Delvers Inc : We Should Talk About What It Is

It occurred to me after posting my previous blog post on bounded random combat systems Link Here, that many if not most of you don't actually even know what Delvers Inc is supposed to be. So we should probably address that for clarity sake.

Delvers Inc is a game where you take on the part of a Guildmaster over a company of dungeon delving adventurers. Every party of adventurers can contain up to 4 different members who dive headfirst into dangerous dungeons, explore their depths, kill monsters, gather up loot, and become more powerful. Or in more game-ified terms, it's a light fantasy RPG dungeon explorer.

It is intended to be easily playable on both computers and mobile devices so that you can jump in, run a few dungeons, kill a few bad guys and then get back to whatever else you were doing until you're ready to explore again. This is not intended as a game that you pick up and lose hours upon hours in, but rather something you play when you have some free time and specifically don't want to get too deeply involved. This isn't 2D Skyrim.

The primary playing spaces are the dungeon maps. Dungeons are scattered all over the game world as abandoned temples, ruined castles, vast caverns, city sewer systems, ancient underground cities, and more. There are towns and villages as well, so that you can recruit new delvers to your guild, find out about other nearby dungeons to explore, sell off the loot you've gathered and don't want, and buy supplies for your parties next delve.

As a top down 2D game, you can point and click or tap to navigate your party through the dungeon, when they encounter monsters to fight they will automatically engage using a series of actions mapped to their own particular style. We talked about combat last week but something to add to our previous discussion is "Special Actions" (better lore appropriate name TBD) which the Guildmaster (that's you, just in case that wasn't clear) can fire off as needed when the delver has accumulated enough power.

Loot is automatically picked up by your party on the death of a monster or the opening of a chest. You can then equip that onto a member of your party if you wish to start using it right away, or you leave it in your inventory to sell later on in town.

Each delver gains experience as they explore and kill monsters and can level up, gaining more health, better attacks and more deft defenses.

Delvers Inc : Development Progress

Well that's kinda what this blog is all about. Giving updates on what is being developed and why. How things are going, etc... Last week for example was all about getting some of the UI up to snuff, loading and transition screens and getting the travelling to and from dungeons figured out. This week is getting the basics of the merchants in place. What they will sell to the player, how much they will pay for your unwanted loot, that sort of thing. Next week's blog post will probably be sharing some of what has been happening with that.

Delver movement and the basics of combat are in place, although I haven't yet implemented the, previously mentioned, "Special Actions" system. Monsters will wander around and attack the player, loot gets dropped, chests have loot tables and will spawn around the map. You can hit up town and unlock new maps and recruit new delvers.

Looking ahead, after I get the merchant sorted out, I want to finish off basic combat by implementing those Special Actions next.

Delvers Inc : Roadmap

While timelines have been pretty loose, and in order to get some vertical slicing going I have been partially implementing some systems so some features are partially completed. The basic roadmap is as follows even though it reads more like a todo list:

• Party Management - Setting what Delvers are in your party
• Dungeon Scaling - As a general rule I am not fond of scaling up a dungeon but rather dungeons will be "banded" 'this dungeon is for parties in the 1-5 level range' that sort of thing.
• Rarity tiers on Delvers and the ability to increase a delver's rarity to make them more powerful.
• Make a final decision on whether I want delvers to have a class. Right now they do not and I did that intentionally but I am running into situations that could be made better if there was a class for a delver, so it is still a decision point.
• Multi-level dungeons that checkpoint. So you can enter a dungeon with multiple levels, complete a level or two and then return to town without worrying about having to fight your way back through those finished levels.
• Consumables! Believe it or not, consumables like health potions are not yet implemented. We need those and a UI for using them while adventuring.
• Boss fights - Each dungeon level should have a harder boss that the player needs to fight to complete the level. These bosses obviously get the best loot in the dungeon.
• Ultra rare artifact items that can really give your delver a power boost but take a lot of adventuring and crafting to acquire.
• Flash and awe, right now fight updates are all via debug message logging. We need particle effects, camera shaking, and floating damage to give fights some impact for the player.
• Flash and awe for the ears - right now there is a grand total of 1 sound effect in the game (opening a chest) we obvisouly are going to need more then that, and some background music to boot.
• Settings menu - because you need to be able to turn sounds off if you want. Personally, if one of my mobile devices makes a noise, it's likely to get thrown out the window.
• Integration with Steam, Google Play, & the App store.
• Data...lots and lots of data generation. New loot items, new delvers, new weapons, armor, shields, helmets, all the things!
• Dungeons...lots and lots of dungeons to explore.
• Monsters...because we have to fill up those dungeons with something interesting to kill.

There is probably a bunch of stuff I'm forgetting...or maybe I just don't want to tell you ;-) but that's pretty good and gives you the idea of where we are headed.

Well that's all for now. Let's talk again next week and in the meantime, Like us on X and Facebook or sign up for our newsletter so that you don't miss out on a post!

-Arakiel