Game Concept: Dwarf Miner
Hi guys, im developing (at least trying to) a small game. The basic concept is a copy of Motherload, you have a drilling machine and dig for ores to sell and upgrade it.The full name is "Dwarf Miner: a tale of greed, heroes and demonic possesions".
But i wanted to expand and make it into something else. So after you excavate to get ores, you can put monster lairs into the resulting tunnels, atracting heroes who will enter to kill them for money. These heroes are persistent, so they remain day after day or until they die, they also level up.
So, you can sell the ore you dig OR turn into weapons and armor to sell to them, which earns you more money but risk being unsold. This equipment makes them stronger (with graphical upgrades), so they can take on bigger monsters.
The game would have differents endings depending on what you do:
- Get lots of money (ignoring hero part) - Rich ending
- Turn your mine into a hero deathtrap (300 or so heroes dead by monsters) - Dungeon Lord ending
- Grow your heroes into killing machines and kill a demon hidden into the deepest of the mine - Good ending
- Let the time pass without fulfilling any of the above - Bad ending (you go crazy)
So you can ignore the heroes thing completly and just dig or get the more difficult Good ending.
The thing is, you cant control these heroes, they just enter the mine after you are done digging and kill things around their level. And leave when they have low health or no monsters left. So here im wondering, as faster as i do this part, its a non-interactive one that will repeat every game day. Do you think it will be too boring?, should i scrap the hero thing? any suggestions to make it better?
Thanks for reading this and i hope you write your opinion (good or bad).
shameless bump, cmon someone tell me what they think of the hero thing
I like the idea of being a third party in a world of heroes and monsters, and the heroes part is a great idea, as long as you don't put too much emphasis on it.
Metal Gear Solid Peacewalker does a great job of something similar, where the main story is kept upfront at all times, but in between missions, it gives you a quick recap of what all of your soldiers were doing while you were away, if they levelled up, etc. and then you can make some changes to them.
If you implemented heroes in a similar way, I believe it could only add more depth to the game.
Thanks i will have a look at it and look what can be cop.. cough "borrowed".
Maybe instead of making the player place monster lairs, their locations could be procedurally generated. Since the player can't defeat these monsters, he'll need to either start digging elsewhere or attract and equip strong enough heroes to continue.
Your sugestion is not bad Cruz, but i think having the heroes killing around at the same time as you dig is a better idea, since it does not consume extra time and you can see their antics (while what you said implies waiting for them to clean up house).
For that reasons the monsters will ignore you, and that goes with the plot, since you place the lairs into the dungeon at nigth while being possesed by a demon (forced to be a demon´s gopher ). This is tied to the endings, since you can fatten your heroes purses with weak mosters and then make a sure death room to get that money and evil points (the energy used to create monster lairs, awarded by monsters and heroes deaths) leading to the evil side endings OR carefully lay them down to grow them so they get the money and level required to buy stronger equipment, ultimately killing the demon (Best ending).
For that reason i want the heroes to be important, but not much, i want to make people look at them as a convenient and disposable tools rather than a necessity, a tool with some autonomy that you cant control directly. Especially, since ill make it so you can ignore the whole hero thing, and just dig, as an option, being that the neutral ending (becoming rich and moving out of the mountain).
You people think im making the concept too simple? or is this level of complesity just rigth?
Complexity is difficult to judge until you have a playable demo, so I would just play it safe, and program it for how it is now, but leave it so that you could easily extend it if you need to.
Im using Unity3d, so adding more content is dirty easy, these are some screens of the WIP gui, about the gui style, well i used Clint advice, so its almost deliberately bad but consistant, i hope it will give it some personality.