New project (bouncing some ideas)

[nergantre]

Hey guys.


Some of you guys may know me from working on a mod for TheSilverBard's night games. Well I decided to start a new project somewhat recently, partially because I want to work on something new, and partially to learn some other forms of development. While there's not much to say about it right now, I thought I'd make a post and bounce around a few ideas if anyone cares


Anyhoo, on to the actual project. I wasn't really sure what to title it, so as a placeholder I named it Descent.


If I had to describe it in one phrase, it would be "sim monster girl dungeon." You play a newly born dungeon lord, and you have to build and manage a dungeon to expand your power. One thing that complicates this though is that instead of being born a goblin dungeon master, or a undead dungeon master, or anything normal, you are born a succubus. Needless to say, that affects your mode of operation a bit. Instead of the normal deadly monsters and ferocious beasts, you can only summon monster girls that gather mana through sex. However, since they aren't exactly very great at  fighting, especially at first, getting the ball rolling will be difficult.


I imagine main game loop will be something like this:


-> You place rewards in your dungeon -> adventurers are attracted by the rewards -> your dungeon absorbs mana from them by your monsters energy draining them -> you use your mana to upgrade your dungeon and place better rewards.


Your monster girls will level up as they gain experience, which they gain as they fight adventurers invading the dungeon. The girls themselves can evolve based on their stats, and I hope to get a somewhat full evolution tree eventually.


I'm still a pretty far from having a working demo, but here's a skeleton of the UI I've been working on recently.


https://nergantre.github.io/DescentGame/dist/index.html
Content wise, it'll be mostly m/f, monster girls, corruption, and maybe a bit of f/f.


It probably wont be for everyone, but hopefully it'll be interesting for some


Notes and details:


As with the nightgames mod, this will probably always be free and open source. I'm not a huge fan of patreon, and don't have any plans for something like that even in the future.


The project will be done in javascript with react-redux. I'm thinking about doing releases both with HTML and with electron, so everyone can mod the game fairly easily without having to set up a developer's environment.

 

[Etis]

The description reminds me another game... Don't remember its name, a rip-off from Dungeon Keeper, which appeared to be underground amusement park simulator, where you had to entertain your "guests" first, and only then catch them and torture for mana.

 

[stuntcock]

The description reminds me another game... Don't remember its name, a rip-off from Dungeon Keeper, which appeared to be underground amusement park simulator, where you had to entertain your "guests" first, and only then catch them and torture for mana.

Dungeons

 

[Etis]

Dungeons

Yep, it is.

 

[asestado]

Reading what the game is about i would give a few recommendations and some changes, this is just to help so feel free to just ignore it:


-First of all create the lore of the world, for example you could base it that the goddess told the humans that they should destroy every dungeon that appears because they claim power for the old gods. It doesn't need to be too long but it has to be well explained.


-Second what you should focus is on the events of the dungeon, having multiple outcomes (the adventurer was defeated but alive, your subordinate drained the adventurer's levels, your subordinate was killed, the adventurer died, the adventurer was intimidated before fighting your subordinate...)


-Third you should add minions for your subordinates, it would be quite good if every subordinate is like the "boss" of a floor, for example a low floor would have as a boss the "goblin broodmother" and she can have more powerful goblin minions if inseminated by a strong adventurer.


-Fourth you should give the subordinates objetives or even let them rebel against you if they feel that they are stronger than you or that they have a good chance, it would be good if your subordinates could take actions by themselves.


-Fifth it would be good to have "dungeon conquer campaigns" when your dungeon becomes quite strong, it will be hard to survive but if you do you will receive a good bonus.


-Sixth it's important to have interactions with the outside world, creating chaos would attract more adventurers to the dungeon.


And those are a few basic recommendations. Good luck with your project.

 

[Hurvey]

I think the idea of having and expanding a dungeon could be done up to be pretty cool indeed.

 

[TheDarkMaster]

I've seen another game like this that's basically dungeon keeper porn.  A big part of that game was actually capturing the adventurers and having your monsters play with them afterwards.  Maybe have the option to either focus on temptation or forced capture?  If going for the former, you place buildings and traps that weaken the willpower and build the lusts of those entering your dungeon before having monsters like succubi disabling the adventurer.  On the other hand, you can try the more direct route of forcibly incapacitating them and then having your monster drag them back to your prison to be taken by amazonian monster girls.  In either case, the more adventurers you have trapped in your dungeon in this way, the more power you have to spend on making your dungeon bigger.  The more you commit to one or the other could affect how your dungeon master levels up or what resources you have to spend on what traps and monsters.

 

[Yamemai]

Hmm, why only summoning and not capture & 'convince'/breed/etc? It seems possible, since there was a human as a subordinate. Also, would we be able to select our gender: Male=Incubus, female=Succubus, Futa=Omnibus, or is it set in stone as succubus?

 

[nergantre]

Hey, thanks for the helpful feedback!


I think there's a lot that can be added here, and it'll just be a matter of picking what to prioritize. I'd like to get the main game loop done and make it playable before going to wild on ideas. My goal is to do something smallish but achievable, since it's probably going to be a one person project at least for a while.


That said, there's definitely going to be traps and kidnapping adventurers. My original vision for the game is that you can have unnamed monsters and traps in rooms, as well as named subordinate demons that function as the midbosses/boss for each floor. The way you get more of them is to either spend mana on the unnamed monsters to evolve them into a named subordinate demon, or to kidnap and corrupt an adventurer into a new one.


That said, currently this is planned to be a text only game, so it'll probably be waaaay simpler than something like dungeon keeper. We'll see how it turns out though.


I'll probably try to put up another progress demo every week to at least show that I'm making some progress , currently I've been coding up the rooms display so you can start adding traps and girls to each room.


Quick edit:


At the time I'm not planning on adding a play as male, mostly because it's time consuming to basically make a completely new set of dialog. It's not that I'm not interested, but like I said, I'm trying to keep this game fairly limited in scope to not make it achievable.

 

[The Silver Bard]

A major advantage of the text based format is that you can abstract out mechanics that you don't need. You could theoretically model they layout of an entire dungeon floor, but that requires implementing a UI to display it and modify it, handling adventures pathfinding through it, and handling adventurer/minion encounters. 


You're probably better off handling a dungeon floor as a single abstract object with limited space for traps and minions. It will reduce complexity in dungeon planning, but free you up to add depth elsewhere. Since this is an adult game, you may want to direct that energy towards the sexual content. It looks like you're mostly focused on sex scenes with adventurers, but you could also do some cool stuff by integrating it into summoning/training your subordinates.


On a slightly related topic. Here's something that I integrate into a lot of my recent designs, though you probably wouldn't want to even consider it until late in development. Crusaders King 2 has provided an excellent example of using traits and relationships to manage vassal loyalty. It does wonders for the difficulty curve by creating a new layer of complications and threats right when you're starting to snowball. I'm a big fan.


Finally a general piece of advice for text-based design. look to board games if you aren't already. They also require abstracting real-time response and a complex GUI. A lot of the design challenges you will run into in text based development have already been solved by board game designers.