Aim

The aim of this prototype was to:

• Simulate the experience of a dungeon crawler game-book
• Implement a simple shop and some chance-based encounters

Feedback

The general feedback after a few playtests were:

• The players started feeling lost the longer they survived and kept going through the dungeon, this was majorly due to the fact that they kept coming back to the shop – it made them feel like they were going in circles, which wasn’t a welcome feeling after a while.
• Players would often want to use their items at any time it was available to them, which was not possible with the current implementation of the inventory.
• Combat started feeling stale really quickly, due to the lack of choices presented to the player along with the limited variety of encounters.

Outcomes

While I was able to implement the simple shop and an inventory as I had intended – accessing the inventory was only possible at the moment the player left the shop, this made the inventory feel rather useless as it wasn’t possible to use it while the player is in the middle of exploring the routes in the dungeon.

The dungeon was set up to keep track of what routes the player has taken. It is laid out such that the player as long he/she manages to survive would always reach the shop and upon fully exploring one route and then would be send to the start of another route (one they haven’t explored already) and would reach the shop again. As there were only three routes and the encounters weren’t too varied or progressive in any way it resulted in a rather repetitive and dull experience. This is what majorly contributed to the players feeling majorly lost.

The ideal scenario would be to have more routes for the player to explore along with an accessible inventory. The cherry on top when further developing this game would be to keep track of route history and encounter history and use this data to add randomness to both the type of enemy encountered and the possible choices to be made; coupling those with some progression by giving the player new abilities and having new enemies and encounter types would make this a much more enjoyable and replay friendly experience.