Dev Diary #15 – Adventures

November 2nd, 2011 at 10:10 am

Let me first apologize for the interrupted communication over the last couple of weeks. I know we missed some card previews and last week’s dev diary was pretty short. 

The reason for this is that I’ve been travelling in the US and only just got back. Anyway, I’m back now and, as we discussed last week, we’re trying to finish up our current milestone which is about Adventures and loot gathering. So, I thought this week I’d fill you in a bit more on that front.

The Adventure is the basic building block of our single-player game. It’s a lot like a quest in a regular RPG – you get given a goal and you set off on an adventure to loot a long forgotten crypt, investigate a wizard’s tower or deliver a pizza to some hungry orcs (the last one of these may not make it into the final game). When you first set out on an adventure, all you know about it comes from the module introduction. Like this:


Now, you might be wondering how you can put that information to use. Partially this will depend on whether you know anything about lizardmen and the other kinds of monsters they hang out with. If you have encountered them before, you may already know their strengths, their weaknesses and what kind of tactics you’ll need to employ to beat them. And that’s important because you need to make sure that your party is kitted out to beat them.

Sometimes you can just wander into an adventure with whatever your favourite characters and gear happen to be right now and do just fine. But sometimes you’ll want to refine your load-out to deal with the specific kinds of enemies you might encounter. For example, you might know that lizard folk like to employ pinning javelins and nets that halt your characters – so taking cards that remove those halting states would be a good idea. Also, you might know that their tough leathery hide manifests itself in a fair number of Armor cards, so you’d be well advised to bring along some Penetrating attacks or cards that force your opponent to discard Armor. Are they likely to occur in large numbers or are you more likely to encounter small numbers of high-level opponents? That will influence your decision as to whether or not your wizard should equip his Staff of Fireballs for area effect damage or bring something that delivers more damaging spells that only affect a single target. These are all the kinds of decisions you’ll need to make if you want to be successful in the long run.

But there’s another twist to the story. Your basic adventures might see you encounter a single monster type or a group of closely related monsters. But don’t count on every adventure being like that. It’s entirely possible that we might drop a group of very different monsters into the Adventure, just to mess around with you. Perhaps the Lizard folk have some demonic allies who represent a very different challenge – invalidating those Penetrating attacks you brought because they don’t bother with Armor at all.

No problem you might say – I’ll just switch out those cards for something more appropriate. Ah, but when you’re on an Adventure you can only use the gear that you brought with you! You don’t have access to your big stash of stuff that is stored back home. What’s a brave adventurer to do?

Here’s the answer:

Behold the dungeon mule! Want to bring some extra gear with you on an Adventure? Need to plan ahead for a variety of different challenges? Load Rodolfo up and he’ll bring (a limited amount of) extra things with you. You can swap your gear with anything he’s carrying in between battles to make sure you are optimally prepared for every encounter.

Is there a downside? Yes, a minor one. Rodolfo (or whatever you name your trusty mule) can only carry so much stuff. The more gear you bring with you, the less room you have to cart your ill-gotten loot out. So, pack lightly – but not too lightly.

I hope you enjoyed this introduction to Adventuring. I’ll end with the usual caveat that we’re developing this stuff as I type, so it may change before you get to play it!

14 Responses to “Dev Diary #15 – Adventures”

  1. That is a very interesting approach to sideboarding. The more backup cards you bring the lesser the reward for completing the adventure. I like it, a lot!

  2. That third quest *needs* to be your tutorial objective : o

  3. I’d love to bring pizza to orcs who wana rip my face off in a tutorial mission lol

  4. Hahaha. Love it. For sure is exciting to see this.

  5. Racing your mule thorugh the night, dodging wagons of hay, escaping the constabulary, fighting off kobolds on bicycles . . . the pizza delivery mission practically writes itself.

  6. The adventures are sounding pretty cool. I want to know how adventures come about. Do you stumble upon them or are assigned them say by a king. Also I notice the lizardman adventure lists a level range. What does that mean?

    Having a mule is certainly useful. Maybe have the option that monsters could steal loot and/or the mule!

  7. @Blain: level ranges are pretty much what you’d expect. The adventure is designed for characters of a certain level only.

  8. I feel like the mule is a really good idea. You could even charge money for a larger mule-inventory, without throwing of the balance of the game. I’m sure a lot of people would be willing to pay for that, even though it’s not completely necessary, thus giving paying customers not, too big of an advantage.

  9. Is it possible to save “eets” of cards so you could load your “whip lizard tail” set before you head in?

    Would also allow players to compare their mini “builds”.

    Really like your design approaches.

  10. +1 to the Orc Pizza Delivery Tutorial. 😀
    Reading all these blogs is getting me super stoked to play this game!

  11. @Luke: if you swap characters in and out of your party, their load outs are saved with them. However, we don’t currently have the ability to save out different configurations for each character within the campaign (you can have different load outs for multi-player). Could be something we add though.

  12. ill-gotten loot!?!

    :)

  13. Something like this is interesting. Having other creatures beside Rodolfo would be even more interesting, such as fairies, horses, donkeys, owls or a phoenix that can carry more things and give you a certain upgrade when using them. Maybe even have creatures that may do side attacks as you attack. Kind a like a summoner class maybe.

  14. I really really love the mechanic of “the more you bring, the less you can retrieve”, it’s a great tradeoff mechanic.

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