They released a video game recently i hear—Plinth of Exhale or something, not sure about the details.
You know it won’t be for me. You know i’m more the Dork Seals type.
I mean—I absolutely love the grognard stuff on display. Reading about some of the endgame builds makes my head spin. Years ago, i was looking through diagrams showing the rate at which life is exchanged for mana, or something like that, trying to understand which passive nodes and skill gems and potions made the magic happen.
The skill tree is such a cool game.
But the moment to moment experience of Plate of Edible? It’s about which nerd is the most willing to deprioritize personal hygiene to click on things 15 hours a day. I don’t like it.
Of course, i don’t judge if you like it.
Well, i start judging after 96 hours without showers, but, you know, up to 95 hours i don’t judge. Different tastes.
So here’s the deal: i want you to make this game, this exact game, except without the game part.
I just want the parts you play in Microsoft Excel.
I will share some napkin game design that lived in my mind for too long, and will never put any amount of work whatsoever towards making it actually happen, i’m an ideas gal and my cut is 50% of profits.
First: it’s gonna be a web browser + PWA sort of game. The game, like Patch of Exhume, cannot thrive being pay-to-win, but a pay-for-convenience thing could work.
In the game, you have one month—one realtime month—to explore a dungeon, and plunder the best trinkets possible to make some numbers go up. The leagues start on the first of the month. Every day, your adventurer gets 6 hours of dungeon time—unattended, server-side. You cannot control her, but you can tell her what to do with the most impossibly baroque gambit system.
If you start the league late, your adventurer gets more daily dungeon time, so you can catch up… but winning isn’t just about guaranteed dungeon time, it’s also about the amount of planning days well used.
You login once a day or so to see what sort of shinies you found, trade stuff with other players, adjust your build, plot your path through the labyrinth, and things of that nature. Even if you play to win, it should not take you more than one hour a day, and if you’re casual, no big if you miss a day or two.
Since you don’t participate at all in the dungeon action, graphics don’t have to be much better than roguelike tiles. RPG Maker could suffice, especially since current versions are Javascript under the hood.
The adventure would be random enough to force you to theorycraft on the spot: if you know that your randomly-generated dungeon will soon take you through the Scorching Volcano of the Firedragon of Flame, you may want to reconsider the value of that 80% ice resist gambeson.
The mechanical depth of the planning phase should be complex enough to make Pants of Extreme seem accessible by comparison. By contrast, the automatic exploration should be very simple: since you have no way to intervene, you shouldn’t feel frustrated the AI blunders. If anything, the randomly-generated dungeons should feel deterministic in the manner they are explored.
At the end of the month, leaderboards ensue, and the best nerds get tacky cosmetics with particle effects that hurt to look at.