Hey Rat Punchers, happy new year once again!
After a bit of a holiday break, I’m back to work on Shattered Pixel Dungeon, which includes laying out some plans for the coming year! This post starts with a year in review, and then lists the major changes and additions that I have planned for Shattered Pixel Dungeon in 2025 and beyond.
I’m glad to see Shattered sales doing well~ Updates really help keep Shattered alive, players can also spread the word to keep the momentum going
I’m eager for city and halls quest, but I’m very concerned with that dwarven vault idea. If none of the player’s items can go with them, it’ll be extremely difficult to balance this quest with high challenges. Sewer and prisons have the highest death rate due to players having no options in their bag yet, and that city quest will end up as another sewer. Builds also become unusable, and some players don’t like this quest idea.
There’s some great suggestions for city quest: What if the devil imp takes the player to an arena in the dwarven kingdom? That’s often the most fun event in RPGs, where you have the choice to fight a few enemies for small rewards, or risk it all for better loot. The imp could set up a fight against weak enemies at first, eventually leading to a boss fight with corrupted Thymor from those lore pages. Dwarf tokens drop from enemies, which can be exchanged with the imp for rewards such as the +2 ring.
This suggestion will solve several problems. Arena fights will allow newbies to get used to slugfests prevalent in Dwarf King’s fight. But more importantly, Thymor will allow useless items in this game to shine. This warlock should use ice spells, as there are almost no ice enemies in this game to justify using Icy Touch’s ice immunity. He could also buff at the start of the battle, since no enemies use buffs in this game for cleansing dart to remove. Of course, players can choose to brute-force this fight with healing potions instead, or escape the arena before Thymor appears, as you will have enough tokens for the +2 ring without Thymor. But defeating Thymor could drop an additional Devil Fruit that fills satiety and adds +6 Max HP. This boss reward should be useful but not game-breaking, as the final boss is already easy without challenges.
Challenge tweaks and new challenges that buffs enemies are also nice. Slay the Spire encourages players to clear the game multiple times using most characters, which unlocks a hidden act 4 final boss as a final goal. Shattered needs that replayability incentive, as right now when new players clear the game once, they get bombarded with challenges that they usually find unappealing, which leads to them quitting without trying most of the game characters, killing the momentum of players sharing the game.
Whether or not the quest is like the sewers is entirely up to how it’s designed. I would design the quest with this sort of limitation in mind and the intention certainely wouldn’t be to have it kill >50% of runs. If anything I think giving everyone a common starting point will make it much easier to balance this quest, as the state the player is in during the quest can be much more tightly controlled.
While I prefer a token gambling collosseum, or something like the caves quest, it’s up to you on how to proceed with the city quest!
Though I’m not sure how to balance that vault idea other than completely eliminating challenges during the quest. On diet, swarm, champions, pharma, and barren lands are lethal, but FIMA will be the worst offender as it eliminates most of the gear progression in that vault microcosm, making all melee weapons + armor useless. That “starting point” is always the most lethal in high challenges, but by the time players reach the city it’s usually a winning run already and they have the correct builds to proceed. If the city quest can even cause 20% death at this stage in the game… my biggest worry will be not experiencing the imp update entirely because skipping it becomes the optimum play on high challenges. Hope that’s not the case!
Players can prepare against tengu or caves quest to boost the winrate, but this vault quest is something that they cannot prepare against, and that constant death rate might be too unappealing as it goes against the core gameplay of “preparing for the next fight”. It might act as a fun minigame if done well, but it seems hard to execute well.
A lot of people thought the same about the caves quest. A lot of people I saw playing were skipping it because it’s too taxing for On Diet
Players adapt better than you imagine
yea this quest was a simple kill quest, but forcing it to a quest without your gear depreciates my progression 😐 I want it to stay as a kill quest to get the ring easily and your idea accounts for that. Arena and boss is a cool idea but I don’t want the battleground to be claustrophobic please, I hate the dwarf king