Was kinda lost on exactly how the deception and reward stats factored in. But neat character expressions and a cool take on the theme.
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DragonDeception's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme/Limitation | #1 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Fun | #2 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Music/Sound/Writing | #15 | 2.500 | 2.500 |
| Overall | #16 | 2.900 | 2.900 |
| Technical | #21 | 2.500 | 2.500 |
| Graphics/Animation/Imagery | #25 | 2.000 | 2.000 |
Ranked from 2 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How many people worked on the game?
1
What elements of the game did you NOT create? (No need to mention engine, OS, etc.)
Font
Comments
Wooow, this is the game I always wanted to play! The game that Dungeon Keeper should have been in the first place. A game that requires you to entirely control the psychology of fear and greed and also your economy. I don't even know why I have never even tried to make something like this, and you nailed it in such a short time.
I spent a good 1,5 hours with it and still planning to revisit it because I still want to try out additional combinations.
I thought I figured out the perfect layout with the below one:
Everyone gets a small loot to bring braver adventurers back, but than the swamp-dead body combo gives them the chance to actually escape. If they feel too tough for that over and over again, the deathtrap combo, in the end, will put them in place.
I almost got frightened to death when this guy passed the third fire trap, but then he stopped.
Later I became greedy. I wanted to see the best adventurers. I dug out all the rooms, put all my money in them, and waited for the results.
The day after the next day, five adventurers showed up, laughed out all my traps, took the money, and left with the news that there is no dragon, and apparently, no loot left in my sweet little dungeon.
The next day, I was utterly broke, four adventurers showed up in my completely lootless dungeon. That was pretty much game over for me.
The balance of fear and greed on both sides, I guess.
Improvement ideas:
- Music, screams, sound effects like Joshua said.
- Bigger map.
- Some actual reasons to make it maze/dungeon-like:
- The more dead-ends, the more time the adventurers spend their time in the dungeon.
- Adventurer patience or the fear of getting lost and starve to death. It can increase deception.
- No day/turn-based mechanics. Adventurers arrive in real-time, and the room gets built in real-time, so you have to dig out winding tunnels and lots of dead ends to save you some time carving out rooms and prepare your traps in it. Gemcraft nailed this aspect, but they also included the mechanic of cooldown and multiple-use traps. It might be a good idea to add them here as well.
- No day/turn-based mechanics. Adventurers arrive in real-time, and the room gets built in real-time, so you have to dig out winding tunnels and lots of dead ends to save you some time carving out rooms and prepare your traps in it. Gemcraft nailed this aspect, but they also included the mechanic of cooldown and multiple-use traps. It might be a good idea to add them here as well.
- Different types of adventurers not just tougher ones, just like in TD games. Some fear fire; some fear dead bodies more. Some are the master of pits but fall short on the topic of moving walls, etc.
- Negative effects on the reward factor to prevent exploiting the system by killing the first two adventurers till the end of time with two basic pits and increasing the town tax forever. This way, if more people died than brought back gold, additional adventurers will think twice before entering the dungeon. If no one dies, no one threatens the villagers, so why would day pay tribute anyways.
Ok, I stop right here. I have already added more than I wanted. I guess you already have a pretty good idea on how to improve your game anyways.
Keep it up! Well done!
Maybe I'll revisit the implementation a bit later. But I don't have huge plans for it.
I'm surprised you played it longer then 10 minutes. It really wasn't intended to be played for this long :-) But let me comment on a few of the suggestions:
- The day/turn mechanics where really important. I spend the first 2 days of the jam working on an version without it. And with a large roguelike grid. And I got stuck, too many corner cases to solve, and I didn't get anywhere. Almost threw in the towel. One of the hard corners cases where "how to convey what the effect of your dungeon was on the adventurers" and "how to deal with your dungeon being expanded while adventurers are in it, as they would have new places to explore all of a sudden, breaking the 'escape after exploring everything' mechanic". When I switched to the day/turn mechanic suddenly everything fell in place. A speedup button might be good tough to skip the more boring parts. And less delay between adventurers when there are multiple ones.
- I didn't get around to do it, but I set it up so the map would expand indefinitely. I just didn't setup that you could move/zoom your viewpoint. One of the things I will add when I revisit it.
- Killing the first 2 adventurers and just ending the day will increase your money forever. But the rest of the hidden stats will reach a limit. As those decay a bit each day, so expanding will allow you to reach higher levels so to say. I kinda did this intentionally so you could never really get stuck, unless you softlocked yourself by spending all your money digging without any traps. I didn't want people to need to restart the game on some failure.
- I misjudged the balance between "risk" & "reward", which caused almost no extra adventurers to spawn beyond the usual 2. You only got up to 4, while the maximum is 10.
And as a final word. When you got greedy and wiped out. You where the dragon, you where slain. Ha, how is that for deception? :D
Well, if you are not planning to continue this game, maybe it will drive me to make something like this on my own finally .
I didn't think about the summary window, but yeah, these are valid points. My first idea would be to show a non-blocking feedback every time a 'guest' leaves the 'park' and also an extra window that you can open any time to check the current state with all the stats. And I start to think about how management games solved this, like RollerCoaster Tycoon and Theme Hospital. Building new attractions and rooms in those were flawed a little bit as well, but acceptable after all. The 'escape after exploring everything mechanic' can be changed to 'spent enough time in the dungeon without facing any real threat and could leave without a scratch, so I doubt there is a dragon there.'
The real-time pace would also be exciting if you would add the manual collection of the loot. What if someone catches the madman who manages the whole scam?
It would be nice to see those hidden stats — at least approximations of them with icons or vague messages. I know the number of tributes and adventurers, and the fact how long they survive is feedback, but still uncomfortably insufficient.
I'm the dragon, indeed.
So you'll see if you want to continue the development of this game or not, but here are some quick and somewhat easy improvement tips to make the current experience a little bit better in my opinion:
- Add the dig and sell button to the list of build room buttons. Use them as interaction modes, and let the player update the map with the selected one without showing other buttons to click until he switches to another. It would make this cumbersome navigation through the options to a quick and easy to use Paint application. Tooltips can still appear on the side, but the player will read those only once or twice, so there is no need to alert them every time they decide to place a trap.
- Digging should be optional. Simply clicking on a new part of the map when a trap is selected should automatically dig that part and set that trap.
- Let the player remove rooms, bodies, slimes. Even if they cannot sell them, a way to remove them in case they changed their mind would be helpful.
- Add auto-refill option for loot, bodies, and slimes. If the player has enough money, this helps to decrease repetitiveness.
- Hotkeys. At least an Enter key for ending the day. But num keys for each build mode and arrows for navigating between them would be helpful as well.
- Damage should also increase fear. If a sturdier adventurer already faced five fire traps one after another, he should at least consider leaving before the sixth kills him.
- Dying adventurers should drop the already collected loot to let other adventurers pick it up and increase the chance of escaping.
Questions:
- Fire. How does it increase deception if no one witnessed the burned body?
- Slime. Are the effects cumulative?
- Body. I see that you can't place them until you actually killed anybody. But after you did so, you can basically fill your dungeon with them, even if the tooltip says 'Amount: 1'. A bug?
That's all for now. Feel free to ignore these thoughts if you already decided not to continue this game further. They will serve me as a note when I choose to go down the same path.
I'm interested if you are really willing to share it, especially because of the stats and the system of factors that hides behind the scenes.
By the way I managed to reach 10 adventurers by giving out loot in all possible rooms 2 weeks straight. The reward? 10 immortals laughing at my 100% fire dungeon.
https://github.com/daid/DragonDeception
There you go. It's all build on top of my own custom game engine, but it should be reasonable easy to follow.
4 years ago(+1)
I ran out of time to add a goal. I wanted to add that you could buy and place a golden dragon egg. Which would call in even more adventurers. Defend it and it would have hatched into a dragonling, which would grow up. And then kill everyone "oops, no more deception". But majorly ran out of time.
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