Inspired by Hero Quest, a game for Android and Windows Phone

[nante]

Honestly I think the current system for consumable items works just fine.
The risk of a player accumulating too many items to breeze through bosses is too big and game-breaking.
Just make the bosses tougher? And *lemony goodness* all over the players who actually used their items through out the game?
No, keep the current system. That also makes it easier to balance a quest as you can easier expect a certain average of found consumables.

IF... You decide to include a shop with consumable items, they should be so expensive that it's a decision whether to buy that helmet or buy a potion. It shouldn't be like, now I've bought all the armor I can carry, time to buy 5 potions for the last 50 gold.

"At the moment" (everything may change), the system should work as follows:
- Equipment can be bought at the market, or found in a few quests, and it's kept forever. Can be sold for gold.
- Consumable are found ONLY inside the dungeon, cannot be bought outside.
- Once you finish the dungeon you have 2 options:
- Continue the quest
- Back to the world map

The first option means you can keep your consumables, but dead heroes won't resurrect, and "probably" alive heroes won't heal (this is something I must think about, it could be really hard). In the next dungeon you will get a bonus on XP.
If you decide to go out, you will be able to continue the quest later. However, consumables will be lost. Dead heroes will resurrect and the others will be healed. The bonus on XP will be reset to zero.

This way if you're good enough you can complete all dungeons and get a huge bonus on XP. If you're a newbie you will need to go out often, getting less XP.

What you think?

[Goblin-King]

Basically I like the idea of having a choice to "push on" or "return to town".

It's hard to gauge what will work without knowing what XP does and how it affects the difficulty.

I would seriously consider healing the heroes between levels. You don't want the healing class to be mandatory. It has a very high risk of being so if the heroes aren't healed. Also at the end of every level you would have to spend several extra turn to use all heling spells you have left. That will be a tedious ritual you basically can't avoid!

Maybe a compromise could be to heal all heroes for an amount equal to half their full health.
If the barbarian only had 1 BP left, he would start next level at 5 (1+8/2). But if he had 5 BP left he would simply start next level at full BP.
That way, you could still continue if you had taken moderate damage during the level. But an almost dead party would be better off returning to town.

tl;dr
I would prefer a full heal between levels. The trade off being you won't get to resurrect dead heroes or spend your gold.
But again... XP? How does that work?

[nante]

Basically I like the idea of having a choice to "push on" or "return to town".

It's hard to gauge what will work without knowing what XP does and how it affects the difficulty.

I would seriously consider healing the heroes between levels. You don't want the healing class to be mandatory. It has a very high risk of being so if the heroes aren't healed. Also at the end of every level you would have to spend several extra turn to use all heling spells you have left. That will be a tedious ritual you basically can't avoid!

Maybe a compromise could be to heal all heroes for an amount equal to half their full health.
If the barbarian only had 1 BP left, he would start next level at 5 (1+8/2). But if he had 5 BP left he would simply start next level at full BP.
That way, you could still continue if you had taken moderate damage during the level. But an almost dead party would be better off returning to town.

tl;dr
I would prefer a full heal between levels. The trade off being you won't get to resurrect dead heroes or spend your gold.
But again... XP? How does that work?

Actually, you raised a bigger problem I didn't consider.
In the new game, I was thinking to give the possibility to cast the same spell more than once, depending on the mind points.
Each character reload a certain amount of mind points each turn.
This way during my turn I can choose to case 1 powerful spell or 2 minor spells, depending on each cost.

But, for healing spells, this mean that after each room the player would stop to heal every character. If there are no visible enemies, he can cast as many spells as he wants (and buff his team as well).

Probably using the mind points is not enough. Or perhaps they cannot recover.
Maybe you could get a fixed amount of casting times for each spell, depending on your mind points, but it's very complex to understand for the average player.

Any suggestion?

P.S. XP work as in every RPG. You get XP by killing or completing dungeons. At certain amounts, you gain a level. Equipment/Spells are available only for heroes of a minimum level. Each level you gain, you get a bonus depending on the class you are (warrior gets more attack/HP/..., Wizard get more MP/Castable spells and so on).

[timbrwolf]

Is this or will this be available for the iphone?

[Goblin-King]

Disclaimer: There are 1000+ ways to do a game and all of them have the potential to be fun. I don't hold the answers, just qualified opinions

That being said... Here are some opinions:

This is a niche game. There are many dungeon crawlers like it, but this is built up to be an almost 1:1 of HeroQuest.
I think you should keep the fundamentals - fading into generic RPG conventions could possible remove that particular flavor.

Character progression (levels) could easily be kept Gold/equipment based by simply expanding the range of equipment available at the shop.
The equipment slots could be expanded as well to accommodate this. Right now we have weapon, shield, armor, ring and amulet. Add helmet, cloak and boots and we are good to go.
Extra attack/HP/MP/spells or even special abilities could easily be bound to items.
That way you as the programmer and us as the players only have to manage one resource: Gold!

Kill monsters? Get gold! Explore Rooms? Get gold! Complete quests? Get gold!
Everything you want the players to do is rewarded with gold. Push on instead of going back to town? +5% gold!

Never ever allow unlimited healing in a game like this. It is almost always game breaking. Seriously! Don't do this!
I can almost guarantee that after every single battle the average player will hurdle up all heroes and heal back to full. EVERY... SINGLE... BATTLE!
Casting extra spells are fine, but make it impossible to abuse. Perhaps like; The first 3 spells you use are not consumed.

As for the decision whether to heal, half heal or whatever between levels.
The easy option could be to just put it in as options. I like the option to play normal or hardcore.
But I still feel like the best way to do it is to just heal the players. The price you are paying is that you don't get to spend gold on equipment.
Sure you can push on... Maybe you are a pretty good strategist. But sooner or later you WILL... NEED... better equipment to survive. (at least if the level designer remembers to actually increase the difficulty)

And finally. You should add an option to put in custom text when opening chests and entering rooms.
Just little pieces of flavor like in the quest notes. The orc in the middle of the room is Grakzul! He looks mad with bloodlust...

[nante]

Is this or will this be available for the iphone?

Arcane Quest 2 will be available on iPhone/iPad as well. Probably not for the first release, as I don't own a Mac/iDevice to develop on, so I would like to see the public reaction before investing in such hardware.
If, as I hope, there's interest in the game, a porting should be made right away

[nante]

Disclaimer: There are 1000+ ways to do a game and all of them have the potential to be fun. I don't hold the answers, just qualified opinions
....
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The reason for XP is that nowadays is a very easy concept to understand and I would like to target a wider range of players, not just hardcore.
It also allows to easily balance the game difficulty. If the average heroes level is 5, I can just upgrade the enemies to level 5 or 6 as well, and so on. I really, really want the quests to be re-playable with increasing difficulty.
Your suggestion is anyway correct, keeping it simple, limited to gold, could be the way to go.

As for the rest of your post, I basically agree on everything, except there's still no idea for a functioning spell system. I will think more about how to limit the usage of certain spells. Perhaps a symbol on the card could indicate the maximum times it can be casted. Could be unlimited for fireballs/attack spells and limited for healing/buff spells. This, mixed with the usage of mind points.

Thanks for your help, I really don't have the time to think about everything

[nante]

Work in progress. What about putting the base on the characters? Otherwise there would be a walking animation, but no combat animations for sure.

[Sjeng]

animations >>> bases.

[sucresalesucre]

Just finished Arcane Quest, it's a great little game !
For Arcane Quest 2, i would dream of more various environments (wood, villages with houses, roads, etc...), some NPCs and more scenarized quests.
Staying old school, but more things to do and explore...