Development News: In the Heart of Madness

Hi Everyone,
This week work on the dungeon of the Skeleton Sage continued. As mentioned before, our hero needs to destroy Skeleton Sage’s crystal sphere and stop his mad plans of undead apocalypse.

Skeleton Sage is a formidable adversary. He has drain life and fire attack. He has a new ability too: Cause Nightmare. This is a sanity loss major effect for our hero and lasts for at least 5 days. When affected, the hero won’t be able to fully rest when he sleeps. He will only have 75% of his maximum health when he wakes up from rest, instead of usual 100%. So cure sanity potions are much needed for this quest.

Last week, we mentioned about gargoyles and how they can be found sleeping sometimes. We playtested a bit and found that it is more fun to play if they always spawn sleeping. They spawn near the doors and entrances and trying to find an optimal route to navigate the dungeon without waking all of them up at the same time is a small puzzle itself. Invisibility and teleport comes really handy in tight situations.



So this is now a new trait called “Sleeping Warden” which all gargoyles will have. Monsters with this trait will always spawn with sleeping condition. They will sleep until attacked or hero comes to its adjacent square.

Note that sleeping Gargoyles sometimes wake up 100-150 turns later. Which is a long time but spices things up a bit. When you think you finished the boss, one or two gargoyles may come over from the next room.

We also decided the drops of the Gargoyles too: gargoyle head, gargoyle tail, gargoyle horn and some gemstones like topaz and sapphire.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading. May the tides bring you triumph!