Blacksmith Quest Overview | Patreon Weekly #209

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going over the general design direction for the Blacksmith’s quest!

Sorry for the delay (again =S) by the way! I ended up having to make some changes to this weekly as I realized it makes the most sense to pace out the info on the Blacksmith quest instead of dumping it all at once.

Design Changes

Firstly, if you want a bit of background, Weekly #164 is the most recent time that I talked generally about the state of the quest’s design.

Since then, I’ve been having a bit of trouble with concepting out exactly how the blacksmith quest should behave. I’ve kept having trouble ‘finding the fun’ so to speak, and my solution to that in my design consideration has generally been to add more mechanics to increase engagement or strategy. This has caused the design to start getting quite large.

One extra floor turned into several, with increasingly valuable minerals as the player gets deeper, where the player needs to balance the desire to get short term minerals and find the entrance to the next depth. More minerals and environment size means more hazards, which also increase in deadliness as the player goes down. All of this could definitely be fun, but I’ve started to realize that what I’m concepting is far too much like a new game entirely than a small distraction during a game of Shattered.

Ultimately, I’ve realized that I was trying far too hard to make ‘a minigame within Shattered’ work, when I really should have started the design as more rooted in Shattered’s existing systems. With that in mind I’ve restarted concepting on the Blacksmith quest to involve mining more as a complement to existing gameplay mechanics, rather than the core interaction of the entire quest. Here’s how that might look:

• The quest should take place on one floor that should be slightly larger than a regular dungeon floor at most. It should be largely tunneled out already.
• Mining for resources should still be the goal, but there should be just two resource types at most, perhaps gold that’s easy to access and gems that are harder to reach.
• Mining through walls will still be present but will be more about evading hazards and finding one or two secret rooms, instead of having equal importance to regular movement.
• There could still be some sort of ‘time limit’ mechanic, but this should primarily be based on the strength of the player’s run (e.g. steadily stronger enemies) or their positional strategy (e.g. only breaking through walls when needed), and not on the efficiency of a mining route.

Expect more info on some of these, such as specific hazards and time limit mechanics, soon!