Dev Take Tuesday - DFYF

As I mentioned in last Thursday’s Indie Illuminator, indie game Guild of Dungeoneering was free over the weekend. I wanted to get a clear picture of what the game offers, so I played for several hours. I had a great time building my dungeoneering decks, beating bumbling bosses, and listening to the incessantly sarcastic bard who sort of narrates the game.

As is often the case when I play games now, I was also doing research. It’s difficult to play a game now and not think as a designer. One small detail that caught my “designer eye,” was the ability to go back to old completed sections of the game to redo a boss battle. Why include this as a feature? Certainly it’s always fun to go back with new knowledge and kick the trash out of an enemy who beat you several times before. And perhaps that was part of the reason that developer Gambrinous included the feature. But I think its key function is to act as a failsafe.

Since one of Guild of Dungeoneering’s central conceits is that all the heroes are simply dungeon fodder for you to make money, you can’t really get permanently stuck on a level like you might in another game. But if you didn’t spend your money wisely on upgrades to your guild, you might find yourself in a frustrating spot. Instead of forcing you to bash your head against that frustrating quest over and over until you’re fortunate enough to win against the odds, the game gives you a different option by allowing you to fight old boss battles and earn extra money for upgrades. The boss battles provide a failsafe for the game’s strategic layer—providing a way out if the player is caught in an undesirable loop.

Upgrading your guild is essential to reliably progress through new quests. (Image source: Pocket Tactics)

It’s vital for a designer to always consider failsafes, because when a player doesn’t feel like there’s a way out of the situation, he or she will simply quit. In Alkanaur, we’re using one of these failsafe mechanics as a replacement for the “grinding” mechanics in many other RPGs. Grinding (fighting easy enemies over and over to gain experience and/or money) certainly works as a failsafe, but it can also paradoxically cripple players sometimes as they spend too much time fighting repetitive battles so that they feel “safe.” Side note: this is me in every Pokemon game ever.

Instead of random encounters, every city in Alkanaur has an arena that will let you fight a small, randomized battle to gain powerful, one-use items. The arena doesn’t grant experience or cash, so its use is only to gain a one-time boost for a mission you can’t get past. One of the other rewards from an arena battle will provide a different failsafe: a tonic that allows a character to relearn their skills. So if players don’t like the skill choices they made earlier, they can put a little extra work into an arena battle to hit the reset switch. We hope that the arena battles will help our players who feel stuck without the “dangerous” allure of overleveling.

So to our fellow game dev friends we say: DFYF. Don't forget your failsafes.