The Perpetual Dungeon Project

[QuillQuickcard]

I've begun my latest project and it has a relatively simple goal:

To produce a map in which a player can dungeon crawl indefinitely while constantly increasing in power and gathering new and better loot.

After working on the Hive Community Map Project for so long, I've picked up lots of new skills, and I wanted to apply them to something new.

The general format of the map is as follows:

There are a series of interconnected square rooms with different terrain in them. When a player approaches a room, it is populated with a random selection of enemy units, doodads, and features fitting with the theme of the terrain and appropriate to the level of the player.

Upon defeating all of the enemies, the room opens and the player can move on. Loot is then generated. Each room provides a +1 tome for a random stat, 2 items of loot, and 2 ability books.

The player will not start out with any abilities in this map. He must collect ability books to gain abilities, ultimately, up to 5 of them at a time. All abilities are sorted into 5 categories and clearly labeled, so the player will always know when picking up a new book will replace one of his or her current skills.

The skills, enemies faced, and quality of loot all increase in power each time the player reaches a milestone level, such as 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, or 90. The max level for the character is 99, and the character only naturally gains 1 point in each stat whenever they level up, making dependence on loot and abilities mandatory.

For the time being, everything I'm using in the map is default editor stuff, though obviously with abilities, items, and a few units modified.


I've started constructing this map today, and I'll throw up a general prototype once I have at least 9 working rooms and content up to level 10. At that point, adding more will be relatively simple, as the framework for the entire project will allow easy modification.


I wanted to get a sense from the community what they think about the project and if they might have any suggestions for how I can improve my perpetual project.

 

[Dr Super Good]

This was already largely done by "Dungeon of Doom" around 10 years ago. In fact with exception of the abilities and tomes system as well as random destructibles it does exactly what you are planning. It used a class specialization system and standard WC3 style ability learning instead.

There are a few points with your proposal which might negatively affect player experience or how fun it is to play.

Square rooms get boring. You end up on a massive grid of squares traversing when you can while killing stuff. Even if you populate them with different themes, a square is still a square and the map will look like a grid. One could mix things up a bit by making double and even quad sized rooms which are more challenging. One could add special themed rooms which have intricate design features to use, eg water or rising/falling platforms. If one is very bold you could even make a random dungeon generator such as used by Diablo games which links repeating elements together to form a large area to explore.

Tomes for random stats, random items and random ability books all sound nice on the surface but when you actually play you end up frustrated. You always seem to get the wrong stat tomes, always get the items you do not need and always get the abilities you do not want. Sure it is all down to "randomness" but that is what it feels like to the player. From a player perspective it might be better to directly raise their stats DBZ Tribute Ultra style so that they get slightly stronger every room they clear, it also stops the problem of min-maxing giving everyone more rounded characters. Giving players lots of loot items and ability books is pointless if they already have a full inventory of that type and maxed abilities. It might be a good idea to increase drop rates when the stuff can drop "upgrade" items so that players upgrade faster and then on afterwards go to less purely random loot. Ability books should drop with a higher probability that are appropriate to the current abilities players use, resorting to random abilities only after the player maxes the ability out.

For abilities you could consider progression instead of simply leveling them up. Every 10 or 20 levels weak abilities get changed out for stronger ones. That storm bolt which stunned a single target for some damage could eventually be replaced by an ability which summons down a giant hammer for heavy damage and area stun. This allows you to limit ability choice at every level potentially allowing for more balance. It is almost certain that all abilities should scale with stats, otherwise auto attack abilities will always end up on top or cast abilities will be just plain old over powered (on the opposite extreme).

Auto scaling content is controversial. It is all fine and well in a game like Diablo III where your power scales as the enemies scale. However in a game where that is not necessarily the case (eg due to bad luck) you can end up forced to face content that is stronger than you when you do not want to. Further more it removes all illusion of you gaining power because as you gain power, the enemies gain power to cancel it out. As such it might be a good idea to allow choice of dungeon level, so players can still do weaker ones if they are having bad luck getting stronger.

Some form of hub area might be a good idea. Sure crawling dungeons infinitely is great, but one might want to rest out a second, or maybe have some sort of vague story or even select the start of dungeon to do. Would be very useful with save/load in case of large player level disparities.

You might also want to consider different base classes. Eg Warrior, Ranger and Mage. Each have different state rates and are limited to different abilities and items. This can force some diversity and at least limit the damage poor ability balance can do. Without it you might find everyone takes that IMBA AoE damage move you made when half asleep or the critical strike and dodge moves because casting abilities sucks when you can just obliterate stuff with auto attacks.

 

[QuillQuickcard]

It took far longer to get a prototype of this map ready than I had anticipated. I tried to keep the triggers as modular as possible so that I can modify substantial elements of the map with minimal difficulty.

So here's the situation:

This is a very preliminary test map for my Perpetual Dungeon Project. You pick a hero and start killing things and getting loot. And that's about it.

This build has 5 functioning rooms: the center area where you start out, and the rooms immediately north, south, east, and west of that center room. The finished map will have at least 25 of these rooms.

Each room currently has 2 types (or perhaps themes would be more accurate) of possible enemies. In the finished map, each room will have 5 types. Some of the existing themes do not yet populate their respective rooms with decorations. This is not a bug, just a bit of laziness.

The hero you play as can have up to 6 abilities. Currently, their are 5 abilities available per ability slot. The finished version will have dozens more skills available than this.

The hero you play as can currently only play up to level 19, one level short of activating the third tier of difficulty. In the finished map, the character can play up to level 99, through ten tiers of difficulty.

If you're feeling up to it, take the map for a 10-20 minutes test drive, and give me any thoughts or feedback. I really want to catch any game-breaking bugs at this point, before they become terrifyingly entrenched.