Long overdue polishing news - Dwelvers

First of I want to tell you all about my weekend at NärCon, this is a Swedish cosplay / anime / indiegames convention which had ~7000 visitors. I was invited to promote Dwelvers, and I have to say, it went really good I went there last Thursday and stayed there until Sunday, I have to admit it went a little slow at first, but I blame this on the bad location I was placed on and that was ill prepared. My first thought was that I was going to do some coding and show of some gameplay to people that walked by, so all I had was my laptop and some business cards (now I know better). It was not until Saturday that I got a better location to stand at and a monitor to connect to the laptop.

Long story short, after I got a better location to stand at I managed to give away 40+ business cards and 30+ fliers in less than a day. The response was really good, people seemed to love the game and all of them came with feedback on ideas that they would like to see implemented (deja vu ).

So, I have been invited to the next närcon conversion in winter, and that time I will come way more prepared with pull up posters, a big monitor and a lot of fliers

So I followed Mello Tonin's design and made new creature bars.

As seen in the screenshot the player can now see the health, the level, the mood and the name of the creature, and a lot more clearly than before. Also, with this design it is a lot easier to separate friend from foe.

Well it is not actually a console window, but it behaves a little like one.

Why I implemented this is because I wanted to get rid of the annoying window that popped up every time the player got a new item or creature available for production. But as soon as I implemented it I saw its potential and tried to push as much information through it as possible. So it will show:

• When a new item is available for production.
• When a creature level up (showing the name of the creature as well so that the player bond a little more with them).
• When the player gets a new message (battle or production).
• When the player speeds up or slows down the gamespeed (yes, we can now modify the gamespeed with +/- within the range of x0 -> x9).

First of, here's the screenshot:

When a creature icon is selected with the hand some other icons will pop up above it. These icons shows how many of the creatures are in a good, neutral, bad or dead mood. Also how many of the creatures that are idle, working, or fighting. When these icons are left clicked the player will toggle and zoom in on these creatures.

Also when a creature type is doing battle a red square will flash around the creature icon so that the player can find the battle without having to scroll through the messages.

I know, this is the third time I change it... But as long as I am not happy I will keep changing it. So this time I have backtracked to DK's way of creating creatures with some modifications.

The idea is simple. There will be some buildings in the dungeon that attracts certain creature types. When these buildings are built the creature that are being attracted will get spewed out by the Dark Mother. From this point the player will have to make sure that this creature (lets say Orc) is happy. Because when all the Orcs the player owns are happy a timer will increase (that is the cyan colored line in the screenshot above), but when one Orc of all the Orcs is unhappy the timer will decrease. This is represented by a green (+) or a red (-) as seen in the screenshot. The challenge here is to keep all the Orcs happy, and the more Orcs the player gets the harder it will be to keep them all happy at once.

To limit the player from creating 50+ Orcs every Orc the player own will make the timer increase slower. So when the player has 1 orc it will take 1 minute to create another one, then it will take 2 minutes, then 4 minutes, then 8 minutes and so on.

The reason I want to limit the creature production is because I want the player to focus on equipping and training the creatures and not to mass produce them.

I will of course make it a lot harder for the player to keep the creatures happy by giving them more demands. The Orc for example requires:

• Well rested, drunk and well feed.
• To be at least level 2 to be happy.
• To get really drunk at least once every 20 minute.
• To start a battle with someone else at least once every 10 minute. If the Orc faces some real enemies there will be a delay on 20 minutes, it doesn't matter if the orc wins or looses, he will still be happy (A lot of creatures will probably be beaten up and dragged to their beds unless the player engages the orcs in battle).
• To be able to be left alone from other races once in a while. (Good to build their beds separately from other races).
• To be able to pray to their God once in a while (Here is where the orc statue come into the picture)

So what about the imps. What I am going to do here is to make all player owned buildings attract imps, this will speed up the imp production timer a lot more. The same goes for the Orcs, if a large amount of buildings are built that are attracting Orcs they will be produced faster. This could be visualised by adding more plus signs to the Orc icon in the screenshot above.

I know a lot of you have been talking about the Evil Meter, it will still be implemented but I have been thinking about using it for spells costs instead.

When it comes to making direct actions to produce creatures faster I have have been thinking about making it so that certain creatures will be attracted faster if the player does certain actions, like torturing enemies and so on. Another idea is also that every time a enemy is killed by a Orc the Orc production timer will get a boost. So we could have more needs implemented for the creatures, but we could also have primary needs that will make the creatures super happy and boost their production timer.

Now when I am working on what buildings should attract what creature I decided to make the editing a little bit more simple, so with the next version I will include this tool:

From here the player will be able to choose building costs and creature attraction if he wants to experiment with the balance of the game.