Future Features

Hello! I wanted to have a discussion about future features to be added to Eat the Dungeon and I'm interested in your comments and feedback.

Approximately 10000 standard years ago, I wrote a roadmap for ETD that you can access from my patreon's About page. I've been following it very loosely for a while now. Among the things I put on there was "Hard mode/Endless Mode", two ideas I'm no longer super into.

So I'm thinking of replacing them with other features, but I'm having a hard time weighing the pros and cons of them. I'd like to gather feedback and see what everybody else thinks, and use that to inform my decision. I will probably implement 1 or 2 new features.

I will list my ideas here along with my thoughts about them, but I also want to hear your suggestions.

Hard Mode

I originally wanted this because I was worried ETD's gameplay was too "mushy", mainly that there were too many viable party compositions to beat levels. My idea for this was that each hard version of an enemy would be limited to exactly one defense (weapon, magic, faith, sneak) so that success would only be possible if you had the exact correct team composition I designed the level for.

First off, would this even be fun? ETD is already a game about trying to read my mind and guessing what team comp I wanted you to use, and having some wiggle room probably saves it. Moreover, recent enemies have had smaller number of defenses (like 1 or 2) which kind of already does this. Honestly I don't like this idea at all.

Endless Mode

I thought this might be like a fun "challenge": all your characters are set to 0 weight and you are sent to a dungeon that can go on forever. The idea is that there'd be some unique fail condition (like half the party is KO'd or you take too long on a room) and you could see how far you get for bragging rights.

I think this is all kind of obsolesced by the uncapped rpg stats of ETD. How far you get is basically a function of how highly leveled your team is. I guess I could standardize it to 10 for each stat, or give you a budget of xp points to build your team, but at that point I feel like I'm making a second game. I think my time is better spend elsewhere.

Passive Special Abilities

Now, on to the new ideas.

These would be unique passives for each character. They would be simple bonuses and alterations to make the characters play slightly differently. Overpowered characters would receive weak passives and underpowered characters would get strong ones. Here are some examples to illustrate what I'm aiming for:

• Ranger- Sniper: Deals double damage to enemies in the farthest column

• Illusionist- Trickery: Adds three seconds to enemy's current attack timers

• Dancer- Alacrity: Doubles the cooldown reduction on support targets.

Unique abilities is something that's been requested from time to time and I've been hesitant to do it because I was worried expanding the design of the basic gameplay. It could introduce a bunch more bugs and making fixing bugs a huge pain. I've worked on several game projects that rapidly went out of scope and became an absolute nightmare to maintain. So I've been extremely (perhaps too extremely) gun-shy about adding new features to ETD I hadn't originally planned for.

But maybe I do need to add something more to it. I'm worried that the gameplay is too repetitive. I'm worried about certain characters being over powered/under powered and not being able to address that with just the current gameplay.

But also ETD is like 90% done! Adding such a big gameplay feature this late might be a huge mistake! Or maybe it isn't! I don't know! What you do guys think?

Bestiary

A menu that lets you check out enemy names, stats, art, lore. There'd be descriptions to flesh out the story and world.

Its pretty straightforward and relatively easy to do. But do people even want it? Would it be useful?

No New Features

Finally, it might also be worth adding no new features at all. The game's already a year behind my original schedule for it, and it'd be great to catch up. It'd be great to finish it and move on to another project. Sometimes you gotta cut content to make your goals. Kill your darlings, and all that.

Please let me know what you think!