December Update
Merry almost Christmas, Happy Festivus & Good Festive Season everyone!
A flurry of work has been done over the last 5 weeks (though mostly the last 3) & I'm honestly starting to have a little bit of faith that the game might not turn out to be terrible?
I've had a lot of (hopefully good) ideas during development that have mercifully been quite straightforward to implement, but that may well make the world of difference in the final product!
The game is, as it ever was, a Roguelite Dungeon Crawler Slot Machine bunchawords type game. However. I came to the realisation that one of the things that people DON'T enjoy about the abundance of Roguelites that have been populating storefronts for the last 15 years; is a lack of control.
Roguelites are, in & of themselves, dependent on randomness. You need a different dungeon layout, or selection of weapons, boss to fight, upgrade, loot, ability, character, event... every time you play. It's the whole concept really. But that said, randomness without an element of control is quite literally dice rolling. It's picking a horse based on the dart thrown at the dart board & hoping you get rich. What makes these games addictive, & engrossing is the feeling that some parts of your experience are within your ability to change or control.
Gamblers come back to the table again & again for many reasons. The chance of winning, sure. The shiny lights of a slot machine & dopamine of the jingles & clunking of the mechanics, absolutely. The ones who are really deep in the weeds, feel like the outcome is at least partially within their control.
To this end, I realised I need more than just the shiny lights, the clickety-clacks & the chance of winning - I need the chance for the player to affect their fate as much as reasonably possible.
In standard deckbuilders, this is very straightforward. Players choose what to add to their deck, what to remove & once they've drawn a hand, they can pick what to play, in what order & directed at what enemy. A slot machine has no hands, no order of operation & no deck order to consider, so how do you assert control over the outcome of your tokens in a slot machine?
Well, you give your gambler a second machine.
In SlotCrawler, you're going to be able to build two sets of items, & each round you pick which to roll. Additionally, you know what the enemy is going to do next - through indicators on the enemy panel - and so it gives you the chance to think & react.
Example: You play as a Paladin, specialising in Strength, so naturally you'll have one side of your machine filled with all the heavy hitting weapons you can find. Maybe you have a bunch of bladed weapons, whetstones to improve their damage & oils to enhance them further. Of course, you still need to defend yourself, & while you could always throw a few shields into the same side of the machine, the chances of them coming up when you need them are well out of your hands - the balance is out of your hands.
Dividing your items into distinct groups - at a very basic level you could start with one offensive & one defensive - allows you to determine how you move through the game, pick your builds more carefully & plan moment to moment, instead of battle to battle.
As things get more complex, perhaps you play a Sorcerer character who has one side of the machine dedicated to fire magic & the other to water magic - after all, the more consistently you can stack items next to each other that synergise, the greater your output will be!
(If you're not following what on earth I'm talking about at the moment with synergies & consistency, then don't worry, it's my job to explain better when the store page is up!)
So, as you can perhaps tell, I was very excited to come up with this solution, & I have to thank the reviewers of another, similar game - Spin Hero - for this idea. The game is generally well reviewed, but one of the most common complaints was that you didn't really have any effect on the gameplay moment to moment. Effectively, whether you won or lost was always determined as soon as you enter a fight, & while you didn't KNOW which way the coin had landed, there was no way to nudge it a bit in your direction.
There's still a lot of work to be done, but I believe I'm still very much on track to get my Steam page up & running by the end of the month so that I can submit my game for February Next Fest & hopefully garner myself some of that much loved attention I've heard so much about.
Lots more to update on, but don't want to make this post any longer than it already is! Enjoy a very tiny, little video of my current progress to see how far everything has come in the space of a few short weeks. Excited to see where this is going - thanks for reading!