[JRPG Idle] Dev Log #8 - Realizing an Idle Game Dungeon
/Hello friends, and welcome back to the JRPG Idle Dev Log!
As we talked about last time, development is getting on well - and so it’s time to start figuring out what our features are really going to look like past the prototype stage.
Enter today’s topic, dungeons!
Any fan will tell you, it’s not a good JRPG without some juicy dungeons to plunder. We’ve touched on the subject before, but dungeons are a core part of that timeless JRPG loop: slogging through perilous territory, facing down the big scary boss, and then strutting over to the next town to snag some exciting new items.
While JRPG Idle doesn’t have full-on manual exploration, we still want to hold on to those core tenets. So as we go forward with this system, we want to emphasize the feeling of discovering interesting locations, fighting through mobs of enemies, discovering treasures, overcoming a meaningful boss with narrative weight, and giving the player a good reason to move on to the next area.
A look at the prototype dungeon we’ve been using up until now.
So far, our placeholder dungeon has basically just been a holding ground for enemies - one after the other. It worked as a starting point, but it doesn’t really hit the goals we’ve set. So to properly realize that vision, we’ll need a few more things.
At the most basic level - if we want the player to feel like they are exploring, then they need to see their actions revealing the dungeon. In traditional games, this feeling comes naturally from moving the player (and camera) through the play space.
However… our camera is static - and so we’ll need to lean instead on obscuring parts of the map, to be revealed later by the player’s actions.
This will be mostly tied to defeating enemies, but in the process of beefing up our dungeon system, we also want a less bespoke relationship between enemies and our “fog of war”. If we build the system to accept any flag, then we leave it open to more entity types later on - like switches or puzzles.
It doesn’t take many entity types to start forming a powerful toolkit. Even if this dungeon remains linear, we can already see how the system supports a more complex layout. That said, we need to be mindful not to overcomplicate it. The dungeon-crawling vibe is important - but it’s not the point.
An example of turning the “fog of war” layers off one at a time.
This approach definitely gives the feeling of exploring a dungeon - but we need a bit more than just turning fog layers on-and-off.
One of the challenges with designing an Idle Game, is that they are generally meant to be played… well, idle. Some titles are more “active” than others, but the more we lean into the idle playstyle, the more likely it is that meaningful gameplay moments will happen while the player is away.
Some things, like playing a scene on entering a new area, can simply be triggered when the player clicks a button. But other things, like defeating an enemy, can happen unpredictably and without player input.
This poses a problem - even for something as simple as our fog layers. We want the player to understand the cause-and-effect of their progression; defeating enemies and clearing an area is what causes the fog to lift, and seeing the fog be revealed shows the player where they should go next.
By witnessing the fruits of their labour, players can feel like they are peeling back the dungeon one layer at a time. If we don’t want the player to miss it, then we’ll have to hold on to the reveal until we know for sure they are paying attention. This also lets the reveal happen when there isn’t anything else happening on screen.
Waiting for the player to return to the dungeon map, before revealing the fog.
Beyond just fog though, we face a similar challenge with most of our messaging - and the bigger the moment we’re trying to sell, the bigger a problem it becomes. The biggest moment in any dungeon is the boss fight, and so this is where we have to be the most careful.
For example, it’s not hard to trigger a narrative scene when meeting a boss for the first time - but it does mean that we need to hold on to any popups until after the scene is done. It would really kill the mood if “Level Up!” appeared in the middle of an important story beat!
On the flip side - if we defeat a boss while away from the game, it’s hard to sell that moment asynchronously. If we trigger the scene as soon as the boss hits 0 HP, the player will return to a narrative scene in progress, just sitting there waiting for them to prompt it.
Even if we acknowledge that this is an Idle game, it still creates a disassociation between the player’s actions and the scene unfolding if It’s… just sort of unfolding when you get there.
This becomes another scenario where it pays to wait for the player’s attention. If we have a juicy victory popup congratulating the player on beating the boss and unlocking new stuff - then we can tie our narrative scene to that popup. The scene becomes just another reward for beating the boss, and the flow makes sense whether the player is present when it happens, or returning from 200 hours of inactivity.
Even just allowing the player to see the screen transition into the narrative scene will allow them to soak in the moment a little bit more, and understand where it came from.
A confrontation with a boss enemy, triggered by the Boss Defeated popup.
Now add a little popup to celebrate opening a chest, and just like that, we have the 3 functionalities that we imagined a dungeon supporting, so many months ago:
Fighting enemies to progress through the dungeon
Branching paths, treasure chests, locked doors
Boss events / story progression
While there have definitely been additional challenges to overcome in more fully realising our vision for how dungeons work in JRPG Idle, not much has really changed from the original design. A lot of the work of effectively selling the fantasy has come off the back of polish that just didn’t make sense to do in earlier stages of the prototype.
Now that we’re trying to hit a bit higher level of realization though, I think we have developed a pretty solid methodology.
We guide the player to the dungeon, and (with a couple additional UI affordances) there should be no chance of them ever getting lost - even if they take an interlude to craft some hats, or like, go to work.
When the player has cleared the dungeon, they get to enjoy their accomplishment, and we have a good way of directing them off onto the next stage of their journey.
Probably to go replace all of their gear at the next town!