We've added some simple quests to TumbleSeed!
Quests are an idea that I've had bouncing around in my head for a while. Roguelikes are a very open-ended structure. You reach the end of the tutorial and are sort of just plopped into an open world and expected to deal. You die a lot. It's up to the player to create intermediate goals that deal with the seeming impossibility of the final goal of beating the game. This is hard, and asks a lot of players. How do you create a system that engages players and helps overcome open-endedness while maintaining a game that is at its core the same game whether it's the first time or 2,000th time you've played?
A big inspiration was Absolute Drift: Zen Edition. I played the original non-Zen-Edition version of the game and had a lot of fun with it. But it never really stuck. The game was pretty open-ended. You did a race and once you completed it you could do the next race. So I pretty much went through the game doing most of the races, getting some random spot on the leaderboards, and then stopped playing altogether. However, when the Zen Edition came out it added these little quests/tasks/missions. All of a sudden I had these little intermediate goals. I realized that I wasn't as good at the game as I thought. The little tasks pushed me to get better and helped me deal with the open-endedness of the game. They sort of warmed me up to the systems of the game and made me feel confident and comfortable enough to make my *own* goals. The game suddenly went from pretty fun to one of my favorite games of the year.
This is the thing that hopefully quests bring to TumbleSeed. I often wished that Spelunky had more things to do similar to the tunnel man unlock missions. Just something that put a little spin on the game or a little diversion/alternate goal while being endlessly crushed by the game.
There aren't many quests right now – 8 in the basecamp, and 2 in the post-forest camp. The end goal (and how it is implemented right now for just the forest) is that at the end of the quest chain in each camp you're rewarded by unlocking the teleporter to the next biome. I am super curious to hear what people think!
p.s. If you're coming from a previous version of TumbleSeed and have unlocked the forest teleporter you'll only see the 2 quests in the post-forest camp and won't see the basecamp quests. However, 0.45a also includes the ability to reset your save data (see details here).