Dungeon Monsters is a new type of dungeon-crawler game, using the old-school first-person view from games like Ultima Underworld, but adapted to fast-paced mobile gameplay, with features of monster-RPGs like Pokémon.
Unfortunately, the game has since been taken down from the stores :(
But you can still see what it looked like here in this gameplay video:
The game manages to be both satisfying and very approachable, thanks to its quick and easy-to-grasp gameplay. The shi-fu-mi formula of monster elements being weak/strong against other elements let the player make wise choices in their team composition, while being very easy to understand.
The problem we faced, however, is that after a few weeks of play, players started to get very good at optimizing their team and had powerful monsters suited to all situations. The strategy that was easy to learn wasn't that hard to master, and the game lacked something to keep the players thinking about their actions. They were playing on autopilot.
We started making more and more difficult dungeons, but as long as this difficulty rested on stats and numbers, it only challenged players' ability to farm and invest in their teams. It didn't provide a gratifying sense of solving a puzzle or overcoming a particular strategy.
We tried various formulas and approaches. Most of them were still very well received by players, but one in particular met an unmatched success:
We introduced a dungeon rule that broke previously introduced concepts in the main gameplay, changing the elements of some monsters and the relationship of power between those elements.
As with all dungeons, I integrated the new assets in Unity, then started working on defining the dungeon levels and layouts. The engine automatically generated paths and encounters based on JSON scripts. I would then play the dungeon over and over again, changing it every time something felt off, and tweaking everything manually to be sure it matched what I wanted.
In this specific instance, however, the rule changing the monsters' elements each time they were attacked made the dungeon very difficult, and it is the only time on the project I published content that I had never been able to complete myself. This was a gamble, but I knew I could change and update it anytime without needing to re-submit the content to the stores or anything (because everything was stored on a server). So I just paid close attention to the players' reactions on social media to see if they were struggling with it.