Forty-eight questions — Rewind Northwest

Part 3 of a week in Dungeon City: an afternoon of design decisions, an evening of code, and an outside review that found the loot was endless.

By the afternoon of November 2, the groundwork notes had piled up 48 open design questions. I answered them one at a time as clickable questions, and the answers became the rules the rest of the game is built on.

One tier ladder covers characters and gear: Basic, Enhanced, Epic and Legendary. Gear comes mainly from bosses, with rolled affixes in the Diablo tradition. Every character has a named weapon of their own, like Bram's mallet, the Nutcracker, which is a capsule prize whose power only its owner can unlock. Teams win by covering roles, enemies pick targets by kind, and abilities combine as setters and finishers. After the prologue comes a time skip and a move to a new town, whose rough tavern grows into a guild hall.

The evening turned the decisions into play. Each fighter's battle bar fills from hitting and being hit, then fires their ability. A shared super pool lets the player choose an adventurer's super or the barmaid's ultimate. A stagger or hex sets an enemy up for a finisher. Searches turn up coins, baubles and capsule tokens, bosses drop gear, and everything rides home, even after a defeat. All 34 roster characters became data, each with a tier, a weapon class, a role, an ability, a super and a named weapon.

Then came a second opinion. An independent review on a separate model played the whole build on the GPU and read the code against the decisions. Its verdict was that the dungeon was a place worth walking into, but the core it had been given (team composition, gear and the choice of barmaid) couldn't be felt in a fight yet. It also found an exploit: a New layout button left in the player's view reseeded every search, which made loot endless.

The next wave answered the review. A party pick at the dungeon door chooses any three of the 34, each fighting with their own kit and gear. The workbench upgrades gear from Original to Improved to Perfected. A simulation over random parties checks that most teams win and a good plan wins easily. The layout button went behind developer mode, and opening a fight no longer freezes the map for up to five seconds.