I was thinking of an alternate game route to the SP campaigns and the MP arena, and started to imagine what else Gary might tucked away under his bed - lots and lots of hand drawn dungeon maps, of course. The idea is that for a set amount of pizza you can buy Gary's hand drawn maps off him (ala the Melvin missions), which would link together to for a roguelike dungeon crawl experience for 1P (possibly 2). Every map you buy you get to keep and use however often you want, the more maps you buy the more variety you get in gameplay. Each section would be a simple layout of corridors and feature rooms, making interconnectivity easier, and the cardhunter has to get from one end of the board to any exit/victory squares: when he does another board is produced and the one previous is removed. In standard Roguelike fashion the baddies are randomly generated - could be 6 monkeys - could be a dragon etc - and once a player's character is taken off the board there is no coming back. To keep the pace up there could also be a stalking big (impervious) Minotaur type beastie that stops you hanging about and healing all the time. This means you have to balance between playing it safe but getting a move on. There could also be chest generation routine built into the random map generation, and at the end of say 100 maps you would get to an Epic chest. If each map took 5 to 10 minutes you are looking at a potential one off playthrough time of 10 to 20 hours; whilst you would ideally be able to save, it would be a case of reloading the game erases the save (akin to Steam Marines, FTL etc). The Dungeon Crawler route has the benefits, in terms of development time, of not needing any new cards/characters etc, just some generic hand drawn maps that link corridors/halls/feature rooms - so no fiddling around with the core game but an entirely fresh dynamic is produced. Anyhow, see what you think and all comments happily encouraged. And, Huzzah.
DISCLAIMER: I know jack diddly about coding. I think this might be a pain in the ass to code up if you meant that said toon would be unable to ever come back for any future maps in the series. IF, however, you're talking about making a game from what's currently existing I'd like to see some better payoff than it happening at the end of 100 maps. Maybe every 5-10 maps if we're going hardcore.
I like a gauntlet-type of idea where you start with your choice of character (wiz, warrior, priest) as he enters the dungeon without any equipment. You beat your first opponent, get loot that is useable by your character, and work your way through a succession of opponents (5? 10? 25?) until you meet the boss at the end, defeat him using only the equipment you've found on your run for some sort of reward.
You can always set a map-specific flag on a character. If the flag = true then the character is allowed to continue. If the flag = false then it's not allowed. That's an oversimplification, of course, but it's generally how a lot of scripting languages tend to do things.
I think you're right - there could be an easy/normal/hard with adjusted drops: easy 10, normal 20, hard 50 or any variant along the same line. Cheers.
