First of all, I apologise for the hiatus. I've been playing through Lego Star Wars: The Original Trilogy a lot over the past week. Which is a wonderful game by the way, it makes perfect use of the Lego format and the gameplay is fun and intelligent (not to mention the hilarious cutscenes recreating parts of the movies) as opposed to painfully generic and simple like you'd expect licensed games directed towards the very youngest players to be. It's about time developers realised that 5 year olds can be pretty damn smart when they want to be. Devastatingly so.
Rather than go into that previous statement in any detail, I shall continue describing Horror Hotel's (I still plan to rename it, don't worry) Dungeon Mode in an effort to get everything about it covered so I can move onto other topics and game ideas. I've covered Treasure, Exploration and the playable Golems themselves, so all that's left is..
Combat & Level Advancement: Combat will be in real-time, in a sort of opposite side of the mirror from the "hordes of creatures" approach in Diablo and closer to Pikmin, in that your Golems will tend to be smaller (being 3ft high robots most of the time) than the regular-sized enemies you'll fight under the mansion and will therefore need to take on a single enemy with a swarm of Golems. Tactics will vary with any given encounter depending on the enemy, though you may want to have several AI-controller defensive Golems take on the enemy creature directly while your player-controlled Fighter can do some damage from behind (getting a damage bonus) and keeping an eye on the other AI-controlled ranged units.
Alternatively, you could allow the fighters to do their thing and control one of the ranged units in order to keep them safe (and it'd be easier to keep an eye on the other ranged units if you're there with them). I already touched on AI in the last update, but I plan on keeping it fairly sharp and customizable in order to easily set up your preferred strategy on downing monsters.
To describe a typical enemy encounter: Your Golems are busy exploring a new room, allowing the Helper Golems to collect everything that isn't nailed down. Suddenly, a Warboar wanders into the room from the south exit, one you haven't been guarding. The game pauses (if you have auto-pause on for an enemy showing up in your visual range, which is probably a good idea).
First off, the natural AI will have any healthy Fighter units charging the Warboar, any ranged units keeping their distance until they can see the Warboar is occupied, and then firing at them. The Helpers will run for it in the safest direction available, as they're not built for combat. The fighting will continue, with various damage scores being given to and from the Warboar in timed increments (which are called "rounds" in D&D as you probably already know). If you have healing Golems, they'll be busy keeping any injured Fighter Golems alive, though you may need to step in if the Warboar is concentrating its attack on a single Golem, since it probably won't last long.
While this is going on, you can assume control of a magic-using Golem (provided you have one) and use all the powerful magic it has that is effective against the Warboar (which will probably be Earth-affiliated, so you'll need Wind magic). Once your heavy magic hitters are all out, you can assume one of the Ranged units and try and maneuver around it to attack its backside while the Fighters have it distracted. You could also assume one of the Fighters that isn't being targeted by the Warboar and do the same thing (back attacks to bring it down quicker) or you could assume whichever unlucky Golem is being targeted by the Warboar and try to get it to safety before it croaks. Moving around the battlefield Golem-to-Golem will allow you to direct the battle for the optimum damage against an opponent, hopefully defeating them before they can take out too many of your Golems.
Just to make this clear: When you start the game the enemies will be approximately the same size as your guys, since you'll only have a handful of Golems for the first few floors and need equal footing. As you explore deeper into the dungeon the enemies will get bigger (like, physically bigger on the screen) and more complex with their powers so you'll need to plan battles closer to a war campaign scenario as opposed to a regular RPG fight. You'll probably have several dozen Golems at this point to choose from.
Dead Golems will collapse into their respective parts and sometimes the parts will be too heavily damaged to be salvaged. Augmentations will always be safe, but as explained in the Items/Treasure blog entry, they'll be a heavy burden for other Golems to carry until the original is fixed. The Golem's central core - the one that has all the information the Golem has learned (experience, in other words) will also be OK (since it'll be built like the black boxes on aircraft), and can be transplanted into a new body of a similar (or completely different, if you wish) Golem model. Transplanting Golem cores into various different bodies will allow you to give that Golem some versatility if it dies again: If it was a Healer and then you turned it into a Fighter, it may be able to use some low level healing magic as well as its Fighter powers.
Killing the Warboar will make it collapse and give off various items it was carrying, as well as enemy-specific spoils such as a Warboar head or the tusks. These can be sold for cash, or used as Hotel decorations (the head can be displayed in your trophy room for example) or can be used as augmentations (the tusks might be fitted onto an Armour Golem's armour, giving it a boost to attack). If you have a Frankenstein/Monster Golem, it could "eat" the Warboar remains for a strength boost as well as a boost in the Earth element (however, if your Monster Golem has been Wind-affiliated up till now, it will decrease the Wind attribute instead since it's the opposite to Earth).
After collecting the spoils, you may decide that the casualties of the previous battle were too severe, or you may have run out of magic for the magic-users and feel you'll need to regenerate before another encounter. In either case, you can warp out of the dungeon after setting up a "point of return" (a standard item) and come back later. Maybe work on the Hotel section with your new finds before healing up the Golems, selecting your crew (you may change your line up to favour Golems which you found particularly effective against the Warboar) and continuing the dungeon where you left off.
You'll also get the experience rundown, which tells you which Golems did the most damage to the felled enemy and which was the "Golem of the Battle" (like "man of the match") in terms of relative inexperience compared to damage: New Golems who pulled their weight in the battle may end up getting "Golem of the Battle" and a big helpful bonus to XP. Golems who performed their tasks as expected will get an equal share (including the Helper Golems who should've run away). Player-controlled units will tend to get bonuses since the player would've tried to get more damage given from that unit than the usual AI would allow. Whoever dealt the finishing blow will also get a huge bonus.
Which leads us neatly onto the Golems' Level Advancement. As stated in both this and the Golem update, Golems can change models by moving their central core around. This central core gains experience no matter which Golem body it is in, as long as that Golem body is active in the battle. If you decided to Level a Fighter Golem to Level 5 and then transplant its core into a Healer Golem, that Healer Golem will learn its moves way before a regular Level 1 Healer Golem. For this reason, it is sometimes better to level up a Golem in something that gains a lot of XP (like a Fighter) before transferring it into the body of a Healer Golem, something that tends to level up slower. Alternatively, you may wish to level up a new Golem in a Healer body before turning it into a Fighter so that the Fighter will be able to heal itself. The system works kind of like the Job System in various Final Fantasy titles, only it makes slightly more sense than a buff fighter suddenly becoming a weak wizard, since you're switching the bodies around.
If you only have 8 cores, but several dozen different Golem bodies, then you can transplant those 8 cores into whichever bodies you feel are most advantageous for that floor. If you find you need a lot of Healers because of the floor's difficulty, or high number of traps, you can transplant one of the less required Golems into an additional Healer body.
Your best Golem (or your "favorite" - the one you assume control of as a player the most often) may start as a Fighter Golem for its first three levels, gaining a Charge attack. You could then turn it into a Healer Golem for one level to get the Simple Heal spell before turning it back into a Fighter. Once it hits Level 10 Fighter (with that Level 1 Healer) you can transplant the core into an advanced Fighter model. Or you may decide to change it into a Shield Golem with Charge and Heal powers.
As a final note, when calculating the floor level (the relative level of the treasure and monsters of that floor compared to that of your Golems), it will ignore your highest and lowest level Golems (so a single "uber"-Golem won't make the floor too hard for the rest of your party to deal with, and inversely the brand new Level 1 rookie Golem won't make it too easy for them) and use the average of the levels of the rest of the Golems for the final result.
I think that's everything to do with the Dungeon Mode for this game covered now. If I've left anything out, I probably have a clear image in my head about how it's going to work even if I haven't written it down. Additionally, and it pains me to realise this, but this game will probably never be made. It's simply a demonstration of my Design Documentation skills, such as they are, to describe a game in fuller detail than the usual basic overviews that the other Game Ideas in this blog have been given.
