Eportfolio Post 6 (Postmortem Unit 3)

Perilous Plunders is a dungeon crawl combat game with the goal of exploring the dungeon while collecting spells and loot along the way to get enough gold to escape the dungeon. It operates as a mixed tactical strategy game and real time evolving puzzle of complicated dungeon room with various dynamic shifts that happen over the course of combat.

When setting out to make the final game for this class I really welt like I wanted to go all out, I had made decent games for the first 2 assignment but I really wanted to challenge myself on this game so when setting out for creating this dungeon crawler I felt a good amount of inspiration going into it. I spend lot of time being a DM for dungeons and dragons so a good 70 hours a week of my time go into making dungeons and combat scenarios that are dynamic and engaging to the players. It was challenging for me to think of a way to create a surprise dynamic shift into automated combat with no dungeon master to interlude and mess with how the game is going. The card flip system ended up being a very successful system that allowed for that goal to be accomplished along with a great way to make the 2 game classes feel unique and interesting. 

Outside of issues of time constraints the main brunt of work time I feel went into creating unique room designs that had these dramatic shifts mid way through. Room of mirrors for instance is terrifying due to after the mirror mage is killed 3 more appear in the room.Tthe mirrored mages have long ranged attacks that can easily snipe the geologist or collapse into the mercenary if players aren't careful. Players need to be careful of their positioning at all times because each room has pathways and traps that if players end up in the wrong spot they can be obliterated. This whole process of thinking about how the combat worked and creating rooms around this system was a ton of fun and I feel not only took from my DnD experience but further enhanced it greatly. its hard to think of dynamic systems in a game as far reaching in possibilities as dnd but dumming things down helps immensely with getting ideas for positioning and interesting combat spaces. I feel both me and my partner put a fair share of work into the game. While I was kind of bouncing off the walls with ideas and concepts my partner did a good job reeling those ideas into reality and making the rule sheet make proper sense of the complicated systems for combat and room dynamics. Our main way of dealing with the game design process was making sure we had the games rules down 100% before going into card creation. I feel if I could change anything about the development it would be getting some of the major decisions about how combat and rooms worked down earlier, Once we actually got to making rooms and playing the game we found a fair few flaws with systems especially when I had some of my Dnd players run through the game. One of the is a bit of a tactical expert and found various exploits with some of the abilities I had never even considered (he is great for keeping rules in check.)A major design change I feel id do is making the cards properly printed out and designed through software like photoshop. Some of these cards ended up just being a bit of a mess I feel properly painting out these rooms in color and proper text and a good system of information allocation upon the cards would have been a great addition to the game. Furthermore I think id try to put more development time into the card creation. In the end we had roughly 15-20 cards and for 50 gold the average is 10 cards. I think more cards would help a lot with the re playability of the game. Also maybe cutting more of the systems down into parts that we systematically tore through and did in a proper schedule would have been nice. A lot for the time we were jumping around a fair amount between systems and couldn't really get a good stable decision on something because we would end up on something completely different within 5-10 min of discussion.