Work Done

Counting both February and March I've done a total of ~40h hours of work. But not many tasks, it's been slow. The fundamentals of the dungeon work was done in January.

Dungeons

So if you play dungeon crawling games the concept of a dungeon should be familiar for you. A dungeon is basically the container of an adventure and they can take a lot of shapes.

For my project they are a group of rooms with connections between them. Each dungeon will have a "vibe" associated with it. Is it a tall tower of a mad wizard? Maybe catacombs beneath an abandoned church. Or simply a cave filled with a particular type of monster.

The player will be diving into these dungeons to discover secrets, gather supplies, find magical items or progress the story forward.

The Flow

The idea is that a player will go through a dungeon they'll be exploring it room by room. Each room will either just be flavor to the "vibe" as I said for the dungeon, but some will have entire mechanics associated with them, besides combat that is.

As the player traverses the dungeon, it will cost their characters heat. And for really deep dungeons the rooms will increase in their cost of heat limiting them how far they can explore before they need to come back later.

To recover heat the party will have to make camp((not yet implemented) by consuming supplies and gaining one exhaustion. Exhaustion as it is gained will lower the max capacity of heat of that character. You can't lower exhaustion while out on adventure but will need to come back to some place safe to recover that.

The player will be cycling through this, room, events, exploration, combat, camping until they leave the dungeon again.

Types of Events

Each room will have events associated with them. These can be incredibly varied in what they do, for now there are four different kinds of events with at least one more to come.

Descriptive events are mainly made up of text and usually are the type of event that is used first when entering a room. Within a descriptive events there can be links to different parts of the room, for instance there might be a table which you can take a closer look at. Clicking on that link in the text will bring up whatever event is associated with that.

Narrative events, called that mostly because I could not figure out a better name, are text-based events that come with some per-defined options for the player to pick between. These events usually have some logic attached to them, they might trigger something depending on the choice of the player, or change the state of the room that the party is in. A very simple example of a narrative event would be a button on the table, do you press it or not?

Attribute events are what you would call an ability check or similar in a tabletop rpg, we roll a dice, add our attribute to it and check it against some kind of difficulty value to determine the outcome. For my game you pick who you want to use for the roll, but it is not as simple as a fail or success. I can have different outcomes depending on if you rolled really shit, really good or anything in-between. Most of the time I'll also allow you to re-roll the check, as long as you can pay the price in heat.

Combat events, well kind of self explanatory, it's an event that initiated combat, usually preceded by another kind of event.

More Dungeon Features

Before moving on to implementing traversing on the overworld and finding dungeons to explore, I have some more features I need to add to Dungeons. Like the camping, party inventory and item event types which will be an interesting addition.

Which also fits as I will probably have very little time available during April as I'm very deep in the works on the next Victoria 3 expansion, The Great Wave which requires a lot of focus of me.

If you want to help I'd love for you to give the prototype a try and give me some feedback on the dungeon crawling in my discord.

https://groogy.itch.io/project-dungeon

https://discord.gg/4f2w6kwrtN