Nandrew
How do I economy? Wat is gold?
… and that’s why you should always explore subdungeons.
The freeware version of Desktop Dungeons has always been hampered by a slightly bothersome gold carryover system. People have complained of its grindalicious nature, and it is indeed a rather weak design element — after all, one of our key desires was to avoid letting players bore themselves by mining for resources in a time-consuming way that wasn’t particularly difficult or rewarding.
In the fresh new version of DD that we’re working on, the economy has already undergone significant improvements, keeping much more in line with our original goals while hopefully avoiding some of the pitfalls:
– Gold still accumulates over multiple dungeon runs, but the amount of gold you can ENTER any given dungeon with is always capped at a relatively small number. There’s no incentive to store gold for anything except other kingdom (meta-game) improvements.
– The conditions of DD’s unlock hierarchy will be determined by more than just dungeon completion. Sometimes new classes and buildings will be made available after specific quest conditions are met — other times, it’s just a matter of spending enough gold. We want this to help beginners unlock a few more character classes and abilities after playing for a while instead of leaving them stuck with just one or two options the whole way through. Veterans can also take advantage of this system to quickly unlock the standard array of characters, dungeons and skills, allowing them to focus on tackling the more advanced challenges that we’ll be offering (when gold-hoarding will become far less significant).
– One feature that we’re interested in testing is the Item Locker system. With this, players will be able to take an item out of one dungeon session and carry it into another for a fee. There’s probably going to be exceptions to this ability — for example, dungeons which rely on particular spawns or systems for balance — but we believe that this is a far more constructive use for stored gold in the long term, especially since savvy players should perform consistently well enough to reclaim the locker fee.
– Everything has market value. If you fail a particular dungeon but leave (alive) with a bunch of potions and a cool item or two, you can sell them off for a small amount of gold when you return to the kingdom. This helps cover any monetary investments that you make while going into the dungeon (such as the locker items).
Obviously there’s about a million ways to exploit and abuse this system, and we’ve been carefully working through some of those over the past week so that we don’t get players trapped in that boredom-incentive loop. We want gold to move away from the stored-up nuke that it has become in the freeware.
April 7th, 2011 at 11:04 am
Soliek, Android DD…
April 7th, 2011 at 11:34 am
Sounds awesome. Can’t wait.
April 7th, 2011 at 11:39 am
Android DD is on the cards, that’s why we’re using Unity 🙂
April 7th, 2011 at 1:05 pm
When can I buy this already.
And when are we getting SpaceHack :>
April 7th, 2011 at 2:24 pm
Exxxxxxcellllennnnnnnnnnt!
April 7th, 2011 at 3:18 pm
Can we ask about tech post for the game such as what Unity libraries/utilities you’re using, etc…?
April 7th, 2011 at 6:27 pm
So as I understand the system, you shouldn’t feel like that you need to grind for money in order to do better in a dungeon, since the gold you get from each dungeon attempt will usually exceed the cost of entering. The excess gold is used for out of dungeon stuff.
As for equipment, maybe you should consider a point system where every item, rune, potion, extra money is worth points and you are limited to how many points worth of items you can take.
April 7th, 2011 at 6:58 pm
To economy is a very difficult task indeed.
April 7th, 2011 at 7:51 pm
There was no need for grinding in old DD. Just unlock the goblin, start a normal dungeon as a tier 3 class, sell the glyph, quit the dungeon. Repeat until top gold.
April 7th, 2011 at 8:19 pm
Heh, that sounds like grinding 😉
April 8th, 2011 at 9:04 am
Will you add a “collector” element?
I’m not a big gamer myself. The only thing that keeps me going is unlocking the classes, levels. I’m the kind of player that never plays the same level twice.
Likwise for the gold, I couldn’t be bothered hoarding it. Sometimes I start a game with 50+ gold because of my last botched attempts where I didn’t ind anything worthwhile buying. Sometimes I start a game with 5 gold.
Live in the moment ^^
April 9th, 2011 at 6:25 am
For the love of Goats, what’s keeping you in the closet? I wantz it bad. Don’t get the dreaded featuritis plague or try to make a perfect 1.0 release. Ship often, ship early. Like, now, pleeeease? 🙂
April 9th, 2011 at 2:11 pm
Patience grasshopper..for when it is released…It will kick ass ;P
April 9th, 2011 at 5:51 pm
Do you have any idea how painful it is to wait for DD 2.0? Its killing me from the inside out!
Even more painful to see a teaser picture such as this! 🙁
/cracks whip, work faster! :p
April 11th, 2011 at 4:56 pm
is the freeware version going to be updated too?
any other change?
April 11th, 2011 at 5:02 pm
@teasel: We might be able to update the freeware, probably mostly bug fixes and other mistakes. The biggest thing we want to fix is to use an installer for the freeware! That would stop 90% of our support questions…
April 30th, 2011 at 6:07 pm
Hello,
i had an error while i was fighting (0 hp) with a human fighter. I dont have a twitter or facebook account.
So i post it here, if it is allready posted, delete my post.
___________________________________________
ERROR in
action number 1
of Step Event
for object Hero:
Error in code at line 210:
if (hp/max_hp<0.2) global.accolade[A_TANK]=0;
at position 9: Division by 0.
April 30th, 2011 at 6:15 pm
Thanks, I’ll add it to the bug tracker 🙂