Dungeon Monsters

Embark on an epic adventure with this real first-person RPG Dungeon Crawler in 3D, with an epic offline story and great characters! Lead your team of mighty heroes through forbidden 3D dungeons crawling with nasty monsters.

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How to keep the game balanced while adding new characters and content every week?

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After the game launch, I designed timed events to keep players happy and challenged for the year to come.
But those temporary events were not supposed to replace nor unbalance the primary campaign and the rest of the game.
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In addition to this, I was also responsible for creating monetization offers with exclusive or select monsters available for a limited time.

Address every class, every strategy, every way of playing.

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The guideline that ultimately proved the most efficient was to base the events on a rotation system.

Every class, every way to play the game, would get addressed, and their strategy put to the test.

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If players succeeded, they were rewarded with new content enriching and adding further depth to the strategy they proved their mastery over.
Introducing new content and characters and let players play around with them one week, 
until we presented a new challenge, to which those characters were the secret master key, also proved super gratifying to players who figured it out.
It made it feel like getting to the end of a chapter was also the first step of the next one.

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But players could still make it through efforts and smart choices, to avoid excluding new players.

First comes the experience, then gameplay, and finally, the narration.

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‍Based on the new illustrations and assets we received, we defined the event theme.
Looking at the stats and specs of already existing characters, we chose a different set of values for the new ones.
We set monster values using a JSON script.
We used UNITY to define how much gold and experience points the player would get for completing the event.

A script procedurally generated the levels based on Json instructions. And after testing it directly in Unity, adjustments were made to get a more smooth and satisfying progression.
Tests could take up to 50 iterations to get the perfect settings.
Monsters were equipped, trained, and placed in the dungeons, waiting for the player.

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Finally, we wrote interactions with NPCs and dialogs and located them in the levels to create a story that would unfold as the player progressed through the corridors.

Having to learn the game again can be surprisingly fun!

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Of all events we released, the one that gathered the most positive reactions from players was a particularly challenging event, and in which we had inverted the rules.
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Usually, players would compose their teams based on monsters' elements they were battling (water > fire > earth).
After each attack, a special rule changed the enemy's element in this particular dungeon.
This twist prevented players from relying on how the game was supposed to be played, improvising, and changing their strategies.
Sometimes punishing them for playing the game as it was usually supposed to be played.

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Suddenly everyone was on the same level again, no matter your rank, no matter your team, your skill, you had to learn the game one more time.

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I initially thought this would lead to frustration and an eventually negative experience for players.
But as it turned out, because the consequences were short-term and did not immediately lead to failure, players had a lot of fun becoming good at the game, a second time.