Into the Dungeons. Building Games. Building Worlds.

I started writing this as I was going through my old Medium blog entries about building a mobile game that was originally titled HexaGrid - currently ITD: Heroes & Rogues. This post provides a bit of background about what Into the Dungeons is and what I want it to become. It summarizes the Medium blog entries and talks about some of the progress made in all sorts of direction on the game and other stuff, since then.

The backstory

I'd long wanted to create a world in which to tell stories, through games (board & video), comics, music, etc. What really pushed me to get started on building the Into the Dungeons universe was Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. The ending was not what I wanted or expected. So obviously the only thing to do was to make my own stories and then I could guarantee the happy endings I wanted to see, and lets face it, 2019/2020 could use ALL the happy endings and then some.

I wanted to start by making a game, but as with every game idea I get I needed a backstory. The Dungeons of Muerr were created on the world of Xyg by using a mixture of magic and technology. Something was hidden deep within them. Inhabitants from all over Xyg journeyed to Muerr and tried to unlock the secrets of the Dungeons, but none succeeded.

And that was enough story to get started on the prototype for the first ITD project, Heroes & Rogues. My love of esports (League of Legends) and competitive PvP games in general were big influences. Heroes & Rogues would be cross-play but I'd start out with mobile.

4 players, heroes & rogues, would battle through three levels of the Dungeons to retrieve treasure. The game would be a death match with pvp and pve elements.

Now as I'm writing this out, I'm wondering what I was thinking. Not hard to design/build/balance at all. Picard gets it.

Then what? A board game, a comic mini-series, a song, and a totally different game.

The initial work on HexaGrid was going well. Good, *visual* progress every week, until it all fell apart. Read emo post 1 and emo post 2 for a brief glimpse. After that, the blog died. I was working more on developing the story for the world of Into the Dungeons. I had this idea for a board game (still in-progress), and started writing a comic mini-series (still in-progress) that tells the story behind how/why the Dungeons of Muerr were created.

Heroes & Rogues was dead. I didn't think I would be able to salvage anything from it and so I started thinking about other games I could make. That's when I started working on Skitrix: Two vs. the Words (more on that later. I'll link this to a post about Skitrix).

While working on the ITD backstory and the comic, I wrote a song that Adrian (a character in ITD) sang about exploring the universe in his spaceship, the Dreamboat.

I would revisit Heroes & Rogues every now and then, and think about the age old question that plagues every procrastinating game developer. Which game engine should I use? 😂

Ultimately, I decided not to use any of the popular game engines. The game is currently being written in React Native, as an experiment of sorts, and we'll see how that turns out.

Slowly, while procrastinating, I did manage to make a few decisions. I would restart working on the game. It would be for the PC first, and I'd move away from the hex map to using a square map.

The original maps on the left. Redesigned 1st map on the right.

I was also sure I wanted to go with pixel art. So I worked on the concept design for the first map with a new artist.

Concept Art for the 1st map.

And after the concept art was done, I went looking for a pixel artist who could translate the concept into pixels! Looking at these images always gets me excited! And I hope the gameplay does the art justice!

In Pixels.

Another image here showing the bottom left part of the map, zoomed in.

The machines are alive!

Redesigning the game

In the meantime, I was also rethinking the game mechanics. What had started out being a mobile game with swipe based movement on hex tiles, with a classic rock-paper-scissors mechanic for attacking didn't seem to fit the redesigned, more involved map.

The goal was and still remains to enable players to use a wide variety of strategies to win. Speed should matter, but not as much as strategy. One of the original mechanics was for each player movement to cost 1 stamina. Stamina would be a capped resources at 10/15 points and would recharge twice every second (these values may still be tweaked). I haven't play tested in the PC version yet, but so far it feels like this decision will work. It makes a real-time game into a real-time/turn-based hybrid.

The other idea that I had was to create unique player characters. A warrior, an archer, a thief and a mage. Each of them would have different basic attack patterns and unique abilities ala MOBAs with Q W E R spells.

From Left to Right: Warrior, Archer, Thief, Mage.

The basic attack patterns were modelled on chess pieces with the Warrior having the attack pattern of the King, the Archer, a Rook, the Thief, a Knight, and the Mage, a Bishop.

Attack Vectors for each player character.

The abilities were the next design question. I went through a bunch of ideas, but the one I ended up with was to add cards to the game. Prior to a match, players would create a deck of six/eight cards. Each card would have a stamina cost. Players would cycle through their decks during the match while engaging in PvE and PvP.

What's next?

And that's where its currently at. The characters need to be pixelized, and there's load of UX, animation work, etc. and that's just on the visual side. I need to figure out the cards/spells, create about 20-30 cards that can be used to create varied decks and then start play testing the hell out of it!

We have the multiplayer piece hooked up. Four players can connect to a game, see the map and move around. I'll be posting updates here as we make progress on Heroes & Rogues!

Thanks for reading!