[Marketing] What do you expect from a FPV Dungeon Crawler ?

News & General Discussion
1

Hello,

I’m nearing the release of my First Person View Dungeon Crawler “The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians” (Blog & More info => The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians | RPG Dungeon Crawler Game ), and I still don’t know how to sell it.

So I’d like to ask you why you’d play a FPV Dungeon Crawler, to help me brainstorm & orient my strategy to present my game.

And I have another question :
When you look at my game (by reading the description & the screenshots below), what do you see, think, feel ?
I’m not looking for a technical analysis, only on a marketing point of view.
A 1-sentence answer could be :

  • “I see a game whose genre died decades ago”
  • “I see a game I’d like to play if the combats are challenging”
  • etc…

Thanks in advance for your help ! :slight_smile:

More details about my game

The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians is a RPG Dungeon Crawler game, in First Person View, inspired by classics like Dungeon Master and Might & Magic, but featuring a modern combat system based on the triptych “tank/damage dealer/healer” mechanisms.

Story :
You’re a newly employed personal of a prison deep into a dungeon. The night of your arrival, strange things happen and when you wake up in the morning, all prisoners have escaped in midst of chaos. The warden then decides to wisely leave the dungeon as fast as possible, while tasking you to run after the escaping prisoners. You then assemble your team and adventure into the mysterious dungeon.

Features :

  • 4-character party
  • Grid-based movement
  • First person view
  • 4 classes, 12 specializations
  • Active pause (ie: you can pause the game and still queue commands for your party members)
  • 25-50 hours of gameplay, depending of your own skills and the difficulty settings
  • 4 environments
  • 20 bosses
  • 100 kind of creatures (including variations)
  • Puzzles (the few ones required to finish the game are easy to solve)
  • Lot of tactical combat

And 2 exclusive pictures with the new interface just for you ! :stuck_out_tongue:

2300947--154900--2015-09 Swing & Hit Indicators.jpg
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2300947--154901--2015-09 - Inventory.jpg
2300947--154901--2015-09 - Inventory.jpg1308×950 369 KB

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There’s quiet a number of games of this type coming out or already been released since Legend of Grimrock; it’s a niche and it’s getting filled quickly. I think the one thing that is needed for one to succeed is a gimmick; something that sets it apart from others in a meaningful and fun way. Not something that feels tacked on, but rather a gameplay mechanic that enhances the base game. Maybe dead monsters drop souls that have to be collected, maybe the magic in the game works in a certain way, maybe the party can enter a parallel dimension at will, which mirrors the real world. A good example is the nemesis system from the Lord of the Rings game.
Of course, this is one of the hardest part to get right, but I feel like many of these dungeon crawlers feel very samey, they all have good graphics and the interface is similar as well, so that little something that sets it apart from others is needed,

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@Cherno ,
The really unique feature of my game is its combat system : it’s inspired from World of Warcraft classic triptych Tank/Healer/Dps + threat mechanisms.
As much as I’m aware (and I looked for hours), it’s the only solo RPG game to feature this system (at least on PC).
Unfortunately, it seems almost no one cares about that, and even worst, a lot of people see that system as enforcing a style of play and thus narrowing their liberty… :face_with_spiral_eyes:
So I’ll go with “Challenging Evolved Combat System”, and emphasise it’s possible to play with different party setups when lowering the difficulty level.

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Hey manutoo I’m really looking forward to your release, so much so that I almost applied to help out with your trailer, (thats my day job), but decided not to.

Not to be contrary -
I see a game whose genre is seeing a nice resurrection and doesn’t require additional gimmickry to succeed. Your game imo addresses the genre well with simplicity, very nice visuals and what seems to be an interesting story.

I very rarely play licensed games and it seems several licensed games are being created in this genre. It’s refreshing to see something not licensed - though I’ll admit I don’t go looking specifically for dungeon crawlers.

You may want to include Shadowgate as a comparison game in your description as well to get attention from additional players who played that game on Nintendo but never gamed on PC back in the day.

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My first thought from the screen shot was someone put the WoW interface on Doom.

But it’s worth noting I’m not your target audience, I prefer much heavier sim type games.

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I’m never a huge fan of classes, but it does seem odd that you have four classes and four character slots.

There’s no real party creation then. Everyone will do one of each class.

IDK, if it were me I’d make ~7 classes to give the player some party creation decisions.

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I wish companies would stop trying to market nostalgia. That’s essentially reselling people their past experience(s) instead of trying to make a good product. Marketing people should also understand that gamers play games, so sometimes enjoying a title like Diablo 2 in 2015 isn’t nostalgia, it’s simply fun.

That said, I think what I would expect from a game like this is utility. Do my skills have more application than simply using my numbers to reduce my enemies’ numbers? Old games couldn’t rely on PBR, so they had to actually be clever and make players think. Don’t just use fireballs to turn your enemies from flesh to ash, also use it to light a sequence of torches and candles that complete a sort of puzzle!

I like the art. Here’s what a role player might want to do in screenshot 1:

1-[wizard] cast a spell to increase the weight of the armor, crushing the skeleton
2-[wizard] electrify the armor, making it pull in near by metal items
3-[wizard] (if it wasn’t a skeleton) use fire on the armor to burn the person inside
4-[wizard] electric shield / decoy that would conduct through the metal armor when the skeleton attacks you
5-[necromancer] raise an army of 16 to pummel this lone skeleton
6-[necromancer] turn the skeleton into one of your minions
7-[necromancer] free the soul /energy bound to the skeleton keeping it alive
8-[necromancer] raise a wall of bone to imprison the skeleton instead of fighting
9-[geomancer] lower the floor under the skeleton and bury it underground (overpowered, but fun!)
10-[any] make use of a magic item

That’s the old way of doing things. It requires a bit of thought and usually is resolved in 1 move. I believe we’ll see design like this come back with improvements to VR because role play and immersion go well together :slight_smile:

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@theANMATOR2b ,
you decided to not apply for the game trailer for professional reason (eg: too busy), or to avoid to spoil you the fun to discover the game as a normal player…? :stuck_out_tongue:

It seems we see the game in the same way ; I’d buy my game as it is, I don’t really need anyone to outline any special plus, except for not basic repetitive fights, even though I played a good bunch of FPV Dungeon Crawlers in the past couple of years… That’s why it’s hard for me to understand what I have to do to sell it to other people…:smile:

For Shadowgate, it’d be probably good to refer to it, but as I never played it, I’d feel dishonest citing it as a source of inspiration or even just as a comparison point.

@Kiwasi ,
you put a little tear of joy in my eye…! :stuck_out_tongue:
In one level, I put some scrolling lava, and when I looked at it once the level was finished, I felt like I had created some sort of Doom revival ! (the 1993 one, of course!)

@Not_Sure ,
there are 12 specializations, ie: 3 per class.
So it means it’s like at least having 12 classes, except you can mix up the different specializations within the same class, so it’s more like 28 possible combinations (or even more if you count the mid-step tuning), although not all combinations make sense.

Your remark makes me think I’ll have to be careful to detail all that in a clear way. Well explained, I guess it could be seen as a strong point of the game.

@Tomnnn ,
if we look the survey so far, there’s 0 old-school answer, so I guess it’s good that my game isn’t really nostalgia based (I’m quite afraid that people wanting to play it only for that rason might be scared away pretty fast :face_with_spiral_eyes:)

2 Likes
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@manutoo I see you mentioned grid based movement. Is the movement realtime? Turn based? Turn based with action points?

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@Tomnnn ,
it’s real-time with active pause (RTWAP for the initiated :stuck_out_tongue: ) = when you pause, you can enqueue the next actions for your party.
So you get a lot of action feeling with a lot of time to think if you need to.
People who don’t like to pause their game can lower the difficulty level and play without using the active pause.

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wheres teh epic lootz option?

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I’m not a fan of FPV grid based movement so my opinions here may vary greatly from people who love that genre.

My largest issue when playing a game with grid based movement - Lengends of Grimrock for example is trying to dodge/evade damage. You end up hopping back and forth between grid and trying to spam attacks or spells, then backtracking to move away and kite mobs and get lost/stuck against walls etc. I find it frustrating because I tend to end up fighting the movement controls to do what I want and it ends up feeling a bit clunky. Too much going on to manage it all on a keyboard with that kind of movement/combat control.

So providing you find a way around that and the combat feels smooth and enables to user to do what they’re intending to without fighting their keyboard then I’d probably enjoy it.

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Grid based movement + fpv? fine
Realtime + fpv? fine
Realtime grid based movement with fpv… wat?

If you pull it off it’ll probably be great but wow does that sound awkward :stuck_out_tongue:

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I think what he means is basically the same as Legend of Grimrock…Grid based FPV, you move in real time by stepping across grid squares as often as you want and mobs move based on their own patterns/speed irrespective of the player. Actions like attacking etc have a cool down between strikes/spells that you wait for so you can attack again.

That combination resulted in the frantic keyboard fighting that really put me off of playing the game

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Sounds like my imagination was not too far off then :wink:

My earlier post discuses strategy and utility - frantic doesn’t fit in well with that. “Frantic strategy game”, haha! Maybe the pause & action queue is there to help with that.

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That’s what I was hoping from reading this. Don’t know if the frantic keyboard fighting was common or just me. Legend of Grimrock tends to be spoken quite highly of so you’d think a major flaw with the controls would come up as a large negative against it.

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@JamesLeeNZ ,
the epic loot is included in “Character Building” (I should have added a “Gearing up” in its details).

@Xenoun ,
the constant turning around in Grimrock feels unbearable for me, especially with slightly clunky controls that makes me hit the walls on a regular basis.
There’s none of that in my game, or only very little. Usually, you just stand in front of your opponents and fight without moving at all. Moving = spell cast paused or interrupted, so you really want to avoid to move when not needed.
The mobs have a few abilities that you have to dodge, though. In that case, you have to step back, wait the mob’s ability to end, and then step forward again, so there’s usually no turning around (with a couple of exceptions).

This is again something I’ll have to explain when presenting the game, to be sure people who like turning around won’t be disappointed, and to avoid scaring away people who dislike that.
So this topic has been very helpful to organize ideas, so thanks again to everybody who has contributed ! :slight_smile:

It’s a mystery for me that so many people loved Grimrock without complaining about the chore aspect of constantly moving then waiting & painful repetitiveness of the combat.

@Tomnnn ,
yup, in my game I removed a good part of the “frantic” to add the “strategy” instead ; I’m not sure it’s the best choice in term of marketing. Future will tell… :slight_smile:

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If you achieve this and it plays smoothly then it sounds like an awesome step for that genre and I’d definitely want to buy it.

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Definitely good in theory, just make sure it’s well understood for your marketing.

Especially if it has indie pricing ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

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@Xenoun ,
could you check either of these gameplay video :

…?
Does it feel like smooth gameplay ?
I didn’t play with the active pause in these videos because I noticed my relatives were stopping to watch me play when I was using it (when I was beta testing the game)… :stuck_out_tongue: So it’s more speedy than the intended way to play.

I guess for the final version I’ll have to do 1 gameplay video where I use the active pause.

@Tomnnn ,
how much is an indie price…?

1 Like