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Game setup

The intended gaming experience is cooperative multiplayer with a party of at least 5 players. The maximum player count per server will likely end up being around 30 due to the high processing and bandwidth requirements of the game. For this reason, heavy sharding by the community will hopefully take place if the game becomes more popular than what the official server can handle.

The course of the game

Beginning

The game starts by the player connecting to the server and creating a character. The character creation involves choosing the race and appearance of the character and freely choosing the skills of the character from the pool of all skills in the game. The skills, which are one of the cornerstones of the gameplay, can be altered at any time with no penalty other than a short transition period during which the skills change to their new values.

After the character creation, the player typically forms a party with other players and starts pursuing either the main quest or some of the randomly generated quests. On role-play servers, such as the official server, the players also have the option to just focus on their roles without ever completing a single quest. In most cases, the gameplay will involve a mixture of all these aspects.

Progression

The objective of the game is to travel deeper and deeper into the dungeons and arrive to the bottom with all the mandatory quests solved. These mandatory quests serve as checkpoints and typically grant some kind of special ability to the player base as a whole, allowing the game to progress further. The order and nature of the checkpoint quests may vary from game to game.

To reach the next checkpoint quest, the players need to travel deeper into the dungeons. This part of the game involves elements of traditional hack and slash dungeon crawling, solving optional quests, and solving puzzles by using the special abilities of the different races. During their journey, players can also find towns, activate portals that connect different dungeon parts together or lead to whole new areas, encounter boss monsters, bypass areas by mining shortcuts or detours, craft defensive structures, and so on.

When the players have solved all the mandatory quests and reach the bottom of the dungeon, they can choose to unlock the end condition of the game. If they choose to do this, the game world goes through a drastic a change and the final challenge is selected from a number of random options. Typically, one or more ultimate foes are unearthed and need to be defeated.

Ending

If the end condition is fulfilled, the game is considered collectively won and a good end is chosen and presented to the players. If the end condition isn't fulfilled in a pre-determined time that is measured in real world days, the game is considered collectively lost and a bad end is chosen and presented to the players.

When the game ends, the server may grant points and achievements to the player base as a whole and to individual players who played during that game instance. After the statistics have been processes and made available to players, a new world map is generated and all characters are wiped from the database so that a new game can begin from scratch.

Elements of the game

Dungeons

Dungeons can be created either manually or automatically using the quasi-random map generator tool of the game. The maps of the official server will be automatically generated, with possibly some manual tweaks applied to special areas such as the starting town.

In principle, dungeons will be rather similar to those in Nethack, except that the whole world map is seamless instead of being split into distinct floors or levels. There also isn't such a strong notion of tiles since objects can be placed freely on the map. Destroying terrain by digging and setting explosives is possible so you can take your own route through the dungeons with some patience.

The map generator is aware of the third dimension, making it possible to connect areas using staircases, sloped corridors, bridges, and other non-flat elements. Variations in terrain height and heights of obstacles also affect the gameplay as players can climb on small obstacles, seek cover from ranged attacks from behind them, ride moving platforms, etc.

Quests

Quests will have an important role in defining the mood of the game, as well as in providing players with additional activities and challenges. There will be three kinds of quests: the branches of the main quest, randomly generated optional quests, and game master run quests. The main quest has some static elements and some random elements, whereas the optional quests are entirely random.

Due to the general hack and slash nature of the game, the random quests will generally only feature short and easy to read dialog. On role-play servers, players can improvise continuation to the quest explanations, while on pure hack and slash servers any explanation beyond the quest objective can be ignored. The quest texts attempt to be entertaining in style in hopes of encouraging players to read them.

When the game is mature enough for the official server to go online and there is a thriving player base, the development team will start organizing game master run quests. These are special quests created on the fly by the staff and tailored to fit the situation and players of the game. They will hopefully make the developers and the community closer to each other and provide lots of fun for both the players and the developers.

Monsters

Monsters are one of the main elements to provide challenge to players, as well as contribute to the mood and balance of the game. They can make or break the game in that, if designed well, they bring variety and surprise elements to the game, and, if designed wrong, they only make the game tedious and annoying.

Some ways to enforce the positive effects of monsters include giving them distinct strengths, weaknesses, and special abilities. Furthermore, monsters should interact in interesting ways with each other, with the different player races, and with various items. Since a single well designed monster can improve the gameplay greatly and making graphics is lots of work, favoring quality over quantity is advised.

Here are some ideas and themes that might be useful for designing monsters that fit the game:

Hybrids: combine two or more ideas in unexpected ways.
Perversions: choose a human trait and take it to the extreme.
Cute: create something cute with a cute but harmful special ability.

Items

Like monsters, items should have distinct purposes that affect the gameplay in meaningful ways. However, as a special requirement, no item can be rare due to the design of the game as a whole. All items usable to an individual player should be more or less equally easy to obtain, which means that, ideally, no item should be able to replace other items without some sacrifices or compromises.

Examples

Combat

Four players (an aer named Sophia, a devora named Pui, a wyrm named Faith, and a kraken named Coral) encounter a mofumofu (a small, fluffy, spherical creature) and a frost vortex.

Mofumofu begins wobbling.
Faith charges towards the frost vortex.
Mofumofu emits a puff of sleeping gas. Faith is hit by the gas and falls asleep.
Sophia throws some wind seeds to the air and casts Wind Strike. The spell blows the sleeping gas on the frost vortex. It is immune to sleep.
Coral throws blue pearls at Faith and casts Cure. Faith wakes up.
The frost vortex casts Ice Needles. A set of icicles materialize and shoot towards the players. They hit Faith, Sophia, and Coral, causing some damage and inflicting Slow.
Pui hits the mofumofu with an axe. The wounding property of axes causes it to begin leaking gas.
Faith breathes fire on the sleeping gas cloud around the monsters. The gas explodes and kills the monsters.

Quest

The players find a peaceful faerie standing at the corner of a remote building. She's stamping her foot and holding her hand on her forehead. One of the players initiates a conversation with the NPC with the chat command:

NPC: "Ah, why did you abandon me, my squishy sweetie. Please, come back home safe."
The player has an option to end the dialog or listen for more. The player chooses "more".
NPC: "Please, if you ever find my little sweetie, bring her back to me."
The player closes the dialog.
Not far from the place, the players find a little pig. They carry it to the faerie and start a dialog with her.
NPC: "My, you have found my sweetie! Take my whip as a reward. I will never use it again!"
The player starts the dialog one more time.
NPC: "If my sweetie runs away again, she'll be boiling in the pot!"

The quest may be different in the next game. For example, the creature and the reward could be different or the faerie might choose to roast the pig and offer some beef as a reward. If the players bring the creature back dead, the ending might also change greatly depending on the plans of the faerie.

Crafting

Faith the wyrm wields a mattock and begins bashing a dungeon wall. Some of the wall shatters with every hit and some gems and ore appear every now and then. Faith mines for a short while and takes the ore to a forge where his friends Sophia is working. Faith hands over the materials to Sophia since aer can get more proficient in crafting than wyrms.

Materials have different, randomly assigned properties each game. Sophia has figured some of them out already and takes advantage of her knowledge by crafting items that benefit from the special properties of the materials the most. She crafts a spear from blue ore by applying the forge and placing the ore in the "forge" dialog that opens. She chooses "spear" from the list of items she can craft and presses the "craft" button in the dialog.

Crafting always succeeds, and the crafted item is always similar when the materials used and the skills of the player are constant. The crafting skill of the player determines what kind of objects can be crafted and what the quality is, and the materials used determine the properties of the crafted item. No random numbers are involved in the process directly, but the materials can be considered random input if you don't know their properties yet.