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Ultamate Disgaia Diablo type game |
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Theres so many ways to make things infinitely combinable, scalable, grindable, the genre is barely touched, including Nippon Ichi, WRPGs, and MMORPGs.
The Randomly Generated Dungeon exists in alot of games, but is rarely interesting. It's usually a few stock rooms connected by random hallways. In Disgaia, it's a bunch of islands with terrain simple or impossible, and has a puzzle element, but it isn't always winnable; sometimes mountains are too high, islands too far away, or every square grants invincible, unliftable, and possibly being cloned each turn. There's so much more potential for cool dungeons.
Puzzle elements can be done on the fly by the computer too. Digaia does it with the color puzzles, but that's far from the only one. The easiest is the kind that relies on keys or similar devices. (And it doesn't have to look like a dungeon, either.) While I'm linking squidi's obsession with PGC, might as well get this card thing out of the way. Of all his stuff, I think the first one is truly useful as it has an algorithm waiting to be coded, while the card series has some good ideas that I'd hate to use that card user interface to play with.
I like item world. I like customizing my gear. I like the idea of popping a pearl into a socket in my sword, and it gains water elemental attack, and its item world gains an ocean. If you just want an ocean dungeon, enter the world that belongs to an unattached pearl.
But really, remember any game that comes with a feature to create a random puzzle? That could be used for a type of dungeon gimmick. Sudoku Dungeon, FreeCell Dungeon, whatever. Different types of items can cause different puzzles to appear. Towns with fetch quests for puzzles, that may have members to recruit, markets to shop and places to train traits. If you use both town gem and pearl it might be a fishing town or port, you'd be able to experiment to find this kind of stuff.
Increase your ranks by recruiting people in towns, or rescuing them in dungeons. If the world doesn't even have a town, the folk you rescue will want to come along, despite not having rational reason to exist in order to be rescued to begin with. You can buy monsters in some towns, or steal hostile monsters to subdue later. Alternately, harness their life force to raise character's attributes, or seal them into more gems/items. Because all the gems and items you're getting from looting the worlds in gems and items in order to level their attributes isn't enough.
Outside of item world, you can make your own base into a town manually (as opposed to the computer doing it automatically). It's where your potential party members hang out when your party's too full, so at minimum it should have a set of barracks. It's where you make items and go into their worlds, so it should have a lab, too. If you're item bag were actually a permanent connection back home it would be a handy plot device while explaining how those things normally work, so it should also have a storage vault for items. Everything else (stables, monster sealing shrine, kitchen?) has to be bought with money and resources from all the crap you pick up in the item worlds. And everything can be upgraded too. If you upgrade your vault a few times it might splits into an armory (filled with stuff used in actual fighting) and pantry (so you can keep your small army fed with monster carcasses) which can be upgraded separately.
If it had a decent class system, this game could satisfy my sense of more. But dang, even enumerating a few of these possibilities took me hours off and on.
 Spriteless Girl · Sat Feb 23, 2008 @ 03:42am · 0 Comments |
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