Tag: drafting

Designer Diary: Corrupted by Ruin #2

I spent the last week at a game design retreat, and among other things, one game I tested was “Corrupted by Ruin.” I don’t have a digital prototype yet, so I printed out some tetrominoes and monster cards and had people play it as though it were a board game.

There are some pretty significant differences between digital games and board games. Some games that work great in the digital realm fall flat in the real world, and some things don’t make the transition in the other way very well either. Still, paper prototyping is a great way to validate an idea, and it is a good sign if something works well even without a machine.

While playtesting, I realized that the triggering mechanism for an incursion makes a big difference in how it feels. Traditionally in tower defense games, the player alternates between constructing defenses and operating them (actively or passively) against regularly scheduled waves of intruders. For example, in “The Last Spell,” the player builds structures and upgrades their heroes during the day and then deploys them against the monsters that attack every night. I initially approached my design this way since it is about defending a dungeon against heroes.

The problem is that this leaves the player very little control over where the heroes enter the dungeon. A big part of the game is engineering encounters to maximize the effectiveness of the monster and room combinations. If the heroes can enter the dungeon anywhere, the player has little control over their path. Seeing where the heroes enter ahead of time doesn’t help much either because the player can’t rearrange their rooms to account for it.

So instead, I tried letting players trigger the incursions. I added “staircase” tiles around the map, and whenever a player would connect to a staircase tile, heroes would invade. The player’s incentive to go after staircases was that defeating heroes was necessary to win. The resulting game felt much more interesting to me. The player is still playing defense, but now they control when and where they fight the heroes.

Roguelike games tend to have a proactive aesthetic, where the player is constantly advancing spatially towards a goal. Reactive gameplay clashes with this. I tried out “Tower Tactics: Liberation,” a tower defense roguelike, and found this contradiction to stand out. You move from place to place, and in each location, you set up towers and defend against waves of enemies, but the contrast between the map movement and the lane defense is a little jarring. By flipping the script so that the heroes react to the player’s incursion, I hope to align the high-level gameplay aesthetic of conquering land after land with the lower-level conquest of a single kingdom.

Giving the players complete control of hero incursions also has implications for what happens when the heroes invade. Deterministic combat allows players to calculate the exact results of triggering a battle rather than relying on their heuristics. I want to avoid this because it is tedious for the player. Also, with more control over the path the heroes take comes the obligation to make the associated decisions more interesting. I think my current combat system is too plain to justify this, so I am starting to think about more interesting mechanics for combat. I will most likely want a puzzle of some sort.

Another problem that I solved through paper playtesting was how to handle monster recruitment. My previous system involved buying monsters from a pool of available ones, with new monsters unlocked by building specific types of rooms. That has three problems: First, it obligates the design of a matching room or monster even when it doesn’t necessarily make sense. Second, players already draft rooms, and doing the same for monsters feels repetitive. Third, it doesn’t interact very much with the tile-placement mechanics that are central to the game.

The solution turned out to be very simple – monsters, like gold, start each level embedded in the map. When you cover them with a tile, they join your dungeon. Now I can design monsters independently from rooms and even associate them with map types, and monster drafting interacts with room placement to enhance both.

To “mine” monsters out of the ground implies that monsters are a finite resource. Limited upgrades for monsters also make sense since they feel less generic than they would under a drafting system.

Cutting mining mechanics from Dungeon Rancher

Recently I oversaw a playtest of Dungeon Rancher in which rounds took 20 minutes (the target is 6). This was an increase of 4 minutes per round from the previous week, so I focused on determining why it was taking so long. It turned out the main culprits were the new dice-selling mechanic (which has since been removed) and the Mining Phase.

The Mining Phase was the mechanic I was most excited about going into the project initially. In games like Dungeon Keeper 2, there is a mechanic in which digging into a gold vein is likely to reveal further gold veins because they tend to be grouped. I wanted to replicate this feeling without any spatial elements by having decks of cards where certain cards allowed players to change the deck from which they drew.

We removed the mechanic of needing specific cards to switch decks after a previous playtest but left the four decks with different resources, each coded to one of the four needs of the game. The red deck had the least challenging monsters, allowing players to save minions for use generating red dice. The green and yellow decks provided green and yellow dice directly. And the blue deck provided tunnels and blueprints for building the rooms that passively generate magic each round.

Unfortunately, the mining phase takes too long. Players have also said that it feels very swingy; this is probably due to the threat system where resource cards have threat symbols that increase the strength of the next monster encountered if its color matches. Running into a lot of monsters means you won’t have time to gather resources, and finding many resources means the first monster you encounter will probably wipe you out.

The other cost of the mining phase is in explanation time. Between the threat system, the differences between the different decks, and capturing monsters, it adds a lot to the explanation time and some aspects are difficult for players to remember, such as the nuances of each mining deck.

As much as I wanted the mining mechanics to work, playtesting indicates that the cost is too high for what they add to the game. Therefore we are removing mining from the game. The core fantasy of the game is raising monsters, which does not require the mining minigame. To replace it, we are adding a Drafting phase in which players draft monsters, resources, and rooms into their dungeon. Drafting solves the problems that led to the removal of Mining because it takes very little time to explain and can be done quickly and simultaneously.

Drafting will hopefully also address feedback that the game lacks player interaction. The difficulty with player interaction is that it can lead to longer playtimes and is often not compatible with simultaneous gameplay. Drafting interactions are one of those rare exceptions.