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.
Welcome back, Evan! I hope you had a restful holiday break! Happy new year!
Thank you for all your hard work Evan
It’s kind of interesting that Lore is a big update
Can I recommend, maybe getting some art with the Lore? It would be a great addition.
You could have an art of the Cleric when they were royalty to go with their lore documents
I’ve been loving the Cleric so far
Lore art would be neat but I’m afraid doing it in any real functional capacity would be a huge amount of work and time. It’s definitely possible but it would have to happen after lore stuff is already completely locked in, and it would need to be MUCH lower detail than the current splash arts.
Warrior. Does indeed need something to make you want to play after the first time. Tier 1 talent Hearty meal could make him more engaging by giving him some shielding on his broken seal to utilize provoked anger more often. Combining buffed hearty meal with iron stomach could give him the edge to survive otherwise game ending scenarios. Tier 3 talent strongman has always felt unnecessary to me so that could be something.
More badges or a challenge to test the skill of experienced players. I was not a fan of Grandmaster researcher :D. I would like to see more challenging badges like Golden champion and Grandmaster score chaser.
Endless mode. I always felt it would be cool to adventure outside the dungeon after ascending with a day and night cycle. Something about seeing the sky, clouds and stars on the ascension screen makes you wonder. What does the world outside the dungeon look like?
Extension for the adventure. A final quest for the hero to break apart the Amulet of Yendor to fire, water, nature and dark. Embark on a journey across the land to seal away the amulet into four different locations (Volcano, Icy mountain, jungle and an ancient temple), so the power of the amulet can never be used to do evil ever again.
On the business side of things. A platform that instantly came to my mind is the Nintendo switch. Switch 2 could be coming soon too.
Cant wait for Cleric and Thank you Evan! Shattered has a bright future ahead!
Strong Man is good, Hold Fast is the one that feels bad to me
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.
The game’s a rougelike, not rougelite. You aren’t supposed to unlock game changing options by doing things.
I’m not asking for the kind of progression that give permanent upgrades or starting gold to heroes. The thing is, we are already unlocking tons of “game changing” options by doing things in Shattered. We unlock characters, alchemy recipes, challenges, seeded runs. The final boss unlock might as well be another 10th challenge.
Longevity and replayability are key aspects of roguelikes and roguelites, and superbosses create a new goal for players who finished the game once. More importantly, these will create online guides, discussions, gameplay videos and reactions. This is the key for growth and momentum, and it’s one of the reasons why some roguelikes and roguelites are so successful, they have this recipe jotted down.
The only gameplay changing things you unlock are characters, and their option unlocks are so easy to achieve you might as well call them locked behind a tutorial. Challenges are locked behind a completion of the game to not overwhelm the newbies and to not put the expectations of the challenges if they didn’t even beat the game. Challenges don’t add content nor brutally change the game, they just restrict it or make it harder by tweaking some values. The rest is not really game changing, seeds and daily runs just change how the layout of the dungeon is generated, but so is starting a new run. Alchemy recipes are locked, but you still can craft them without having the recipe, thus not being a game changing options. You just don’t know you can do it yet. You can, though.
A whole new boss, though, is significant content added through progression, defining characteristic of rougelites.
SPD is already replayable enough. Achievements and the random nature and variety this game holds naturally is enough to keep players replaying it. A new boss won’t add more replayability to that, as you are just asking the player to do a second run to see new unlocked content. Content that will only satisfy the player once. Different updates, the kind of updates Evan focuses around, updates that interact with the rest of mechanics of the game, that enhance gameplay, are the long term updates that actually promote replayability. By implementing this “new boss” you only fall on spirals of new fast content (as this new content doesn’t encourage replayability, it has to arrive faster than the one we currently receive) that works well for bigger teams (as they can make these type of updates fast enough), Evan can’t, he is just one person working on this whole game by himself. It is better for content and replayability to make these updates because, while they don’t produce that growth or momentum you were talking about, it does promote replayability. Another problem these kinds of update have is that they are also overwhelming for new players, as it is not as natural as the already present content in the game, and it will overwhelm new players in the long run. This will only ruin the simple nature of the game which has, in the end, the opposite effect of what you want to achieve, as it discourages new players to join in due to the complexity of the game, if it followed that direction.
+6 max hp is not rewarding when you can have 177 without RoM… It’s a 3% increase
It can be higher if you think it’s too low, I just don’t want it to outclass elixir of might, which is 4HP + 5% increase. It could also be another reward entirely!
“Uhm, aschually, duh necromanser’z skeleton iz an enemy that uzes a buff” ☝️🤓
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
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.
It’s hard for me to really address this specifically when the quest is an idea in my head and not precisely designed currently, All I can really say is that I am going to try to plan for the player to have proper means of skill expression, I agree that just forcing the player into basic equipment and then turning the quest into stats vs. stats would be boring and overly punishing for chal players. That doesn’t have to be how it’s designed though.
I agree. It can’t end just being a stats vs stats, as that will turn to be basically a dice roll on whether you die or you get some loot
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
I also thought On Diet made the caves quest difficult, but I manage to adapt to it specifically because I can prepare for it. That’s the entire point of this message, every obstacle in this game can be adapted to because there is a way to prepare items. That’s what makes roguelikes fun, you see an impossible boss ahead, and on the next run, you bring solutions to counter that boss.
The vault quest however, has no possible way to prepare if you start at zero again. That’s the problem. The only way to adapt to vault quest is if players are allowed to pre-buff before the vault, but at that point it’s no longer worth getting the +2 ring as you need those buff items for dwarf king and yog in 9-chal. If the vault quest won’t be as RNG-hell as 9-chal sewers, then there is another way to adapt via skill and memory, but that’ll be difficult to balance with challenges.
To a degree you also can’t prepare for the caves quest
You can only damage enemies with the one item you are given, which is the Pickaxe
I’m sure the Vault quest will follow a similar logic, you start with no items but get to pick items based on the current situation
Maybe you will find a unique sword that can kill unique enemies, or a unique spear that can keep them at bay, however you can’t hold both of them at once
A part of Roguelikes is also adapting to unique and unexpected scenarios. This might be one of them
And you keep on yapping about challenges making things harder… Like bro, they are challenges
Not true, only the boss needs to be pickaxed. Everything here can be prepared: sight options, cleansing potion for food, preparing huge damage + crowd control for the minions. Stamina potion can help chase and dodge against the boss, which essentially gives the player high pickaxe DPS. Without options, there is no adaptation, and that’s the “sewer problem” that’ll hopefully not exist in the vault.
And please stop twisting my words. I never said that challenges are bad because they make things harder. I’m saying that a game can be both difficult and fun, and if said difficulty strips away entire classes and core gameplay elements to remove player choices, then it’s bad game design, and we can learn from successful games on how to better create difficulty. If the google result to “Shattered PD challenges” is players complaining how poorly designed it is, then there’s a problem.
You can win the quests without encountering minions, fighting them, without wasting food, and without vision
Even if you can’t, you can severely limit the minions damage output with proper positioning
Also, I really don’t care what your opinion on challenges are
But you only complain that it’s gonna make the game harder for people who play challenges. A really big portion of people don’t play challenges
And if you happen to be someone that does, then you gotta take the difficulty level that comes with it
Do you have in mind what kind of rewards the imp quest overhaul will have?
I’ll probably keep the reward fairly similar overall (high value misc. equipment), but might give the player a bit more choice and/or add artifacts as possible rewards (not at +0).
