Proposal/Prototype - Traitstone Forging

So I came up with an idea for a new mini-game, but being an aspiring game designer I decided, as an exercise, to actually prototype it so it could be seen in action. I give to you… Traitstone Forging!

The .exe can be found here:
Traitstone Forging

##Proposal

Introduction
Due to your role in defeating Gorgotha (twice) and ridding the dwarves of Khaziel of his influence, they have decided to open their traitstone forges to your use… for a price. The dwarves require souls to power their magic forges, and gold for their tools.

Traitstone Forging is a mini-game designed to allow players to use excess resources, for a chance at getting traitstones that they might be lacking. While primarily aimed at higher level players with little use for gold and souls anymore, the initial cost to play is hopefully low enough that even new players to the game can enjoy it if they choose to.

General Description
Traitstone Forging takes the normal match three gems idea from the base game and from the Treasure Hunt mini-game and adds a slight twist to it. Rather than matching the gems as soon as a move is made, gems are only matched every 5 turns, allowing the player to set up matches they might not normally be able to. Also they are able to pay extra gold at the start to increase the range at which they can move a gem horizontally or vertically, as well as paying extra souls to increase the number of forges they are able to perform before the game ends.

Mechanics
Gems
There are eight gem types available, the five traitstone types (Minor, Major, Runic, Arcane, Celestial) and three new types, Dust, Shards and Fragments. They follow a similar progression to the gems in Treasure Hunt where three of a type will combine into one of a higher rank. The order goes Dust → Shard → Fragment → Minor → Major → Runic → Arcane → Celestial. Only gems of the first three ranks can be spawned on the board at the start, or when the board refills after forging. If the player manages to make a match of five or more of a type, then that type will increase by two ranks instead of one. While this is quite a powerful effect it not overly difficult to set up. However, it does mean that the player is using all of the five or more gems to create a higher rank, and they will likely be replaced with much lower rank gems. As a result, they will have a smaller number of higher rank gems, and be relying a lot more on random chance to get the types of gems they want.

Forges
Forges are the core of the mini-game, and are what the player will be spending most of their time setting up. The amount of forges the player has is set at the start, to a base value of 3. If the player chooses to spend extra souls on the start screen, they are given one extra forge at the cost of doubling their soul payment (e.g. starting at 500 souls for 3, 1000 for 4 forges, 2000 for 5 etc.). One major difference between Traitstone Forging and the main game, and treasure hunt, is that it is not possible to get extra moves while playing the game. This is done to hopefully counteract one of the common complaints about the treasure hunt mini-game, being that it takes too long to complete. Forge amounts are the main control knob for adjusting how much players are able to get out of the game in one play, so limiting the amount of extra forges would help prevent players from getting too many stones too quickly.

Range
Players are able to spend gold to improve the tools of the miners to increase the range at which they can move gems. This is an optional enhancement the player can choose to use or not. The base tools, with a range of 1, cost no gold to use. For 50,000 gold a player can upgrade the tools for that attempt to Rare, which give them a movement range of 2, or for 100,000 they can upgrade them to Ultra-Rare to give a range of 3. This applies to all moves made in the following game, but if the player wishes to have the upgraded tools again in a later game they will need to pay the gold amount again.

Results
The traitstones that the player receives at the end of the game are of a random colour, decided at reward time (similar to the traitstones awarded from Treasure Hunts). Any remaining dust, shards or fragments give back either gold or souls, with fragments more likely to give souls and dust more likely to give gold. The total amounts shouldn’t allow the player to recoup their costs in full, however.

Notes:
As this is a prototype there are a couple of aesthetic things I didn’t implement. The main one being the traitstone images, Ideally they would be a 6-colour version of the traitstone, similar to how we see 6-colour weapons for the hero and the Mega Gorgotha. I randomly picked blue for the prototype, and kept all the types the same to avoid visual confusion.

Also there is a bug that I’ve yet to be able to track down as it happens uncommonly. Occasionally a gem will “disappear” and there will be an empty cell where it should be. In this case it appears that the gem has actually fallen to the cell below. But I haven’t been able to reproduce it with any regularity. Unfortunately you’ll just have to work around the empty cell if this happens.

10 Likes

While this is a nice idea, there were many, many nice ideas about traitstones. I wouldnt mind seeing most of them happen, including your but i dont think its likely.

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I agree I don’t think it’s likely to happen, which is why I put this in Community Content rather than Feature Requests. I mostly did this as an exercise in Game Design/Development, and wanted to at least share it with the community.

4 Likes

Eh. Let’s stack more RNG on top of more RNG so we can RNG while we RNG.

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I liked it. Was fun to play around with :slight_smile:

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out of all the traitstone forging ideas i find only this one actually worthy.
great idea man :slight_smile:

ps. i think each traitsone rarity should have different single color just for convenience to differentiate them easier and not tire eyes too quickly :slight_smile:

2 Likes

I was confused by the mechanics at first. But I like this. This could be fun.

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This I’ll admit is very confusing, but it’s a good idea at the core. It will need a few play throughs till you get an idea on how it works. Kudos!

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Well, if anything i must say that it’s an inspiring project. It’s always nice to see people engaged into the game to this lenght of trying out the very rudiments of coding a match-3 minigame trying to breath life into an idea. Kudos to you for your dedication @Ozball! :slight_smile:

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@Ozball I love your idea! I thoroughly enjoyed playing it too!

One note/question:
I paid to increase to rare tools (2 movement spaces) it increases the vertical and horizontal axis by one as it should have BUT what it did not do was add a diagonal position which would be the equivalent of one horizontal move and one vertical move. (Still 2 moves)

Was this intentional by design or an over sight? I would love to see that diagonal spot added!! The same would have to figured out for the ultra rare tools as well. I should be able to reach ALL AVAILABLE SPACES within the 3 move limit. And for 100k I don’t think it’s too much to ask! :wink:

Keep up the great work!!

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Hey @Ozball. I’ve read the description in the first post and vaguely understood. I’m on a janky safari browser so won’t be trying the link to your game, sorry. Hence my comments are sweeping and probably unjustified. But still:

  • sounds too complicated - mini games (like in pq1, pq2) need to be simply variants on core fast match 3
  • unclear if this is a gold sink (won’t be popular) or souls sink (very much needed in endgame)
  • feels a lot of trouble for a random traitstone - why not bash out an explore match in 30 secs for a chance of a more targeted traitstone?

Oh yeah - great stuff actually doing this - enough positives from people trying your prototype who aren’t clearly idiots to show you did a great job

3 Likes

W-wait…you do care!

:blush:

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I just tried it and my first impression was it’s interesting and challenging. I was confused at first but maybe that’s because the mechanic is slightly different than treasure hunt where gem are matched as soon as move is made.

At first try I only use 3 forge and I think it’s really hard to make an Arcane from just 3 forge. Then I tried 4 forge and increase range by 1, still failed to make Arcane. Then I just tried 10 forge and 3 range, finally able to made 2 Arcane. So that cost me 64k souls and 100k gold to make 2 Arcane. :sweat_smile:

This could be a nice way to get rid unused tons of souls though. I’d personally be okay to trade 64k souls for 2 Arcane if that arcane is my own choice because at my stage I don’t need many souls anymore. But if it’s random arcane, I think like @Jainus said, explore is still better and faster.

Great stuff anyway. Kudos to you!

2 Likes

Thanks for all the feedback!

I considered that. I also considered making a multicolor traitstone like we see for mana on Mega Gorgotha etc. But in the end figured it would take more time, and it wasn’t needed at least for a prototype to show the main mechanics. I do agree that the visuals of the stones needs improving.

This was intentional by design (it actually would have been easier to allow diagonal spots with the way I coded, had to do extra to disallow it :stuck_out_tongue: ). The thinking behind it was that it would make it a bit too easy to get the longer (ie 5+) matches, meaning players could get too many higher level stones for too little cost. But I’ll admit I didn’t actually test it with the diagonal, so that might be something I’ll look at testing more thoroughly next time. And yeah, the prices could use some adjusting. I’m not that high a level of player, so I had to do some guessing about what is available to them normally based on various screenshots people have posted in these forums.

I actually got some similar feedback to this from another source, and it’s something I’ll be taking forward with me. I agree that it’s a little too delayed in terms of gratification, having to wait 5 moves before a match.

It’s meant to be mainly a soul sink with a bit of gold sink on the side, to give players some choice between gold chests and guild tasks at higher levels. But the prices on the gold might have been a bit higher than needed in hindsight.

The theory was, if you were after a specific stone, you could still do explores. But if you wanted a lot of traitstones (of any type) you could do this instead, and use up some excess souls one might have lying around. More forges means you have a lot more time to match and get the ranks of the stones up.

Thanks! The feedback has been great! I might try and do some more of these in the future.

Yup, as I mentioned above, this seems to be a common confusion, and something I’ll work on.

I think you’d get better at getting higher ones the more you play. Also aiming for 5+ matches gets you an extra rank increase on the stone, making it easier to get higher ranks. Eg 5 Major’s in a match should give you an arcane.

Yup, fair enough. The idea was more to provide an alternative to Explore and allow people to get traitstones in more bulk than 1 per match, but it seems the costs etc might have needed some tweaking to make it more appealing.

ok so i found time to play it and here is my feedback:

  1. the images are too confusing, i cannot guess in what order they go to upgrade to which ones, especially the pile of mini-shards could be the lowest or the highest grade (it looks like pile/gasket of shards not a dust, if i didnt read minigame description i would be 100% sure that its coming after the other two shards as it looks like there is a lot of shards in there) if you get time please work on their shapes to be more intuitive, or add a gem upgrade map/legend (like the one in the treasure hunt)

  2. gems not matching instantly but waiting all turns to roll over is too confusing. maybe you could make it match instantly and treat “forge” as just a “payout” trigger, type of forge could determine move count and instead of amount of forges you would get a size of forge?

  3. as mentioned before if each gem had different color it would help ease eyes for a longer shot

  4. i think diagonal moves are not necessary

  • originally (reading your minigame description) i thought the game would use your actual traitstone resources (beside shards dust n fragemts which are for free) to reforge them meaning it would actually withdraw the minors majors etc from your collection in order to add the upper type in your collection, could you confirm/dismiss/cosnider that idea? what if they could be tossed in the forge alongside with gold (you decide which ones and how many you toss in, thanks to it less gold needed) to determine forge size (turns)?
1 Like