CHIRP! - Randomly Generated Infinite Dungeon - New PvE Content

Greetings all,

Since this was brought up over in the other thread about PvE drop rates, I thought it could be fun / interesting to put down some ideas on how to design a randomly generated infinite dungeon, as new PvE content.

Here's how I would do it. Please feel free to add ideas or to criticize what I've put down.


I am going to call this new Dungeon the CHIRP. Card Hunter Infinite Randomized Puzzle.

Rules of the CHIRP:

First of all, when you play the CHIRP, you do not use your regular party, and you do not use your regular item stash. All of those things are unavailable to you, and you will play characters who start from level 1. You will have a completely separate pool of items that you find as you play through the CHIRP. This way veteran players and newbs have all the same advantages and disadvantages in playing the CHIRP, and only your skills and luck will separate you from the rest.

There are two ways for your adventure into the CHIRP to end. You can either die (and lose), in which case you will only get a reduced prize, or you can opt to leave after you've beaten a floor, instead of delving further. The challenge gets harder and harder as you go down, partly because your item collection isn't going to be perfect and you're fighting tougher monsters.

The levels work as follows:

1. Each level is generated using a random choice from preset maps with randomized enemy spawn locations. The community could certainly help by building maps. Some maps would only appear earlier or later, and of course enemy levels would roughly coincide with floor level. There's just so much room for creativity here ... you could even have (very rarely found) freebee floors with no enemies on them, just to mix things up.

2. When you first enter the CHIRP, you get a choice of one character type (class and race). The other two are given to you randomly. All your characters are given random common, low-level equipment. I don't think there is any need for more-than-common items to start out.

3. You do not have access to your regular collection of items during this dungeon, at all, and your characters all start at level 1. Every floor you advance, the characters advance a level as well. So, they are level-1 characters on floor 1, level-2 characters on floor 2, and etc. There is no need to calculate experience points. Character level equals the current floor number. At level-20 in the CHIRP (if you advance that far), advancing deeper will just continue to send you to floor-20 maps with level-20 characters. So, 20 is the max depth. You might want to keep playing floor-20 maps if you're able to survive, because if you read below you will see that your final prize depends on what you find in the dungeon, in part.

4. At the end of each successfully completed CHIRP floor, your characters are healed and revived. The way you "win" on a floor is simply by ending a round with your characters all standing on the victory points on that map (these can be depicted with a new graphic showing stairs down to the next floor!) So, you can beat a floor even without fighting an enemy, for example.

5. While you play the floor, you can earn 3 special stars. The stars are unlike normal CH game stars. Each star is a different color and can be earned in a different way. You can earn one of them without earning the other two, so you could end the floor with any combination of stars. These are described below:

Blue Star - All 3 characters survive the level.
Red Star - Kill all the enemies in the level.
Green Star - Finish the level before the end of the 6th round.

Yellow Stars - For every other star you earn, you also get a Yellow Star. The game keeps track of how many Yellow Stars you have through the entire run this time, and it will affect your final prize when you leave. You also get +1 Yellow Star for every floor you beat, so you can get 4 Yellow Stars per floor.

6. At the end of each successfully completed floor, you receive three randomized 5-slot chests of loot to help equip your party. These items do not go to your permanent collection either -- they are just part of your CHIRP inventory for this one run. The chests contain items near the level of the dungeon / your characters, but the item rarities are as follows:

Chest 1:
Wooden Chest (5 random items, no guaranteed upgrade beyond common)
>> If you received at least one colored star on the floor, the chest is upgraded to a Magnificent Chest (5 random items, one rare or better) - yellow stars don't count for this prize

Chest 2:
Wooden chest (5 random items, no guaranteed upgrade beyond common)
>> If you received at least two colored stars on the floor, the chest is upgraded to a Superb Chest (5 random items, two rares or better) - yellow stars don't count for this prize

Chest 3:
Wooden chest (5 random items, no guaranteed upgrade beyond common)
>> If you received all three colored stars on the floor, the chest is upgraded to an Awesome Chest (5 random items, one epic or better) - yellow stars don't count for this prize

7. After you equip your party with your new items, you can choose to continue in the CHIRP, or to quit. If you continue, you start the next floor. If you quit, you officially SURVIVED the CHIRP and get a prize which you keep in your permanent collection! The prize is determined by how many Yellow Stars you earned. Here is the table that shows how it works.

CHIRP Grand Prize Structure:

If you died, your Yellow Stars are cut in half (rounding down). The prize you get depends on the floor you reach and the total Yellow Stars you amassed during your run.

Remember that all items you found during your run are not kept by you on your permanent account - those were only for the run and will be wiped. When you start the CHIRP again next time, you will start from scratch again with new characters!

BUT, you can keep a few of the items you found, at your choice, and add them to your permanent collection! This all depends on how many Yellow Stars you earned.

You Can Keep:

X number of items that you found, where X equals your maximum dungeon level / 4. So if you made it to floor 8, you can keep 2 items. If you made it all the way to floor 20, you can keep 5 items. The division rounds down, so you don't get to keep anything if you can't make it to floor 4 (also a good way to avoid farming too quickly).

Spend Yellow Stars to Choose Rarer Items:

The items you can choose to keep "cost" you yellow stars, and you can only keep items if you have enough yellow stars from this run to pay for them. Costs are as follows:

Common Item - 4 yellow stars
Uncommon Item - 8 yellow stars
Rare Item - 12 yellow stars
Epic Item - 16 yellow stars
Legendary Item - 20 yellow stars

Keep in mind that if you survived, you will automatically have 4 yellow stars per item you can keep, since you get one for each floor you finish.

The way this all shakes out, it's actually quite challenging to get full yellow stars on most floors, and acquiring a legendary item is really something you'd have to earn (after finding it in a chest in the first place).

I think this is the type of content that would be so fun and so popular, it would instantly become the most-played version of Card Hunter. Not that it would ever replace PvP ... but still ... this could be amazing!

Please tell me what you all think.

Cheers,

- Sir V

 

Great idea, Sir! Dungeons in CH..it seems almost too perfect! Im afraid for my social life xD

One thing you didnt mention is the amazing co-op possibility. Three characters, three players, three times as much fun ^^

 

Co-op play could be a great idea!! You could nuance it by having players only able to take out prizes that would equip to their characters within. That would add an element of strategy to which class/race you choose (you could give players a choice in that case) so that people could actually try collecting equipment for a class/race they might need.

 

I just want to add that CHIRP is an appropriate name for something in this game. Especially if you turn up the ambient sound and listen to the apparently very large population of birds in Cardhuntria.

 

I'm all in favor of a 'survival mode', where you take a specific party and run down as far as you can.

I'd ALSO like to see a mode that's just a randomized singular dungeon, that scales to party level (or simply to top level currently available if Manchu doesn't want to let parties have access to ready XP at each level outside of the provided modules), so that your main parties can keep running something other than the typical grind.

Just wanting to clarify the distinction between the two, so that conceptual focus isn't shifted to just one or the other- I'd hate the sole focus of the game to become 'disposable parties' and 'static pvp parties', but at the same time, I'm totally up for an additional self-contained survival mode as well

 

Sure, a randomized dungeon at your level that's usable for experience gains has its own merits. I tended towards the Lufia II - esque start-from-scratch dungeon because I thought the current PvE setup and the item pool lend themselves to that kind of gameplay. BlueManchu has hard wired into the design an increased utility for many different levels of items through their reset of character levels to within ranges that match given campaigns ... this would be somewhat along those lines.

 

I have never heard a more creative and well thought-out idea such as this before! I honestly love your cleverness... if it were up to me and if I was a higher up member of Blue Manchu, I'd surely and most definitely hire you for our ideas staff!

An endless, randomly generated dungeon... in Card Hunter... if ever there was a more perfect match, I would be speechless. Kudos to you, sir!

 

i hope to see it coming out soon :v

 

LOL, would that we had the money to have an "ideas staff."

 

That's one of the prime reasons why I respect and admire Blue Manchu so. They're such a small team, but wisdom, creativity, and technical know-how has of course nothing to do with how many members a certain team has.

All kidding aside, though -- I really believe they're a remarkable bunch, developing an awesome game like this AND keeping it running, all while trying to please the mass of players. Hats off to you, BM and co.! A compliment well-deserved.

 

An Ideas Staff is easily within reach if you give wizards some kind of card draw.
I mean, they are supposed to be highly intelligent, right?

 

Not since Whorl has there been such a risky item..

Ideas Staff Level 12

 

what is this?

 

It's a card that exists but isn't in use anywhere. A Vulnerable that doesn't replace itself and sits in your hand. Probably one of the worst cards in the game?

 

I thought of swapping it out of the mock-up once I realized it wasn't a trait, but it worked so evilly in conjunction with the +1 hand size trait, I couldn't resist it :X
I'm an awful, awful weapon enchanter, don't let me near your stuff.

 

Because i thought i had not seen it anywhere

 

Since I was nerdish enough to look it up, with these cards this would be a Level 9 staff.

 

What if it was a legendary?

'cause, lets be honest, it's bad enough without having a two-pip cost.

(But pretty amusing as a deck-shuffle item)

Edit: Oh, wow. If you build for a melee-mage, it's actually a pretty good item (Legendary-worthy), you only have the one handicap to worry about, then.

Assuming you can find a melee-mage build worth doing, of course

 

Not how our item system works. Rarity is based on card rarity and token cost is based on item level (which in turn is based on card quality)

 

Please keep in mind I'm brain-damaged, I'll need that laid out a bit more mechanically for me to understand it. (eg, A->B).
But Legendary cards generally have better cards at lower pips, compared to items at the same level, which is what I was going off of.

If you say it's impossible, then it is