The Mines DevLog - 001

Hi everyone,

We're gearing up to launch a new game called The Mines. It's a combat heavy, turn based RPG, inspired by some of the CRPGs such as Wizardry and Bard's Tale from the 80s.

My inspiration for creating it was from playing the Bard's Tale Remastered series. I always enjoyed the character creation and party management and how little it held your hand. You built a party and could kind of explore any way you want. Being a game created in the 80s, the balance was lets just say not ideal, as once you got a certain level of spells, well the rest of the game mostly involved casting the same 2 or 3 spells repeatedly. But that first 2-4 hours I always found amazing getting the party strong enough to survive, and feeling like every turn in combat mattered, and each piece of Gold or Experience point was valuable.

So my thinking was build a game that was more balanced and while it could still be combat heavy, have it avoid some of the common traps including:

1. Excessive grinding and random battles. Grinding and some random battles can be fun, too many and it becomes a chore. My goal here was to minimize grinding for the sake of grinding, and focus more on fixed combats and a curve that meant going out and exploring generally got you the XP you needed. 

2. Also ensure for each level there were mechanisms that essentially meant you can't just level up beyond that level to make the fixed battles simple. This means most fixed combats and special encounters remained the right level of difficult and involved meaningful decisions for the player (don't just cast MIBL every time - Bard's Tale reference alert).

3. Keep the great concepts from those games such as status effects like insanity and NPCs and possession, and also bring in more from modern games around the tactics side and other systems. So in general make sure there is lots of systems enabling many different strategies to evolve. This would make party composition important, and choices in combat interesting.

4. As well to avoid the grinding trap, moved to a Hospital approach to healing with very few healing options in the game. This combined with Perma Death should provide that feeling of each moment being important as you can't just buy your character back to life and carry on without consequence.

So with these ideas in mind we set out to make The Mines. The game at this point is likely to be between 3 and 5 dungeon levels at its completion. We are likely a month or two away from a first release here with the first level in its entirety and going to make it available at no charge. Our goal is to find out if we've succeeded on any of these fronts and made something fun for those who like a challenging, combat heavy, turn based RPG. Then with the feedback we hope to refine it from there.

Leading up to the first pre-release of level 1 we'll be updating this Dev Log periodically with progress and highlighting various aspects of the game. There is much to do take our prototype to a game, but before we get to far with the lore and art and other amenities, we want to first see if we've created something fun in terms of the systems and combat and broad design.