[Devlog] Designing the Dungeons

Hello,

its been a while since the Alpha 0.2 Update and I'm happy with the current design state of the game. There are some bugs that needs to be fixed and alot of balancing to do, but in the end, I'm having a ton of fun playing the game and do a run every other day while adding new content. Right now, the game has all features that I wanted to implement and now whats missing is alot of content to make every run feel different and unique. For the upcomming Version Alpha 0.3 I'm planning to include new difficult modes and the fourth and final dungeon. Thus making a run and the overall feel of progression complete. 

When comming to designing the run the most important thing is to have fun and still be challenging. Doing big combos and dealing alot of damage or slowly killing the enemies with DoT abilites, all of this should feel satisfying and rewarding. This all depends on the fights and therefor the enemy design (and alot of balancing). In this Devlog I want to share my thought on designing fights and trying to create a difficult curve.

First of all, a run is devided in 4 dungeons. The first dungeon is the tutorial and should make sure the player knows the basics of the game. This dungeon contains 3 normal fights and 1 elite fight. The normal fights have mechanics, that should teach the player to use his Block-Ability to defend and his Wait-Ability to get a better position in the move order. The elite fight is there to check, that the player can use his Block-Ability. Cause the Block-Ability and Wait-Ability are fundamental mechanics in my game, I think its important to teach players in the early stages about these abilities. To do so there is an enemy called Gesp which has the Sting ability. Sting does alot of damage but is nullified against target with Shield. All classes can gain Shield with their Block-Ability. This should push the player in the right direction.

The second dungeon is about aggro controll and targeting. Alot of fights are designed in the direction of targeting the right enemy down or changing the target of an enemy towards your tank (or others). Controlling the targets of the enemies is also a core mechanic of the game and each character can do so. If a battler is faster than the target, the target will change his attack to the attacker. Being faster than the enemy means you can mostly controll which enemy attacks which character. Also there are enemy that will use defensiv abilities, so that targeting them results in a less effectiv turn. Targeting the right enemies in a fight is the lesson the player should master to complete this dungeon.

The third dungeon has two goals. One to just bash enemies with you abilites and feel good. The other is to fight against the enemy. For the first one, there is now a fight, where the enemies are weak and less complex, so the player can just use their combo and feel good. The more fights in the dungeon, the player should learn to not just use his strongest abilites on turn one and hope he can kill the enemy as fast as possible. While the other dungeons are not ability specific, in this dungeon the player needs to think what ability to use when. Just using the ability with the most damage when its not on Cooldown will likely result in a loss against certain enemy troops. There for it is alot about thinking and going with the flow of the fights instead of sticking to Plan A and trying to brute force a win.

The fourth and last dungeon is about team synergy. While all the lessons learned in the previous dungeons apply here too, the player now needs a balanced party to succeed. 3 Damage dealer will not do the deed and neither 3 Tanks. The team of the player needs tools to deal with certain situations depending on their teams weaknesses and strenght. If the player doesn't know how his team functions together, they won't succeed in this dungeon. If the player has a damage dealer without defensive abilities or attributes they need to have a good support or defender, to protect the damage dealer. If the team is about a long fight, there need to be tools to deal with Poison and other strong DoT effects. If the team has mostly AoE abilites, there should be a Plan to deal with strong single targets enemies. Basecly the idea is that the player can't just put all their eggs in one basket. 

These are ideas I wanted to share.

Cheers and thanks for reading.