Today's "Design Genres" is both a regular genre introspective and a continuation of the Horror Hotel idea, as I'll be addressing Dungeon Crawlers as a whole and my spin on them for the Horror Hotel Dungeon Mode.
First, an explanation. Dungeon Crawlers are considered to be the most mindless of the RPG supergenre, as they focus on constant exploration and treasure/XP mining with the barest of plots or character advancement (from a literary perspective, not gaining levels). The most famous example is probably the Diablo series, or the expansive array of ASCII-based Rogue-likes, though in truth the genre has existed from extremely early on in video game history.
If we're being technical, Pac-Man is probably the first Dungeon Crawler. A spurious claim you might say, but hear me out: The entire focus of Pac-Man is to gain points. It's the only reason for playing. Well, besides fun, but no-one would play games if they weren't having fun. To do this, Pac-Man is constantly collecting treasure (pellets), defeating evil monsters (ghosts) and descending floors of dungeons which all look the same to repeat the process. The ultimate worth of any given playthrough is how highly you scored, which tends to be the same end goal for Dungeon Crawlers (how high a level you can reach). There's no limit to how far you can go before dying, as the system is designed to repeat itself indefinitely.
Of course Gauntlet is probably the first "true" Dungeon Crawler (which I'll now be referring to as DCs for the rest of this update), unless a Rogue-like snuck its way in before that iconic game. Red Fighter needs food badly indeed.
Because of this configuration for endless gameplay (a very promising promotion for developers to write on the game's box), DCs tend to be very common and, unfortunately therefore, very overdone. There's only so many ways you can present a game with this premise, such as tipping the ratio towards favoring a high number enemies (making the game closer to something like Doom) or a high amount of treasure (which is somewhat rarer, as taking the enemies out sort of removes the challenge).
Before I go onto my idea, I'll just note that Dungeon Hack is probably my favorite example of this genre. It is what it is, and knows it: A repetitive DC. But it uses this to its advantage by allowing the player to select the parameters of the game. I know some Rogue-likes do this too, but Dungeon Hack doesn't look like 500 lines of UNIX trying to eat each other, so I have to yield my preference to it. Setting these parameters (monster strength, dungeon depth, the amount of key + lock puzzles, the amount of treasure etc.) gives the game far more depth than its simple structure could otherwise afford, and allows you your personal optimum DC experience to boot. Though Dark Cloud 2 - probably my second favorite game of all time - is technically a Dungeon Crawler, I consider it far more expansive in the various forms of gameplay it employs to count it as such.
Now, as to what I plan to achieve with Horror Hotel's Dungeon Mode: First, as already explained in an earlier update, it will be a team effort. You'll control the leader and those following you will have their own assignments based on AI. All the golems in this game are built for their own purpose, meaning the AI is a no-brainer: Warrior Golems fight, Magic Golems keep their distance and fireball things, Helper Golems stay out of the way and clean up afterwards.
Next, an explanation of the inventory system: Golems turn items into magical "Spheres" while they're carrying them (sort of like Pokeballs in a way. In a really, really bizarre and roundabout way) and the size and strength of this sphere is based on a magical power statistic. Because the Golems use magical sub-space to store items (kind of like D&D's Bags of Holding), they only have so much magical "room" in their inventory before filling it up. This means that no matter how big or cumbersome an item is, if it's a perfectly mundane item (like a giant log) it won't weigh barely anything. Inversely, a magical gem (which is far more valuable) may end up being twice as heavy as the giant log. The Spheres are uniform in size, but they have a luminescence which indicates how strong a magical field the item it represents has. Once the luminescence meter is maxed out, the Golem has filled its inventory.
All Golems have an inventory score, but some Golems have an incredibly limited amount of storage depending on how they're built. A Golem with a lot of different powers (like the magic-users) will already be close to maxing out their magical potential, so they won't be able to hold much. Again, inversely, something useless like the Helper Golem doesn't require much magic to run and can therefore use its reserves for large amounts of storage.
This Sphere system should allow for an interesting capacity dynamic (you could carry half a building in there of furniture, but you may not be able to carry a pocketful of gems if they had powerful magic capabilities) and they'd be colour-coded to help you decide what should stay and what should go. What follows are the different items and their respective colours:
The enemies are seen as a different type of treasure in this game. Killing something always yields some useful item, even if the item is the carcass itself. There are numerous uses for the bodies, meaning it's sometimes better to go out of your way to defeat something challenging for its valuable remains. Enemy carcasses count as Red-coloured spheres of varying luminescence depending on how strange the monster was (since oddities require more magic to exist). I'll have to talk about combat and such in another update I think.
Furniture, the bread and butter of your hotel operation, can be found in various states of disrepair in the dungeons based on how old they are and what they're made out of. Most furniture would be rather magic-free, meaning a very low amount of storage room would be needed. A fully-furnished room could set your Golem back around only 10% of its storage space. Furniture would be White coloured, since it's fairly mundane. If you so desired, you could empty a treasure chest of items and then take the treasure chest itself as furniture.
Golem Equipment, the kind of things you can give your Golems to augment their abilities or use to build new ones, can be found in various places underground also. Golems are magical beings, so it stands to reason that Golem parts are magical too. This means that while these parts are very useful, they'll be a heavy burden to carry also. Golem Parts will be Blue. No real reason, I just like blue.
Gold, fairly self-explanatory. Gold can be used for buying anything the game has to sell you in the overworld, which includes everything I've mentioned so far (besides monster carcasses). Gold has a very slight luminescence, and since every gold piece you collect will be stored in the same sphere (which will be Gold-coloured, in a somewhat bizarre leap of logic) it'll eventually become a very heavy thing to carry. There's always been some disparity between DC camps about how gold should count as a carrying expense (since you can amass a lot of it and it is made of metal after all), but when you consider that you don't need to carry amounts of gold with you everytime you go into the dungeon (what will you need it for?) I figured it should add to encumbrance.
Finally, miscellaneous treasure. Anything that doesn't count as gold, furniture or Golem parts go in this category. Books, clothes, rings, boots, bits of string, rocks, food items, plants, gems, and so on. If they don't count as furniture or Golem parts, you probably can't use them. So you might as well sell them. All items in this category have their own luminescence and monetary value that can vary wildly so it'll be up to the player to decide what's worth keeping. They may all be one Sphere colour (I'm thinking Green) or I may decide to assign a bunch of different colours for them to make things interesting.
That's it for this massive update. Certainly is good to get out of that 50 words thing, what a pain. Pain for me, that is, not for you. These kind of giant updates are painful for you. Like I care.
