels. It's not quite as infinite and open-ended an experience as something like Caves of Qud; but it's the sort of game I'd personally want to have on my tablet and phone, but just doesn't really exist.
That said, I'd also like a big graphical version of Caves of Qud on my tablet or phone, but that just doesn't make sense for us in terms of scope (yet). This game is reasonable in scope, so that it's something we can actually finish (barely), and it's the sort of game we like to play, so after quite a bit of deliberation, it became our first real commercial project. We'll see how it goes!
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Topic: Caves of Qud: Now in Open Beta (Read 570863 times)