Campaign mode sounds exciting. Would it be possible to have a portal network that links all the maps together, rather than having to march my minions all over a huge country?

5 unconquered villains is enough to be getting on with! Especially if they all own a whole map for themselves! Could you limit the major villains to about 5 at the same time (like we have now in normal mode?) When I conquer a map, a new villain could be switched in. So they could be rotated in one at a time. Thus saving my laptop from exploding and also avoiding getting attacked by 30 players at a time.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 9 months ago by Keeperman.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 9 months ago by Keeperman.

Good idea. After conquering a dungeon you could click on like/dislike. Dungeons with more likes could appear more often as major villains in a campaign.

OK, bear with me here. I apologise in advance for the length of this post and please take it the right way.

Before you jump into developing a campaign mode, I want to explore what you are getting into. This looks pretty complex. As I understand it, perhaps it might play something like this:

I start a new campaign and you create a folder for it, containing the overworld data. All the summary information for the villain maps needs to be displayed to me from turn 1.

You fill in 10 map squares with villain keepers to defeat. Let’s say they are all pre-installed maps. You put a private copy of the keeper maps in my campaign folder. Now you must generate the remaining 90 maps on a 10 x 10 overworld. Maybe you just generate the summary information at this stage. Generating 90 map files is too slow. Most people will probably never visit most of those maps anyway if you don’t need them to win the game.

I choose my starting location in the middle of some easy-looking keeperless squares you spawned. I complete the starting location easily because it is only inhabited by one human town, a cyclops and some bandits. It takes 20 minutes.

I ignore the bandits. I save the campaign. It only saves one map, the other maps haven’t changed. Most of the maps haven’t even been generated yet.

I go shopping in real life and come back later and I load my campaign. It loads the overworld file again. I load my dungeon base for a while and get bored because there isn’t much to level up on. I have no throne and no enemies yet. I go to the overworld map (dungeon base saves). I invade a neighbouring square by selecting it on the overworld map view.

This time I have an average difficulty map, like the common ones you get already. Some dwarves and elves and humans. It takes a short time to generate this map because it hasn’t actually been created yet.

I have to stay in control of a minion. If it dies, the invasion has failed and the villain map will be saved. Perhaps during my invasion, I realise I am unready.

I go back to the overworld map and you save my invasion. I return to my dungeon base to train up my troops. My dungeon base loads up. Some neighbouring bandits have been waiting to attack me but I was away on an invasion, so they waited to ambush me when I come back. I kill the bandits and go on to wipe them out. I train a bigger and better army and make a throne for myself.

By doing this, I get attacked severely and I hit the 5 villain limit on my base dungeon. This will probably remain the case for the rest of the campaign – it is now all out war.

Up to 5 different tribes are coming in occasionally from some of the surrounding maps. These invaders represent the strength of those tribes but those other maps are not actually loaded because it would be too slow to have more than one map running at a time.

There is a dragon that attacks from the square to my north. Since the dragon was the only villain on the map to my north, I now own 2 squares when I kill it. There is some loot, although I have to load up the map to get to it.

Back to my invasion (you save my dungeon base and load my invasion). During this next assault the elves are defeated. I take a look at my base dungeon. (invaded map saves). I defend my dungeon against the four other villains that are attacking from around about. These were all waiting for me to return to my base because they can’t really attack while I am away on an invasion. I guess they all attack at once. This is the price I pay for botching my invasion. I survive.

After this, my keeper is getting very high level and I also have spell casting vampires and legendary beasts, traps, all the types of rooms and minions. I make a direct path across the 10 x 10 map to the nearest villain keeper, who is only a few maps away. I guess I have to conquer the maps in between us. Should be easy, but if an invasion fails for any reason, I will have to go back to my base dungeon map to re-equip and party up again. I can expect to face plenty of assaults waiting for me every time I have to go back to base. On the other hand, I also get to train and recruit.

I start taking on the villain keepers. Invasion parties have to be well chosen because if I fail, I will have to go back to my dungeon base and face counter attacks. The private campaign copy of the player maps also have to save and load when I enter and exit them. However, I don’t have to wait for the initial generation of those maps because they are derived from player maps that were installed with the game.

This will go on in real life for days or weeks. Attacks and counter-attacks. Loading villain keeper maps and then failing and getting hit back. Eventually all 10 keepers are dead and I have won the campaign. 25 of the 100 maps were beaten. The other 75 maps were never visited, loaded up or even generated.

I retire and upload my own base dungeon for other players to enjoy.

My question: Can you handle that kind of complexity?

• This reply was modified 8 years, 9 months ago by Keeperman.

Thank you Michal for continuing to work on new developments! 🙂

Wow Keeperman, TLTR (= Too long to read.) You may want to consider shortening things up a bit. (At least this is the common complaint I get when I write something so big lol.) Or put it into a separate forum thread as it’ll garner more attention than this initial post is for.

Posting a few more of my thoughts and questions about campaign mode and the game in general.

1. How big is the campaign going to be, and how is permadeath going to work? I really wonder if it is feasible to design a campaign that is intended to last 30+ hours, all on a single life, without the game becoming too boring and forgiving. The Rogue-likes and -lites that I’ve played (DOS Rogue, Faster than Light, Convoy, and recently, Risk of Rain) can all be completed in a few hours, but it is expected that the player is supposed to die. In many cases, it’s expected that the player dies more often or as much as he succeeds, especially if he is not a master of the game. This is tolerable if each run through only takes a couple of hours, but not if the game takes days or even weeks.

   Secondly, do you think that this game will be increasingly enjoyable as the campaign length increases? I think certain genres (RPGs, for example) obviously benefit as the playthrough length increases; however, three two-hour rogue-like sessions might be more fun than one six-hour session, because a lot of the fun in a rogue-like is dealing with variable conditions early on, and how the choices that result from these early decisions affect the late game. In other words, the more the player starts a new game, the more fun he has (to some extent).

   In some ways, this game is becoming more and more like fantasy XCOM, heh.

2. I like the idea of being limited to one base. Managing dozens of dungeons everywhere would be a mess. Since we’re limited to one base, though, I think that the size and/or complexity of the base has to increase proportionally to the player’s progression through the overworld. I think it would be VERY BORING if the player were able to carve out a dungeon and mine out the home sector of the map to build his facilities all on the first day, and then just wait for reinforcements to arrive for the rest of the game. It would be more interesting if you fought a battle, carved out some dungeon, fought another battle, carved out more, and so forth.

   Given that the dungeon carving is a such a big part of the game, I wonder if designing dungeons could involve more strategy than it currently does. For example, some regions of the mountain could provide certain production boosts for different types of minions, the mountain could become more difficult to mine the deeper you go in, and so on.

   I’m drawing on inspiration from Faster-than-Light and Convoy, games in which <b>every transaction involving resource allocation is important.</b> I believe that every mechanism that a strategy game introduces should be developed on as extensively as possible. In Faster-than-Light, for example, rooms can catch on fire. Fire also interacts with the oxygen and crew mechanisms, because fires can be extinguished by draining oxygen from their immediate vicinity or by sending a crew member to deal with it. This results in somewhat interesting decisions that involve extinguishing fire. In the heat of battle, he has to determine how the fire should be extinguished, either by sending crew or by purging oxygen, and who should be sent. If the doors are damaged while there is a fire, the response becomes more complicated if large sections of the ship are evacuated.

   Secondly, there are certain types of crew members (rockmen) who are immune to fire (as well as those who are not), and there are certain types of weapons that can start fires. There are also augments that can suppress fire or mitigate low oxygen. The point is, though, that <b>all of these systems are intertwined.</b> And this is just one little mechanism of the game.

   I don’t really see such a network of concerns present in KeeperRL. Such a system exists to some degree, but it’s not very well balanced. For example, the minerals are just sitting there in a cache within the mountain. You mine them and then you spend them. Does mining have any costs to it? Well, it occupies my imps, but that’s not really a big deal because they generally don’t have anything better to do. It also exposes my imps to danger, but they’re usually enough that they can run away, and there’s generally an alternate way to grab the minerals if I really want to get them quickly. Gold attracts bandits, and tree stumps spawn tree spirits, but neither of those are big threats.

3. Is the “campaign” going to be as simple as plunking the keeper in the middle of a world and letting him go anywhere he wants, or is there going to be some sort of directional progression? I think that too much freedom can be a bad thing, because players will almost always select the best option. Secondly, forcing the player into a limited set of moves makes him think harder, and it adds replay value to the game.
4. How will the hunger clock work in a campaign mode?
5. What happens if you’re attacked on a map that you’re not playing on at the moment.)