#project-irrgarten

I also tried out a new idea for equipment since everyone who tests it wanted to equip armor and stuff long term instead of just play them as special attacks. So the idea *now* is that you can equip characters with gear to ‘ready’ a special move, but the equipment gets used up when you use its move or is unequipped. I’ll have to experiment a bit more to see if needing to ‘prepare’ things like potions and torches is too harsh. 

A.K.A. What’s Going Into Irrgarten V3, Please Tell Me If It Sounds Awful

Just some trivia while cooking up the next updates:

“Irrgarten” came up when searching for translations of maze or labyrinth in other languages- it specifically refers to hedge mazes and can be broken down to literally mean “lunatic garden.” Fits the theme of a randomly expanding dungeon, don’t you think?

The world the game takes place is actually predominantly non-human, but focused on human settlers scrounging for resources. Not all ‘monster’ races are hostile, either of course.

The blonde cleric, Silvy Whitewing is based on an old Dungeons and Dragons character of mine, and the rogue, Rami Hayami is based off an old Shadowrun character. 

Silvy was originally conceived with Mint Adnade of Tales of Phantasia in mind, but as the campaign wore on and she wound up more battle-worthy than expected, she became more of a paladin instead. If this game progresses, I hope to have several first-wave characters come back in ‘advanced’ classes like this. 

Drake, the “Hero,” was inspired by the lineage of fighters named “Ryu” in the lead role of the Breath of Fire series, with Drake being a more Western dragon-inspired name. His childhood friend/rival Tori comes from ‘tora’ or ‘tiger,’ and is a sort of reference to the tiger vs dragon, yin vs yang balance of power. In the original draft, if they were in the same party, they basically trade a +1 attack bonus between each other every turn as they try to outdo one another.

The male wizard (who has no official art yet) is named Arad after another kind of dragon, and will likely turn out to be Drake’s grandfather or uncle.

Lydia the Sorceress was designed with a middle-aged version of Lina Inverse from Slayers in mind, including the innate skill Sorcery Genius. 

After a bit of time on the back burner and reviewing the older systems, I’m going to be starting work on what should be a step back towards making the dungeon crawling faster paced again.

Leader and Support roles will be returning, and I have an idea as to how to make items and skills easier to manage. To avoid running into stalemates in combat, Defense will act as HP rather than as a number to beat to deal any damage at all. 

I also think I have an interesting idea into how to incorporate floors and level bosses into the flow of things, which was something I always wanted to do, but couldn’t think of a good way to do it. 

So, did some testing this weekend. The 'all actions happen at once and nobody is 'dead' until the resolution phase' rule seems to make things a little more harder to track than I like when all party members are active, rather than one 'active' character with the rest buffing them method of v1. I also realized the second I dumped out my coin and wound markers that I did *not* want so many bits and pieces rolling around. So with those two main observations, I'm thinking maybe having dice involved in the game wouldn't be too bad- d6's aren't exactly hard to come by, and a bit of chance does kind of make most games more exciting. I could add initiative rolls for players and assume that monsters attack before or after all the player controlled characters do. I could eliminate the need for coin counters if I make the item cards pull double duty as well- you basically get coins by ditching an item you don't want in the first place, so mechanically it's just an extra step in the way of whatever you'd be spending coins on anyway (basically reviving/replacing heroes at exit points, trading for items at merchants' rooms.) I could probably simplify/balance items a bit more if I attach the Special Attacks to characters and require them to be powered up with an item card rather than the attack being tied to the card. Table space can also get to be an issue, as I saw playing with a friend in the hotel Starbucks. I could keep the room-by-room exploration theme in place if players just keep their explored rooms in a pile and remove them if they need to backtrack. Maybe it could be a deal where you need to clear X number of monsters/hazards to 'claim' a floor of the dungeon then move on, though it would be a better idea for solo than vs play in that case. Any ideas? I'm kind of up in the air here. I went to a couple panels on card game design and board game publishing and I definitely want something more polished before I try showing the game off again.