During the past week, the Roguelike Mode has continued to get some development love, and we’re out for some feedback once again! We’ve been discussing and implementing persistency of the Roguelike, and come up with a little town called Arcadia.
Small beginnings!
The idea behind Arcadia is to give an anchor point between your runs. In the screenshot is a basic version of the town, but as you progress through the mode you’ll unlock town improvements, both functional and purely cosmetical. Let’s break the major features down:
Essence of Grindea
Essence is a roguelike only currency used within Arcadia. You’ll find it as rare drops from monsters and bosses, as well as rewards for quests, accomplishments and at the end of runs. Needless to say, all essence collected will go into a pool that’s not limited to a single character!
Perks
Perks are tiny advantages you can unlock and equip to boost your chances. While we’re planning to add quite a bunch of these, you can only have three equipped at one time! Examples of perks are starting items, a small sum of money, a skill point, slightly better drop rates, and so forth. In the screenshot, I’ve equipped a perk letting me start with a Squire’s Sword instead of the Wooden Sword, giving me a slight early game edge!
Quests and Achievements
Quests work a bit differently from the regular game. You can only have one quest active at a time, but you can change and remove the active quest whenever you want. While a quest is active, the roguelike mode is changed in some way. For example, if a quest NPC asks you to “defeat the Pumpking in Pumpkin Woods”, a Pumpking (it doesn’t really exist – yet) will spawn as a boss or a challenge. Perhaps a quest is a challenge to reach a certain floor with no healing whatsoever, disabling healing in runs as long as the quest is active! Quests will never make a run easier, so you can’t use them to unfairly boost your score.
Achievements also exist in the story mode, but as with quests they work a bit differently. While they are character based there, in the roguelike mode they carry over between runs and give rewards relevant to the roguelike. An achievement might be to reach certain floors without taking damage, beating high score thresholds, or completing difficult challenges.
Transferable Items
Transferable Items are things you unlock which can then be redeemed by your characters in story mode! This will probably mainly feature cosmetic items — especially viable with the new style slots — but we could technically also have genuinely powerful equipment transfers with level restrictions.
Please let us know what you think, and don’t hesitate to share your ideas!
No weekly recap is complete without some moving graphics from Fred, so to tie the topic together, here’s a new level up effect for when a player… yeah.
PS: We made the Slime Hammer wobble <3
Yeah wobbely wobbely
Wow boomy level up effect
I am watching forward to a demo of this game :D cant wait ;)
Awesome! Stoked that my suggestion was used!
That level up animation looks great.
Also, I’m so excited for Roguelike mode, but I’m unsure and unable to find if it was mentioned… Is it single-player only? I know roguelikes are (usually?) single-player, but it seems like it would be fun to play through with a 2-4 player party.
Well, that actually sounds like far more of a reward system than I expected. Glad it has some tie in to the story mode, especially in the form of unique collectible thingimes.
The things that transfer over don’t have to be anything more than cosmetic to be sought after myself, though a few impractical or ‘joke’ weapons/equipment would not be remiss either. ^_^
The game really seems to be coming along. Wobbly hammers, exploding level up, A giant naked girl statue, and the Roguelike mode is really sounding fun.
Yes, a few suggestions.
First, does the level up animation come with a huge exploding noise?
Second, are perks just for Roguelike Mode, or is it for the entire game?
Third, on an entirely different topic, is there a dye system in this game? Or perhaps some sort of method to change clothing colour? I’m very fond of white clothing and get annoyed at games that half-ass it and just tint stuff grey.
Fourth, hats! I love bucket hats! And not the raggedy fishermen type, but something that looks nice. Being autistic, I can’t stand the sun in my eyes, and a bucket hat just works so nicely. Is there one in the game? I would wear it all the time. Keeps the sun out of my characters eyes. Also good for fishing… I guess…
Man, I can’t wait til throwing money at you is an option. I will wait, but it’ll be hard, hehe.
Hey,
the roguelike mode sounds great. And the score makes this game much more competitive(me: “I have the highest score…” my brother: “No! I have the highest score!”)
One question to the new animation. How high does the level up beam goes? I think it looks weird when it just stops in midair but it wouldn’t be better if it goes up all the way. Last would be a bit to much wouldn’t it?
Nethertheless i like the animation :)
I’d love to see coop in the rougelike mode as well. Is that going to happen?
Theodore (administrator) wrote at 08/10/2013 15:31:@Chris
The roguelike mode will have co-op support! It’s single player for now while we test things out, since multiplayer is pretty time consuming to implement, but it will be added :)
@Serva
1) It will when we’ve let one of our sound guys have a go!
2) Just for the Roguelike Mode
3) The dye system is palette based, and thus you can have an entirely white character (well, except the shading): http://i.imgur.com/iC49yKE.png
4) Certainly!
@Kisox
We’ll be playing around with it until we find the sexiest solution!
@Everyone
Thanks for the feedback, and keep it coming!
Improved Slime Hammer! Woohoo!
The transferable items are a good idea, in my opinion. Receiving bonuses for doing the rougelike gamemode is good but care about balancing. If there are too overpowered items, everyone would play the rouge gamemode to improve his normal character.
Althought a nice idea!
Keep it up!
Sogomn
Looks amazing. That’s about all I’ve got to say. Keep up the good work ^_^
Awesome! The perk system sounds very interesting and useful. It’s also really nice how you consider your fan’s suggestions, wobbly hammer :3
It’s great to see that you’re putting a lot of thought and effort into this mode.
See, I’m not really in the market for a scoring / achievement mode.
My main motivations for playing the game are as follows :
– Have a blast with great gameplay
– Get immersed in a compelling world
– Build a character to play with and against friends
So the whole play a rogue-like mode for the ability to boast on a higher score is just not sexy to me.
I love and play a LOT of rogue-like, yet in the current configuration it just doesn’t add much to increase my three motivations :
– Gameplay : I feel that this mode doesn’t add much to the gameplay already in the story mode (monsters, skills…), aside from the permadeath of it of course.
– Immersion in Grindea : immersion is not really the point of a rogue-like, and might actually hurt the discovery of new areas / monsters if not implemented as end-game content
– Building a character : The only improvement to my long term character is limited transferable equipment that will have to compete with story-found stuff
I’m also a bit worried of the complexity you have to deal with in order to make it an independant yet compelling mode (introduction of multiple new systems like Essence, Perks, modified Quest system, and level-locked transferable equipment).
We previously discussed the benefits of having a rogue-like mode and I’m all for it.
I do believe it would make an extremely fun, simple, efficient, easy to implement end-game content to fuel the late game with a nice loop of Story-mode+PvP (level-up) > Rogue-Like (get uber loot) > Back to Story-mode+PvP… Repeat.
I’m just not one of those who would love to play a rogue-like mode of the box in Grindea.
I do respect those who would though, especially those who didn’t get the chance to play the beta so far, and it might become an enjoyable time-killer while waiting for release.
As always, I fully support you in your choices for this mode and knowing your past achievements I’m pretty sure it will come out great.
Since you were asking for feeedback, I hope it helps.
Regards,
Yangna
I like it. I didn’t know there would be a score either which is a pleasant surprise. All those things really give the player incentive to improve their score and progress in the roguelike mode.