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.