More thoughts on design of SKUME
Happy new year everyone.
So I've been thinking about the way solomon's keep is structured in general and see if there any way to improve its design for higher replayablilty. The current design of solomon's keep is just a bare bone "raid keep->kill solomon->next difficulty plz" with little to no story development other than "congratz you graduated". Sure, I understand why solomon's keep is in that way BUT SKUME should NOT be same like that. I know that there will be some new features like quest but I think the entire game may needs a huge overhaul from what you have made previously (this is based entirely on what I've seen from the dev blogs and other comments that I could find). I have been mostly talking about character balance and probably making more post on paladin and rogue again soon. So, in this post, I am going to talk about game modes:
So here is the idea: Instead of just having normal and hardcore saves, there should be three different game modes: classic, standard, hardcore. Here is the simplified description of how each game modes are like.
1. Classic: As the name states, this will be very similar to how solomon's keep is used to be. "clear keep->next difficulty" and "restart at the last save you had upon death". However, to have some justification on constant revival and clearing keep over and over again, there will be an npc called Asmodeus who revives you from dead, send you back in time with increased difficulty upon solomon's death, and removes resurrection upon reaching gauntlet mode. As the name suggests, you are basically clearing keep to entertain this ancient evil which solomon made a patch with previously. Asmodeus should have a vibe similar to Gaunter O'Dimm from Witcher 3.
2. Standard: So for this one, your characters have permadeath and there is no difficulty swap due to lack of Asmodeus' support. However, even if your character dies, you still maintain any upgrades Dead Hawg, golds, and story progression while keep itself resets. Also, you may transfer some skills from your previous characters based on the upgrades you have in one of the buildings in Dead Hawg. Because this game mode promotes players to "die and retry" like a rougelike games, enemies will have stronger attack stats in earlier levels and getting back to base using magic key would be only be possible after clearing a floor. When you defeat Solomon, Asmodeus takes Solomon's soul and opens a portal to hell which you can go for the brand new gauntlet mode for your character. After defeating Solomon once, Asmodeus will reset keep, resurrect solomon, and operate graveyard instead of solomon.
3. Hardcore: In addition to all the features in Standard, you gain less xp, you gain additional resources to manage like hunger and stress, and you have to use your gold to revive or the whole operation to eliminate solomon will fail.
For the additional info about the standard mode like all the new stuff in Dead Hawg, I will make a separate post about that later. Hope all of you are doing well and seriously wish SKUME's development starts this year.
P.S. if John ever needs a hand for skume (things like level design, game balance, localization etc) I'm more than happy to work for him.