I've opened a new topic to permit people to speak out loud about the specification details relative the design notes offered so far, thanks to Danimal for the cool summary.
- Story: we are evil, humans are stupid and deserve to die, we want to make the game feel genuinely evil
- Two sides: Evil keeper against hordes of heroes and rival keepers
- Monsters have their little life and hobbies: each creature perform their preferred activity in the dungeon when they are not killing something
- Start small and go big : progression on the build up of troops along the game, expect to have critters like flies and spiders as your minions on the first levels, and end up commanding a screaming demonic legion.
--> Two sides: Actually, there are something like 5 or 6 sides in the test level AFAIK, and when looking into the portal code logic, every faction can spawn any creature defined in the level file at random with a set of probability rules.
If you want this to happen, we, devs, will need to get to know the following AFAIK:
- The list of creatures for each of the two sides (from weakest to strongest) using the existing creatures for now.
- For now, the rough rules used to be able to spawn them. Please note that we lack reinforced wall support, and lack other room types atm. So I'd like to get rules appliable with what it is working at the moment, if possible. If there could some kind of progression in those rules, it would be cool.
Eg.: If more than 1000 gold available and more than 250 claimed tiles, Orcs are becoming available.
- IMHO, a third independant side, or side-less creatures should be definable. This would make possible to fall on naturally-living creatures to fight and so on.
- Keeper specialization: choose to go down the path of War, Magic or Stealth; each one of them grant access to exclusive creatures, spells, traps and bonus. Ex: do you prefer to be a Mage keeper specializing on Chaos magic or Death magic?, or just became a warlord and storm your enemies with hordes of weak creatures, or why not be sneaky and send a team of high level assassins to destroy choice targets and then banish them back to your dungeon.
- Would need new rooms, traps, spells support, I'll ask about that a bit later.
- Different environments: who though there would be so many biomes underground?; levels will have a different decoration to represent jungles, swamps or other environments depending on the story setting instead of just rocky ground.
- Each environment grants you different creatures, making your army composition dependent on what environment you are.
- This is very cool, btw. We'll need the list of the planned biomes (including the current default one), and the list of creatures for each side for each biome.
For now, we'd implement only the standard ground ones. Things would be much simpler if the biomes can't be mixed as we'd simply apply a different texture on dirt depending on the biome.
But I'd rather ask now. Should the biomes be mixable within the same map? (I think it shouldn't, but well.)
Best regards,